A New Spin on a Holiday Classic
If you’ve still got an appetite for holiday links, I’d like to point you to a great new piece by a friend of mine, the author Greta Christina. In a new post on her site, Greta takes that classic piece of Christmastime treacle, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus“, and rewrites it the way it should have been written in the first place – not as an insistence on literal belief in falsehoods, but as an ode to the value of free inquiry and rational thought. It’s both hilarious and brilliant. Check out an excerpt below:
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! And that would be excellent. That would be exactly correct. Fairies don’t exist, either. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, and if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? A fair amount, actually. The Santa hypothesis claims that Santa comes down chimneys on Christmas Eve and gives presents to children: if every chimney is carefully watched on Christmas Eve, and nobody sees anybody coming down any of them, that’s very strong evidence that the Santa hypothesis is incorrect.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
