Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader sends the above video:

I know you are not prone to posting Norwegian music-videos, but this Santa exposé from a children’s program in 2005 caused some turmoil when every five year old in the country was told at the same time that “Santa does not exist”. The video is quite self-explanatory – and very funny!  The refrain goes something like “Santa does not exist, it’s just bullshit.”

Another perpetuates that theme:

I love the reader’s stories on learning about Santa Claus. Mine’s probably not as interesting as some of the others, but here it is anyway. I was eight and was deeply fascinated by science. I had just learned about the experimental method and decide to see if I could apply it. The test was simple: I asked Santa for one set of things and told my parents that I had asked for a different set. I then waited to see which I would get. As I suspected, I got the second set and that was that.

Another reader:

It just happened an hour ago with my two kids. We went to a department store to see Santa. After they saw him, the older one said that “If Santa kept us waiting for half an hour, then how can he be clever enough to deliver presents to a million children?”

Another pins the blame on a Muslim:

I think I hung on to the Santa myth a little longer than most kids around me. One day, as I was playing on the floor, I noticed that Muhammad Ali was being interviewed on TV. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I distinctly remember him saying something was a lie, that it was a lie just like Santa Claus. At that moment, it all came to me – the flying reindeer, giving toys to every child in the world in one night, climbing down the chimney even though we didn’t have a fireplace. All of it was exposed as conspiratorial fraud.

Another got greedy:

I was maybe 7 years old, and my dad told me that if you put a list of what you want in your stocking, Santa will bring it for you. I remember that I wrote down every possible toy I could think of and put it in my stocking.  My mom took the list out and gave my dad the dirtiest look ever – that was when I knew.

How another’s consciousness was raised:

When I was 7 years old, I got a Super Nintendo for Christmas, and I was probably the most excited boy in the entire world. A lot of my friends wanted Super Nintendos that Christmas, but I and maybe one other kid actually got one. But for some reason, I didn’t think that was fair. Why did I get one when ALL my friends wanted one too?

I decided to ask my mom why Santa wasn’t fair in gift giving. All of my friends, at least to my knowledge, were “good” too, so why did Santa not give them Super Nintendos too? It was then that my mom decided to tell me how Santa worked.

As I got older, this was a lesson that stuck with me when I had kids of my own. It was a sort of realization that what we are doing is equating “being good” with our parents’ socioeconomic status. My wife and I talked a lot about it and decided that we wouldn’t “do Santa” with our kids. We didn’t want our kids thinking that they were “better” than other kids because we could afford to give them a nice Christmas and other kids’ parents might not be able to. Our kids know of Santa and what he represents at Christmas time, but we prefer for our kids to appreciate that their gifts come from love and, to an extent, our financial capabilities, and not equating these things to their behavior.

Another gets a bit morbid, even for us:

It’s good to teach children to believe in Santa Claus, because they need to learn, early on, that those they love and trust will conspire to deceive them.

Another ends on a cheerier note:

One Christmas, when we had no money because I was unemployed, I spent hours out in the barn in my workshop building a dollhouse for our two girls, aged four and six. It was a replica of our house. We got them scaled people and furniture to go with it. It turned out really nice.

On Christmas morning, I did the whole “Waltons” thing, stolen from “The Homecoming.” I whipped a big rock on to the roof above their bedrooms and made a lot of noise downstairs until they came pounding down. I told the girls that I had just caught a burglar in the house, a fat guy in a red suit with a bag of our stuff. I told them that I had whipped a rock at him and that he had run away and jumped in a sled. I told them that some packages had fallen out of his bag when he ran. They saw the dollhouse and the people and the furniture and their eyes went wide. Merry Christmas.

I am getting to the point. A couple years later, when they were about six and eight years old, the older neighbor girl clued our girls in on the Santa thing. They came back for dinner and asked us directly whether Santa was real. I don’t lie to my kids, so I told them that no, there was no Santa.

“Then who made the dollhouse?”

My wife pointed at me.

Their eyes went wide again. I was Santa. Merry Christmas times two.

What our holiday lights means for NASA:

Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Yale University in Connecticut used satellite imagery to track light patterns in 1,200 cities over two and a half years. They found that increased light correlated perfectly with the holiday seasons for Ramadan in the Middle East, as well as Christmas and New Year’s Eve worldwide. They also saw variations in how cities and neighborhoods within those cities celebrate these holidays, the team announced this week at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

“What’s happening during the holidays is our patterns are changing,” says Miguel Román, a physical scientist at NASA Goddard. In the West, we’re staying up late drinking eggnog and going home from work early. “Those changes in behavior are changes in the locations of demand for energy services.” Understanding such seasonal shifts might ultimately tell us what’s driving carbon emissions at a local level.

Chris Mooney elaborates on the findings about Ramadan:

[The researchers] examined three years, from 2012 through 2014, and saw a marked lighting increase in Cairo:

This time, of course, the lighting isn’t Christmas lights. Rather, it’s people changing their schedules due to the religious holiday. “It’s a change in the timing of human activity, because people are fasting from dawn to dust,” says Yale’s Eleanor Stokes. “So activity, commerce, heating, family gatherings are all being pushed later into the night.”

The Cairo picture shows something else interesting as well, notes Stokes — economic differences. The researchers found that in poorer areas, people were still celebrating Ramadan but were not using more energy at night, presumably instead choosing to conserve and save money.

(Image via NASA)

Matt Novak looks into how humans would feed themselves following an apocalyptic disaster:

In the event of a super-volcano, asteroid impact or nuclear winter, the sun would be completely blocked out and it could be up to five years of darkness before we might start up agricultural systems again. A five-year supply of food would take up an enormous amount of space and cost about $12,000 for a family of four, according to the researchers. So what will be our options? “We came up with two primary classes of solutions,” [Feeding Everyone No Matter What co-author Joshua] Pearce said in a release. “We can convert existing fossil fuels to food by growing bacteria on top of it—then either eat the bacterial slime or feed it to rats and bugs and then eat them.” Rats and bugs can also consume wood products, which would likely be plentiful in a disaster scenario. The researchers also included ideas about creating tea out of pine needles, which they insist would “provide a surprising amount of nutrition.”

Pearce and co-author David Denkenberger admit to having tried out these post-apocalyptic provisions:

A lot of it was just to make sure that the taste wasn’t so bad that it would never happen. Stuff like pine needle tea is really not that bad. Many insects are, I would even go so far as to say, tasty? If you get by the initial sort of gag reflex. Let’s say we grow mushrooms on logs and everybody’s eating mushrooms. Of course, that’s not too scary. And then the waste product from that goes to feed ruminants like cows, and then [you’ve got] beef so you know, you can still have hamburger. It’s not that bad. We might be eating more of the cow than we do now, but it’s not that bad.

Matthew Dennison argues that painting snowy scenes poses a particularly vexing challenge even for great artists, suggesting that a “sense of something lacking characterises much ‘snowy’ art”:

It’s as if the technical challenges of recording the fluffy white stuff convincingly are so debilitating, there’s no room left for inspiration.

For Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp, who painted landscapes teeming with ice-skaters early in the 17th century, unusual climatic conditions liberate a holiday spirit among his stolid burghers. Avercamp’s snow is theatrical backdrop, much as in the ballet Les Patineurs, and every bit as tinselly. Invigorated by the freeze, his skaters do not reflect on the irony that what temporarily quickens their pulses is itself a deadening force: trees stand black-branched, birds wheel in search of non-existent food. Later in the century, Dutch landscapists explored the stillness snow imposes, sometimes by moonlight. Such scenes invite reflection, as if the association of snow and Christmas were firmly established 400 years ago, the snow a metaphor for the physical hardships of the Nativity. Alternatively these images may simply be exercises in tonality, like the later wintry cityscapes of Childe Hassam.

Monet painted more than 100 snow paintings, including ‘The Magpie’ of 1868–9, Argenteuil views and, inevitably, soggy haystacks. Several surprise on account of the breadth of the artist’s palette. Snow proved an ideal foil for ‘impressions’ of light, sunshine that is pink, blue-grey, palest buff or white. Yet, while many successfully capture aspects of the reality of the snowy experience, it is the artist’s prowess, rather than a deeper profundity, that impresses the viewer.

(Image: Hendrick Avercamp’s “Winter Scene on a Canal,” early 17th century, via Wikimedia Commons)