Just a little commentary...

So, there's this disconnect in my mind.

Basically, every Christmas special goes something like this:

Santa is real! :)

But nobody believes in him. :(

Then Santa shows himself and convinces the most curmudgeonly person in the cast of the true spirit of Christmas. Then he flies off into the night, his job fulfilled for another year.

There are variations, but this is the Christmas special in a nutshell.

Here's my problem: it doesn't make any damn sense. Not the Santa mythology, that's fine. If I can suspend disbelief long enough to care about Ents and Jedi, I can accept Santa and all his reindeer and elves and shit in a movie. My problem is that if Santa is real and he really goes around every year giving out presents, why the hell would anybody not believe in him? What the hell sense does that make?

If he's demonstrably real, and doing what he's supposed to be doing, wouldn't even the most skeptical bastard on the planet evetually realize that the presents under the tree each year weren't just materializing? So why would anyone need to be convinced of that? Why would anyone lack Christmas spirit, or not believe in Santa Claus? It's stupid.

There are only a couple of possibilities (or "epileptic trees" as they're called) that shoehorn this formula into something resembling logic.

a) Santa doesn't do a damn thing. He just sits up there at the North Pole making presents all year and then on Christmas Eve he dumps them all in the North Sea, and the parents still put presents under the tree. In which case, why do we give a shit what he does or whether parents believe in him or not?

b) He runs around and gives presents, but only to kids whose parents believe in him. Which seems kind of arbitrary and wrong-headed. Why punish the kids for what their parents believe in? Because, again, another trope of these movies is that the kids inevitably believe and it's the parents that need to be convinced. But if this were the case, there would be times when your neighbor has presents from Santa but you don't. Wouldn't you occasionally discuss this with the neighbors and realize that, hey, there really is some guy that makes presents appear? And then wouldn't you believe after that?

c) It doesn't make a damn bit of sense and the screenwriter just hopes you're so caught up in the Christmas spirit or whatever that you won't notice. I tend to think the correct answer is "c."

Thoughts?

Back to regular updates on Monday...