Monday, December 06, 2010

Santa speculations

During dinner tonight I was discussing Santa Claus with the girls. Sarah has been gamely playing along and is doing a good job of convincing Grace that she once saw Santa Claus when she was seven-years-old and came down in the night to get a drink of water. (I'd blame How the Grinch Stole Christmas here, but I don't think Sarah's memory for that particular holiday tale is that good.)

Grace and I were trying to get more details out of Sarah on what Santa looked like, how much he weighed, etc. We were also discussing how many cookies he eats each year. I suggested that perhaps Santa doesn't eat each cookie he is presented with, but instead eats some and stores the rest in the bundle he has flung on his back. As the presents are removed, cookies fill the space. In this way, he can store up food for the lean Spring, Summer, and Autumn months . . . as I noted that it's not likely that Santa has a grocery store nearby at the North Pole.

Grace seemed to accept that, with a wink. (She's well used to my tall tales by now.)

But I probably went off the deep end a few minutes later when I made Sarah realize that she must have encountered Santa during his annual pre-Christmas visit to our house. (Because we have always been elsewhere on the actual Christmas Eve, her tale of coming downstairs for a glass of water could only take place PRIOR to our annual trip south.)

And this made some sense, as I speculated that during these pre-Christmas trips, Santa's guard is lessened and he is more likely to be caught unawares.  I then began to wonder how Santa was able to get his last-minute preparations for the global trip taken care of when he is constantly faced with the special requests from families like ours who insist on having multiple Christmases on different days.

Perhaps, I wondered, Santa has a contingency plan set up for families such as ours in which he beams the presents to the house from a remote location on whatever date is requested. And we don't notice them because they are hidden with a cloaking device of some sort that is automatically deactivated at the scheduled time?

The kids greeted this idea with the necessary skepticism, and wondered why they never stepped on them, invisible or not?

Well, then, I conjectured, maybe Santa places the gifts not in a cloaking field, but in a parallel dimension that mysteriously merges with ours when the family being serviced is all fast asleep?

Plausible?

(Such are the things we discuss when taking our mind off of leftovers.)

I welcome your comments, elaborations, and embellishments.

2 comments:

Chris Rogers said...

Santa uses a similar scale of time as the movie Inception.

Grace-face said...

Hi Dad!!! It's me, Sarah! I wanted to let you know that I think your post was super-funny (although admittedly, I couldn't understand some of it) and that I do remember stuff from, The Grinch Stole Christmas!!!