Christmas in tatters for Nottinghamshire tots after mayor tells them Santa's too busy The age-old deception that is Christmas has been unravelled for a bunch of tots in Nottinghamshire after an ill-conceived comment by the Mayor of Rushcliffe. According to the BBC, Mayor Christine Jeffreys told assembled kiddiwonks at a festive lights switch-on event in West Bridgford on Saturday that "Santa was too busy to …
It's OK, with Corbyn's amazing budget skills he'll undoubtedly buy presents (not bribes at all) for all the children in the land and pretend that he is Santa.
Obviously he'll fund this by taxing everyone but claiming that he's only taxing the rich (good news everyone, we're all rich now!) yet somehow still have to borrow billions to make up the shortfall (which is OK because it'll be down to a future government to pay it back).
Oh, sorry, did I get political there?
those billions of cut have been made to decrease the national debt which was (is?), what else, snowballing. Or to make it grow just a tiny bit slower. Guess how this respectable plan has gone? Cause I stopped hearing about it along the time Osbourne gave up on the idea and went back to media. As to "cuts", miraculously / who would have thought, continue...
Because, despite the general reporting we have not really been living under austerity...
We tightened our belts and reduced spending but at no point have government spent less than they have been receiving (i.e. producing a surplus to pay down the debt). The debt has just grown more slowly.
“Except they have increased the mortgage.”
Remember the “sorry, we spent all the money” note?
Austerity has reduced the government deficit (difference between annual income and expenditure) from ~£50bn in 2009 to ~£100bn in 2010 when the Tories came to power.
Since then, the Tory austerity program has reduced the deficit to ~£19bn but each year has run a deficit and so debt has grown.
BUT debt has grown more slowly than if the deficit had not been cut, reducing annual interest payments from what they could have been with funding cuts.
The question is whether any government would run a surplus to reduce debt - based on the manifestos of the three main parties but ignoring the SNP due to devolution (and a lack of familiarity with their manifesto), none of the options provides a balanced budget and a reduction in debt.
You might want to inquire where all the hundreds of billions the Tories borrowed has gone while they've been cutting public services to the bone.
YAWN. There have been NO CUTS. Its a union myth and a lie. Public spending has risen year on year every year - that is a fact. There's no more left to spend, contrary to what your labour candidate may tell you.
Where has the money gone you ask? It's gone where it always goes - on public sector pay and pensions. Where it now also goes is on interest payments on the national debt, which is really just money we spend on what we 'want' today that our children pay back for us tomorrow.
Public spending has risen year on year every year
Let me introduce you to a little thing called 'inflation'. Of course spending has gone up but I can tell you that, working in a public body as I do, that our spending has gone down. And, if you adjust for inflation, gone down fairly precipitously.
The Tories say that they have 'increased spending on xxx' without mentioning that they were the ones that cut the budgets in the first place (and yes, I know that the Blair and Brown governments were guilty of that as well).
I'm no fan of Corbyn though - I fully agree that neither he nor Boris are fit to be PM. Mind you, I'm not sure that *any* of the party leaders are..
Let me introduce you to a little thing called 'inflation'.
Yes, Blair & Brown dumped money wholesale into public services way ahead of inflation year on year for more than a decade. Prudent public bodies would have used that money to restructure and become more efficient as it is obvious to all that on a long run timeline the public sector cannot consume more than an inflationary amount of money for existing bodies or no new agencies can be formed without it sucking in a greater share of GDP year on year leaving less and less money in the pot for the productive sector of the economy.
The Tories say that they have 'increased spending on xxx'
And they'd be right. We currently spend more than £50 billion annually than we did in 2010 on public services. That's an extra billion pounds a week! You do realize there's only 30 million income tax payers right? And of them fewer than 4 million higher rate tax payers that put in more than they take out?
There's no magic money tree/forest. The public sector already consumes record amounts of money and tax rates are already about as high as they have ever been as a share of GDP. There's no more money left to come. From this point on the public sector is all about efficiency, because there's no alternatives, no matter what your labour candidate or union rep tells you.
Edited to add:
The fact is that once base rates rise, the 6% of public spending that makes up interest on the national debt (more than the defence budget) will have to rise with it, thereby forcing reductions everywhere else in spending. It cannot be otherwise. Of course, if Corbyn and McMao get in and let rip, the country literally won't be able to afford an NHS by 2021 because the debt pile will be taking over its share spending. There's no free money - what is borrowed must be repaid and the interest paid constantly until it has been.
Palestinians are "of Semitic origin". Most Ashkenazi Jews are either not, or not identifiably so.
You really need to disentangle Semitic origin and anti-Semitism, which was originally a name coined to describe people who were anti-Jewish but has now, sadly, been extended to people who are merely anti-settlement. Dr. Mirvis seems unable to make the distinction.
Does the Labour Party have an anti-Semitism problem? Well, yes. It's very deep rooted in British society, and most likely much more so among Conservatives.
Did your comment contribute anything? Nope, factually incorrect, unfunny, crude.
No, it isn't. You presume without evidence.
Heck, there have even been articles in Commentaryon the subject. The belief that Jews, unlike just about everybody else, have managed to pursue an exclusive genetic heritage for over two millennia is all part of the "they're different" that has been used in the past as an excuse for anti-Semitism.
I think you will find genetics says you are wrong.
There are plenty of blue eyed Ashkenazis; there are black Jews. There have been times in the past when Jewish groups have actively recruited members, something conveniently forgotten or never known by some Orthodox groups. Your little sneer is misplaced. I suspect I have been into the subject a little more deeply than you may have - and indeed as I taught in a Jewish school for a number of years I suspect I know more about both the Shoah and the Golah than you do.
The post I responded to was ignorant, thinking Jews are a distinct genetic group. You are ignorant; you think that all Jews "come from the Middle East". It isn't actually surprising that anti-Semitism is a very real thing in this country when the level of ignorance about Judaism is so great and people rely on soundbites and special interest groups.
Is it deep rooted in British society though? I didn't know anybody when I was growing up that was anti-semitic, nobody I've ever worked with has been, none of my friends are, the people I socialise with don't express such views.
The only people I've heard criticising Jewish practices are two female friends. One was a Jewish lady decrying the religious constraints she was forced to comply with when growing up and at the Jewish school she taught at, the other is an Irish Catholic deeply disappointed that the family of her Jewish boyfriend refuse to accept her as an appropriate wife for him, even if she's willing to convert faith.
Just where the hell do Labour keep finding all these people, because I don't see it coming from the Britain I grew up in.
The "hold my beer moment".
As a teenager Jewish kids getting beaten up at school for being Jewish, by kids they didn't know.
Jewish " jokes "Why do Jews have locks on their dustbins....
A voice calling "Here Jew, I've dropped a penny" from the back of a classroom.
Want more?
Then unconscious antisemitism, the teacher colleague that accidentally called me Mr. Goldstein ( not my name)
Casual antisemitism "You've got to watch them Jews when you do business"
Antisemitic businesses. My uncle applied for jobs with his real surname and got no responses. They changed the name (anglicised it) applied again with the same letters and got the interviews
Conspiricism: "The Jews/Rothschild/Soros/Israeli money controls the govt/newspapers etc."
Leftwing Antisemitism. People who know nothing of Jewish or middle eastern history but are focussed on boycotting Israel ( the Jewish national state) and "defending Palestine" while being uninterested in Uighur Muslims in China, or Kurds or Royhingas or any one of the hundreds of populations who genuinely are being terrorised and murdered - because "no Jews no news".
Leftwing Antisemitism
I wish I could give you more than one upvote. The irony is that a lot of the seminal left-wingers (Marx et. al.) were Jewish. I think the attitude was (to an extent) inherited via two routes - the Russian/Eastern European origin of manifested leftwing politics (and Russia was and is deeply anti-semitic) and the fact that, post 1948 (the foundation of modern Israel) things changed so that the Jews were no longer the 'oppressed minority' but percieved as the oppressers[1] - partly because a lot of the early Palestinian resistence organisations were communist/socialist as well as muslim. And most of the nations Israel was fighting were supported (directly or indirectly) by the Soviet Union.
(The thing about money - the irony is that, for large parts of the medieval and post-medieval history, Jews were forbidden many professions. The various states did not allow 'Christians' to be money lenders so that role was pushed onto the Jews. Which had the fringe 'benefit' that, when the loans were due to be repaid, a quick pogrom could be whipped up to remove the problem)
You got a downvote for stating known facts! Pathetic isn't it.
I should add that those fringe Communist Jews have tended to be the offspring of successful, middle class Jews.
There's always some - in every minority community, see the Coopers in Goodness Gracious Me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h-t8vVi0zc - who want to go one step beyond economic success and join "society" by disavowing their own community and their ( in our case) "Ghetto Jew" origins.
Historically though it doesn't often end well. As the Dreyfuss case identified.
Sometimes their offspring move to the Left, in a rather extreme way. Still rejecting their Jewish cultural roots.
The Palestinian business mostly comes down to a simple case of the enemy of my enemy's friend is my friend. Israel has strong ties to America, especially the American right, so if you hate America and the right wing, there's an obvious common cause to make with the PLO and its successors.
That's part of it. Countries that voted for and supported the re-establishment of the Jewish State in 1948 have realigned since for all sorts of reasons. A big part was the question of access to oil. And within that, political influence in the Middle East and North Africa.
Anti-Imperialism/Anti-Americanism was built into that manouvering.
"Is it deep rooted in British society though?"
Sadly yes it is. From the Daily Mail fulminating against jews "swarming" here from Europe (funny how the same phrases keep cropping up isn't it?) to pathetic name calling and general unpleasantness whn I was growing up it is still here. Not as bad as in Eastern Europe by any means, but its still a "thing"
+100 for the Spitting Image video ("Santa Claus Is On The Dole"), which I don't remember from the first time around. That made me all misty eyed for the days of decent telly satire - it was a sad day when Spitting Image was snuffed out. Shesh - even the self satirising politics of today still needs the weekly kick up the arse that Spitting Image used to dish out.
On a slightly related note it reminded me of one of my favourite Spitting Image songs: Spitting Image - The Christmas Singles although for some reason that version has edited one of the best bits which was:
#Take Every Christmas Single; Take every Record back; Load them onto an Aeroplane; and dump them on Iraq# (it was televised in 1990 I think)
Now it makes lyrical reference to Milton Keynes instead of Iraq despite still having the footage of Saddam Hussein getting a vinyl deluge. Perhaps Saddam lived in Milton Kenyes because he had a particular love of round-a-bouts and the grid system?
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Nothing to stop you from creating one now is there eh?
Do you warrant your own page on Wikipedia?
You could create one so that you can boast about it to your friends over drinkies at Crimble. (sic)
Before anyone asks, I don't want one, don't need one and... (you can guess the rest)
As for Social Media... the sooner that dies a messy death the better.
Yours Grumpy (who delights in getting out of the bed on the wrong side)
Parents lying necessary ? Seriously ? Not with my children. Took a while to get them to understand the TV lies, pollies lie, their school mates exaggerate and not to be too confident in what they think they know. No wonder you poms usually elect fraudsters and liars. Regrettably the rest of the world is worse or the same
Bare-faced lies etc.
My SWMBO is a teacher in a Catholic primary school. The contradiction between "you have to be dead before you can become a saint" and "Saint Nicholas delivers crimble pressies" is always a tricky one to navigate.[1]
[1] He's allowed out of Heaven one night a year!
Alternative headline:
Politician apologizes in telling-the-truth scandal.
The Mayor of Rushcliffe is under fire today after evidence emerged that in unscripted remarks at a recent gathering he told statements that he knew were true. The accusation was levelled by shocked onlookers, who had never heard such utterances from a politician before.
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Hmmm... not so fast Tonto. It can get confusing. We had a Chris in our office that literally and suddenly overnight became "Christine". I have no issue with this per se, but claiming suddenly to be a woman on the basis of wearing a dress and slapping on some lipstick does sit somewhere between delusion and a fancy dress party.
Too bad she didn't go on and mention that god was too busy to answer prayers so the kids will have to work it out for themselves. In my, admittedly grumpy, thinking we could do with less magical thinking in the world.
Top tip - kids should put their wish lists on Amazon where Santa Bezos always has time for them.
A work chum of my old man was bemoaning the fact that his eldest had sussed Santa was actually mummy & daddy and had leaked that little tidbit to his young brother.
My dad asked for a list of what they word be getting and what his chums phone number was. Cue Christmas day and older offspring was reportedly wide eyed when he got a personal call off Santa, "just checking" that his (correctly identified) list of pressies had been safely delivered.
I even had the immense satisfaction of doing much the same for one of my own work chums, many years later.
Anon cos, well, I really AM Santa.
Try it yourselves if you can. Made my day, it did.
For years, children's letters to Santa were dropped in a special mailbox at the post office in the small town where we lived and, at home in the evenings, my mother and her co-workers would answer them, put them in envelopes addressed to the child and put them in the appropriate mailbox (or give them to the route carriers) when sorting the mail out in the morning. Being that it WAS a small town, there was a good likelihood that they knew the child, or at least the family, and could personalize the letters in a way that enhanced Santa's omniscience.
Damn. Where'd that mist come from, all of a sudden...?
Top tip for those in the UK who are thinking of encouraging their youngest to write to Santa.
Just address the envelope "To Santa Claus" and the Post Office will reply, pretending to be Santa. If you write the address as "Santa Claus, Lapland" then they are obliged to send it to Finland and it will get lost.
I remember being read an article from some magazine or book when I was old enough to understand about Santa about the history of St Nicholas, the 'creation' of the actual Santa in the hearts and minds of parents and children everywhere, that stays real when you are under six years old, but which then flows out and becomes you: that you have a bit of Santa Claus in you when you understand that the real joy of Christmas is giving. And that parents are filled with this love of giving when they make Christmas as special as they can for their kids, even if they can't afford gifts.
Well, I'm a sucker. I believed it and I still do. The greatest gift my parents gave me was the lesson of the joy of selfless giving. Thanks Mum. Thanks Dad. I miss you both.
"So much for commentard being enlightened here...
...the Mayor is a SHE, not a HE, as so, so many have automatically presumed...I know a woman Mayor...what a fucked up world we've become."
Or, heaven forfend, I made a mistake?
I guess the fucked-up world is where people get roundly jumped on by twats for making tiny errors (or, as they are now labelled, micro-aggressions) in speech. I would prefer a world where people are just a little less automatically outraged about every little thing in their lives but, you know, I just have this one.
While we are criticizing people, how about this?
"So much for commentard [sic] being enlightened here...
...the Mayor [sic] is a SHE, not a HE, as so, so many have automatically presumed [sic] ...I know [sic] a woman [sic] Mayor [sic]...what a fucked up world we've become."
It should be 'commentards', and 'mayor' (it's a job here, not a title). You don't need 'automatically' as that is part of the presumption, so this should not be there. It should be female mayor, not woman Mayor. There are other errors in your child-like sentences, but I do not have the time to correct you further. What a fucked-up world we now live in, where people cannot string together a few simple sentences.
Saying "heaven forfend I made a mistake" would be a lot classier without going into a mental rant about The World and that and calling people "child-like" (which for the record is not the same as childish and not generally offensive to adults)
Yes, you skipped the article to post - it happens. A mea culpa was all that was necessary.
But you've made a meal out of a simple fuckup you could have avoided very easily.
Can I point out that the Mayor's comment was in effect "there's no magic money tree."
After Boris's Bridge, the hybrid buses that weren't, the Heathrow bulldozers and the "we are definitely leaving on the 31st October", I think that the Conservative Party at least has form in the unreality stakes. But denying Father Christmas as a present giver and believing in Boris Johnson? Now that's cognitive dissonance.
Um, Mr Cycle? You might want to remember who stopped us leaving on the THREE dates stipulated by EU law under Article 50. But in case you have somehow missed the obvious, it is the REMAIN-VOTING members of Parliament who have blocked it on all three occasions.
You can have the bridge, the buses and the bulldozers though - it is Christmas, after all!*
*Other non-Christian holidays are available. Anyone who thinks Christmas is 'wrong' and "Happy Holidays" is a suitable alternative had better not be having any extra time off between 23rd of December 2019 and 2nd of January 2020 - you wouldn't want to look like a two-faced opportunist hypocrite, would you?
" it is the REMAIN-VOTING members of Parliament who have blocked it on all three occasions."
Yes, damn those REMAIN VOTING members of the ERG, Boris Johnson, etc who all voted against May's (rubbish but hey) deal...…
Stop spouting leave nonsense on here please.
Every year in December, she has to deal with the kids who absolutely want to tell the "truth" to the littler ones.
Once the tears have dried, she tells them : "They don't believe any more, so of course Mum and Dad place the presents. Santa does not come for the kids who don't believe."
Works every time.
I remember meeting a couple at a mutual friends' dinner party a few years ago, and in conversation they mentioned that they had, that very afternoon, decided that their daughter was getting quite grown up now and it was time that they told her the truth about Santa.
So they broke the news to her and she was devastated. Properly upset....legs gone from under her, crumpled-on-the-floor crying type of upset.
Now you might think that there's nothing especially unusual about that, but there's one detail I didn't mention...
....she was 16 years old.
G K Chesterton's comment that when the average person stops believing in orthodox religion they don't become atheists, they start believing in anything to fill the void, seems to be uncomfortably true.
Anti-vax, the greatly increased status of Santa Claus, Goop, conspiracy theories, the list is endless.
Is there any empirical evidence for Chesterton's smart-arse comment?
Try substituting "magic", or "pantheism" for "god" (the word in the original quotation), and it sounds a lot less convincing. This suggests that the force of the statement is rather dependent on a prior belief in "god".
My assumption then would just be that the girl was cognitively disabled or developmentally delayed or something.
Not at all. From what I remember, I think it was the fact she was going to be leaving school and starting 6th form / A-Levels that made he parents think it was time to break the news.
As a family, we are into a second generation of children blessed with tooth faries inspired by Sir PTerry. Ours seem to be Fat Mick and Bert, who are Tool Fairies, plus Fairy Fred, who moved into a tree in the garden of two grandchildren, to "look after them" following their move to a new home in a new county.
The tooth faries manage tooth rewards as you'd expect but all the fairies will occasionally drop little personal notes to the (grand) children to mark the odd momentous event in their lives. Strangely, any letter sent from fairyland appears to go through some kind of dimensional transformation and always appear in mirror writing, much to the (grand) children's fascination.
I have fond memories of our youngest son, who by that time knew full well it was mum & dad, but kept the whole thing going as it was a cash cow and fun. He appeared in our bedroom one morning with his latest tooth dividend, the accompanying note from Fat Mick and Bert and a silly grin. For about five minutes all we could get out of him when we asked innocently "oh, have you got something there?" Was an absolutely continuous fit of the giggles.
Happy days.
One day I hope to start the same for great grandchildren - or at least be responsible for someone else kicking it off.
Thank you Sir PTerry, thank you. Without your inspiration Fat Mick, Bert and Fairy Fred would have never been born.
My kid were little in the days when the internet wasn't rapacious. I had a Toothfairy email address and domain name ( something like toothfairy@fairlyland.com) set up with one of the free sites, so that they could send and receive messages from her.
I did something similar for some of the kids in our support unit. ( Santa@Northpole.com or something of that sort ) so that they would write and read messages.
Santa will still come -- as long as each child has registered in advance with a verified email address, postal address, cell phone number, demographic info, and installed the Santagram Googlebook app that collects naughtiness / niceness data in real time 24/7.
Children and their parents should rest assured that Santagram Googlebook cares about their privacy. In accordance with industry best practices, all PII and behavioral tracking data will be carefully stored in an unsecured AWS bucket that can be easily found on Shodan.
Merry @#$% Christmas, rugrats.
I would guess, from here. The numbers don't perfectly match, but that might be just transcription errors.
And the difference between "no religion" and "atheist" is like the difference between voting Monster Raving Loony versus not turning up at all. It's all about how much effort you're willing to put in.
(grossly simplified...)
An atheist believes that there is no god.
Someone with no religion just doesn't believe. Also referred to as 'agnostic' or perhaps 'undecided'
It gets interesting when you start to define 'god' - not just 'God', 'Buddha', etc - would 'mother nature' count as a god, or perhaps the laws of physics? (and if not, then who/what created those laws?)
Regardless of what you think of Richard Dawkins (who does have a tendency to polarise opinion somewhat) he does give a very good definition of agnosticism versus atheism in 'The God Delusion'. IIRC he has a scale of 7 grades from full-fat belief to fully-leaded atheism, but I can't remember much more because it's yonks since I read it.
> Someone with no religion just doesn't believe. Also referred to
> as 'agnostic' or perhaps 'undecided'
No, I don’t think that can explain those figures. It says 34% “no religion” and 0.1% “atheist”. I can’t believe there are 340 times more agnostics than atheists in Nottingham.
Gods that don't exist can't have sons. These are questions of history, not faith. There may be evidence for the existence of a man of that name, but frankly a lot of the other details of his origins, life and death are implausible and unlikely.
If there was such a person, I'd say it's more likely he was suffering from a mental illness that made him say and do irrational things, perhaps including willingly martyr himself. Certainly not the last case of seriously deluded egotism or making stuff up. L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith have form, here. Given the long history of human culture, societies and mythology in particular, 99% of which is now no longer taken seriously by anyone, it's more likely that gods are inventions of man, not the other way around.
That there was a very charismatic preacher called Jesus who lived in the province of Judea around 2000 years ago who spread the ideas that we now call Christianity is not disputed by anyone who has had a serious look at the evidence, including people who think he was a fraudster and charlatan.
The virgin birth, the resurrection, the miracles, the general validity of the things he preached; that is very much disputed, and there isn't much if anything in the way of evidence to support it. As for the Three Wise Men, even a lot of Christians dispute that one.
It is perfectly possible to hold the position that Christianity is a load of rubbish, and also that Jesus was the person responsible for inventing the rubbish. But for a lot of militant atheists, there position seems to depend on them proving that Jesus didn't exist, and someone else made up the rubbish.
Also, all the evidence points to the fact that Joseph was a 90+ y/o man who had been given guardianship of a 13-15 y/o Mary after her parents died. I wonder if that might be a factor in the virgin birth thing?
...rejecting all gods but one; atheists reject all the same ones you do, plus one more.
Not sure why you'd focus on the not-particularly-controversial existence question rather than the significance one, unless you were worried that it's massively more open to doubt. Then again, not sure why you're worried about what atheists doubt at all, given that christians can't even agree amongst themselves on the simplest of doctrinal questions.
Log in your eye, and all that.
"Also, all the evidence points to the fact that Joseph was a 90+ y/o man who had been given guardianship of a 13-15 y/o Mary after her parents died"
Sorry, there's evidence of some random pensioner looking after a teenager 2000 years ago where exactly? Parish records? Births, deaths and marriages column of the Judean Times?
I've never met a "militant atheist" yet. Plenty of rabid religious people who think shouting the same dogma endlessly is the same as "proof".
"Atheists believe that Jesus didn’t exist despite all the evidence to the contrary, therefore it is a religion."
Evidence? I suspect most atheists do not specifically believe Jesus didn't exist, but that he cannot by definition be "the son of god" (I won't get into the whole convoluted mess here), in the same way that jews believe he existed, as muslims do.
Atheists believe that Jesus didn’t exist despite all the evidence to the contrary, therefore it is a religion.
Not quite. I can believe in the physical existence of the Mango Mussolini, but not believe it is an object of worship, as one third of the USA seems to. Jesus of Nazareth a real person? OK, quite possible. Jesus as a diety? Well, that is up to the individual.
Some people take "atheist" to mean someone who doesn't believe in god. Others take it as meaning someone who believes there is no god. The 34.4% are the atheists who avoid the word because it leads to uninteresting arguments about terminology.
(Proving non-existence is impossible, so if you think the word means that then there are no atheists and the word becomes useless, and we need a new word for non-believers. "Agnostic" doesn't really cut it because it would be like saying you were agnostic about whether the tooth fairy is real.)
Could be that Atheist is a definite belief: "No"
No religion could be "don't know (agnosticism), "don't care"...
Granted, it would make more sense to lump it ALL under No Religion, but yes, atheism is distinct simply because it is a definite "belief" in an answer vs not knowing / caring / identifying as something.
Three distinct groups then:
Is there a God:
Yes
No
Arsed, mate.
"Of course, she could have also done it out of pure spite."
Saying something disappointing or hurtful by accident still requires a reason - some prompt or motive. It doesn't just happen. Unless this mayor has some sort of unfortunate condition there was absolutely no reason for her to refer to the matter of Santa's reality at all. None. It's not part of her role. It's not why she was there. It has no real relevance to the occasion - which was to add a bit of seasonal jollity and switch the lights on. That was her only job. "click".
This. Someone does it every year and it's hard to imagine that it could be entirely accidental. "Don't mention Santa, don't mention Santa". It's not your job, just come in, flick the switch and say how beautiful everything looks.
It takes a particular type of humourless sad-sack wanker to tell other people's kids that he doesn't exist and:
1. Saddle the parents with a hard evening because of it.
2. Deprive those kids of a valuable opportunity for self-discovery and critical thinking by slowly working out for themselves that their parents and society have been lying to them.
For the last few years I've reminded the kids that the little red light on the alarm sensors really mean that Santa is checking up on them to make sure they're being good.
Another good one for Crimbo Eve is if the ISS appears, sorry I mean Santa's Sleigh. It's too early to get a predicted time from NASA just yet though.
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