"Will someone just please tell me how to lie about Santa?" sincerely asked novelist Jessica Grose in the Nov. 29 webzine "Slate." She wants her young daughter to experience the "magical part" of believing in Santa Claus, yet does not want to lie to her.
More importantly, is Grose prepared to tell her daughter the whole truth about Santa?
Saint Nicholas was a real historical person, the Christian Bishop of Myra in the 4th Century in what today is the Mediterranean country of Turkey. He is remembered for giving gifts, especially for putting coins in the shoes of those who put them out for him.
This has dovetailed with the Bible's description of Three Wise Men likewise giving tangible, practical gifts of spices and gold to the baby Jesus as part of Christmastime's open-hearted generosity and sharing.
But two modern impostors are unreal.
One is the Santa Claus depicted by advertisers, who have replaced a selfless Saint Nicholas with a secular magical elf — based in part on the ancient Dutch magical trickster Sinterklaas — and used this semi-pagan image to sell soda pop and a thousand other products. This Santa replaces the religious nature of Christmas with mere materialism.
This time of year we turn from Thanksgiving Pilgrims to Christmas yet surprisingly, the Pilgrims scarcely celebrated Christmas. The Pilgrims celebrated Christ's resurrection at Easter, but they saw Christmas as a holiday that in Europe had become spiritually contaminated with pagan ways and magical symbols, from Druidic mistletoe to Santa Claus.
These Puritans would have told us to read Jeremiah 10:2-4 in the Bible before putting up a Christmas tree.
The other Saint Nicholas impersonators of our time are progressives, many of whom disdain God but, paradoxically, all believe fervently in Santa Claus, in the form of government with never-ending free goodies it can give away without any negative economic or social consequences.
The reality is that everything government gives away, it must first take from somebody else — past, present or future. America now has only 101 million full-time workers, the lowest percentage working since President Jimmy Carter, yet we have 108 million people receiving means-tested welfare benefits from our fast-growing Santa Claus welfare state.
The politicians to pay for this welfare keep running up taxes and a credit card tab that already — to pay it today — would require a stack of dollar bills from Earth all the way to the planet Mars 35 million miles away, and beyond, as Craig R. Smith and I explain in our latest book
"The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressives' 100-Year Debasement of America and the Dollar Ends."
The ugliest thing about this giant debt is that today's politicians are sending the bill to our kids and grandkids, making them pay for today's profligacy, and leaving them a future impoverished America that our fake Santa Uncle Sam is selfishly running into the ground now.
Our offspring will be forced to pay this bill throughout their adult lives in higher taxes, soaring inflation, devalued dollars, lost prosperity, lost opportunity and greatly diminished freedom . . . all so today's politicians can buy votes by pretending to be Santa.
As Rush Limbaugh says, for Republicans "it's hard to run against Santa." It would be easier if people saw that our kids are not getting freebies; they are getting stuck with the bill from selfish liberal politicians who are really anti-Santas, takers instead of givers.
Jessica Grose's heartfelt plea in the left-liberal webzine Slate complained about a judgmental Santa who "only rewards Christian boys and girls."
Progressives can mock Santa's political incorrectness: this white male Santa Claus wears leather and animal fur, smokes, is obese, exploits reindeer, cracks his whip over a non-unionized elf sweatshop 364 days a year, and leaves his wife alone on Christmas Eve at the icy North Pole.
Obamacare might not be kind to Santa on healthcare day because of his extreme old age, obesity, smoking, conservative moral judgmentalism, and unequal sharing of materialist gifts.
It is unsurprising that Grose criticizes the jolly old elf. But is she willing to tell the whole truth about the terrible price her daughter will pay for today's liberal politician Santa impersonators?
Lowell Ponte is co-author, with Craig R. Smith, of "Crashing the Dollar: How to Survive a Global Currency Collapse"; "The Inflation Deception: Six Ways Government Tricks Us . . . And Seven Ways to Stop It"; and "Re-Making Money: Ways to Restore America's Optimistic Golden Age." His new book is "The Great Debasement: The 100-Year Dying of the Dollar and How to Get America's Money Back." Read more reports from Lowell Ponte — Click Here Now.