Author: Andrew Sullivan

This summer, we noted research that found a significant percentage of subjects preferred to suffer an electric shock rather than be alone with their thoughts. Alva Noë revisits the results, asserting that “there is good reason to doubt some of the findings of the study”:

Take, for example, the most widely discussed result: that some significant percentage of subjects administered a minor non-painful shock to themselves — like familiar household static electricity — when they might otherwise have spent six to 15 minutes quietly in the presence of their own thoughts alone. Notice, to begin with, that the subjects were wearing a self-shocking apparatus. Under those conditions, it strikes me that exploring the effects of shocking oneself, testing and reflecting on one’s responses, simply indulging in curiosity about it, should be counted as a form of engagement with one’s thoughts rather than a flight from them.

He zooms out to consider thinking’s complicated relationship with pleasure:

We tend to think of thinking as cerebral and inward looking and we contrast that with a kind of selfless outward orientation to what is going on around us. But this is confused. Is the mathematician working out a problem on paper looking out or in? And what about the visitor to a gallery concentrating on a painting. Isn’t this kind of looking (at the painting) or doing (writing on the paper) one of the forms that thinking can take for us?

And something similarly goes for the idea that we can simply range complex human psychological attitudes and choices along a spectrum from aversive to extremely pleasurable. As Fox et al. explain, “just thinking” can be valuable, meaningful and important in ways that are tied to, but not the same as, being simply pleasurable. The same is true, perhaps, of any form of what we call exercise. It can be hard to make yourself do your work out. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t highly pleasurable. And even when it is, in some sense, aversive, that doesn’t mean that you don’t value it highly.

Will Wilkinson recently shared why, as an atheist, he plans to teach his son to believe in Santa. Rob Stennett, a man of faith, also weighs the pros and cons. He argues that believing in Santa is good for kids, but notes that “many of my Christian friends don’t look at it this way”:

They think teaching about Santa can damage your child when it comes to believing in God. It’s not a stretch to see why. We teach our kids to believe there is a bearded man in the sky who knows you by name and cares about how you act. I think that’s why it’s so important to be careful about how I talk to my kids about Santa Claus. But I’m just never sure what to say. This year, I’ve decided to say nothing at all.

This morning, my daughter asked, “Dad, how does Santa get in our house when we don’t have a chimney?”

I was searching for the words when I decided I didn’t need to answer. I asked, “How do you think he comes in?” She gave me an elaborate answer, and I said, “That’s a very good theory.” It was a good theory. I didn’t lie to her — I just gave her room to discover the answers on her own.

Meanwhile, Michael Brendan Dougherty calls himself “unpersuaded by the more principled anti-Claus chorus.” He suggests that “there is something too flatly literalistic, even Puritanical, about their arguments”:

Radical Protestants of an older stripe thought holy days like Christmas were offensive because God is with us every day, and because they hated the “mass” in Christ’s Mass. How this translated in practice was that around the time other people began making merry, the dour low churchman marked the time with especially strenuous sermons against holy days.

Similarly, just as parents are conjuring a model of abundant generosity and joy, today’s killjoys make it a season of rote sermonizing against materialism. This misses the point entirely. A materialist looks under the tree and sees the year’s economic surplus, badly invested. It takes a spiritual person to see it as the work of St. Nick, as a recurrence of the Magi, or an imitation of the great generosity of the God-child born to us. Only the devil wants your Christmas to be just like all the other days. Save the mortifications for Lent. …

There’s also something to be said for a light touch with magic and myth. For “letting the faeries out” of your soda bread, and for what Chesterton called “creative credulity” in another defense of Santa. This doesn’t mean accepting fantastic stories cravenly and literally, but inhabiting them with zest.

Scores of Dish readers share their stories of Santa disillusionment here.

Kelly Williams Brown points to the Beaver State:

Oregon is the biggest producer in the country, and arguably the world. In this green and gray state, there are 45 to 50 million Christmas trees in the ground at any given time, which means Christmas trees outnumber humans 12 to 1.

It’s not just that Oregon has a the right climate to grow the trees (though it does) or that a state historically reliant on logging would continue to produce trees as products. Oregon is where the modern Christmas tree industry in America was born, thanks to a Nebraskan-born farmer named Hal Schudel.

In 1955, Hal had an enormous idea: Perhaps Christmas trees, like corn, wheat or soybeans, could be a crop. They could be bred selectively, attended to and fertilized, sheared each year into the perfect cone. A tree’s nooks and crannies that perfectly showcase your ornament collection didn’t happen by accident. They were designed. Like every agricultural product, Christmas trees are now selectively bred and groomed for what the consumer wants: the perfect color; needle retention to minimize vacuuming; dense, bushy branches that can hold the heaviest ornament; and perhaps most importantly, the scent that wafts gently through a home and announces the presence of Christmas.

Hal’s insight became Holiday Tree Farms, which started as 300 acres and now reaches 8,500 acres, is one of the two largest Christmas tree operations in the world, trading off with McKenzie Farms, also in Oregon. Holiday Tree Farms is still held by Hal’s family, and this year will ship over one million Christmas trees. Today, 98% of Christmas trees come from farms like the one first envisioned by Hal.