The Blog I'm Not Writing

Department Of The Partridge Of The Week

It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself   is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard.   [1]

Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?

 

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Department Of  Somehow I Managed Not To Post This To The Store’s Site…

But I’m sharing it with y’all.

Background info:  my adopted village   [2]  of Manzanita (Oregon) has several nicknames, including, Muttzanita.   [3]  It’s a dog-friendly town to say the least, and in the 30 years moiself  has been hanging around the coast I’ve seen the best and worst of dog owners.  I am happy to report that *most* of the dog owners – well, the locals, as in, the ones who actually live at the coast – are good at picking up after their dogs (even though, the, uh, “remnants” of their dog’s solid business still remain, and the liquids blend in…eventually).  Still, there’s a reason (besides the rusty hooks, jagged crab pot wires and other fishing detritus that periodically come ashore with the tide) that, although I walk on the beach every day when I’m at the coast, I don’t do so barefooted.

Dateline: earlier this week. A store at Manzanita, one which I love and where I’ve frequently shopped, posted an ad on their social media page for a new holiday product they are offering for sale:

Stocking stuffer alert!🫧🌊🩵
Our magical Sand & Sea Scrub Bars are blended with sand from Manzanita Beach!

My first thought:  For anyone familiar with – as in, paying attention to –  what gets deposited onto the sands of Manzanita beach, this is not an enticement.   Do the buyers realize that means they will be scrubbing their skin with puppy piss-drenched sand?   [4]

 

 

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Department Of Yes Virginia, You’re Correct About Santa, But If You Know What’s Good For You You’ll Keep Your Mouth Shut
Sub-Department of Two Santa Stories

I don’t know how old I was when I figured it out, but I can never remember a time when I thought about Santa and “believed” – that is, when I thought about the story of Santa Claus and thought it was true/Santa was real, rather than knowing that he was a character in a story and that my parents actually supplied “Santa’s” gifts under the tree and in our Christmas stockings.  I also cannot remember ever discussing this with my parents, or my siblings, when I was a child.  Moiself  *does* remember the common knowledge about such things:  kids believed in Santa Claus; adults didn’t.  After noting the difference between the respective Christmas presents received by kids and their parents, I thought it in my best interest to keep my mouth shut.

 

 

Look at what kids who “believed in Santa” (even the ones just pretending to believe) found under their Christmas trees:  A miniature, pedal-propelled 1956 Chevy-styled sedan; Barbies and GI Joes; roller skates and skateboards and pogo sticks; Nancy Drew books and Animals of the World almanacs; Lincoln Log sets and Mousetrap games; Tonka trucks and plush stuffed animals.  And what did the adults, the A-Santa-ists, get?  Sockx and neckties; aftershave lotion and talcum powder; stationery and appliances.

I figured out early on that the idea was to go along with the story for as long as possible….which is somewhat related to the reasons why I stayed in religion (read: was not out about my non-belief) for so long.   You get better “presents” when you go along with the pretense.

Then, viola! you’re a grownup with a forehead-smacking moment of realization:  the Santa Claus story is one of the most useful tools ever for freethinkers, in showing how otherwise seemingly kind and intelligent people can agree to promote a lie, even after you ask them a direct question and emphatically request a truthful answer, for what they believe is the greater good (“Oh, honey, of course there is a Santa Claus!”).

“It’s hard to even consider the possibility that Santa isn’t real. Everyone seems to believe he is. As a kid, I heard his name in songs and stories and saw him in movies with very high production values. My mom and dad seemed to believe, batted down my doubts, told me he wanted me to be good and that he always knew if I wasn’t. And what wonderful gifts I received! Except when they were crappy, which I always figured was my fault somehow. All in all, despite the multiple incredible improbabilities involved in believing he was real, I believed – until the day I decided I cared enough about the truth to ask serious questions, at which point the whole façade fell to pieces. Fortunately the good things I had credited him with kept coming, but now I knew they came from the people around me, whom I could now properly thank.

Now go back and read that paragraph again, changing the ninth word from Santa to God.

Santa Claus, my secular friends, is the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had. Our culture has constructed a silly and temporary myth parallel to its silly and permanent one….“

 

 

…as our son began to exhibit the incipient inklings of Kringledoubt, it occurred to me that something powerful was going on. I began to see the Santa paradigm as an unmissable opportunity – the ultimate dry run for a developing inquiring mind….

This is the moment, at the threshold of the question, that the natural inquiry of a child can be primed or choked off. With questions of belief, you have three choices: feed the child a confirmation, feed the child a disconfirmation – or teach the child to fish.

The ‘Yes, Virginia’ crowd will heap implausible nonsense on the poor child, dismissing her doubts with invocations of magic or mystery or the willful suspension of physical law. Only slightly less problematic is the second choice, the debunker who simply informs the child that, yes, Santa is a big fat fraud….

I for one chose door number three.

‘Some people believe the sleigh is magic,’ I said. ‘Does that sound right to you?’  Initially, boy howdy, did it ever. He wanted to believe, and so was willing to swallow any explanation, no matter how implausible or how tentatively offered. ‘Some people say it isn’t literally a single night,’ I once said, naughtily priming the pump for later inquiries….

I avoided both lying outright and setting myself up as a godlike authority, determined as I was to let him sort this one out himself. And when at last, at the age of nine, in the snowy parking lot of the Target store, to the sound of a Salvation Army bellringer, he asked me point blank if Santa was real – I demurred, just a bit, one last time.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘Well…I think all the moms and dads are Santa.’ He smiled at me. ‘Am I right?’

I smiled back. It was the first time he’d asked me directly, and I told him he was right.  ‘So,’ I asked, ‘how do you feel about that?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s fine. Actually, it’s good. The world kind of… I don’t know…makes sense again.’

By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough. Such a lesson, viewed from the top of the hill after exiting a belief system under their own power, can gird kids against the best efforts of the evangelists -– and far better than secondhand knowledge could ever hope to do.

( excerpt from “Santa, The Ultimate Dry Run,”
Parenting Beyond Belief, Dale McGowan;  my emphases )

 

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Department Of The Second Santa-related Story

The second Santa-related story comes from a book moiself  has previously/recent blogged about, We Of Little Faith: Why I stopped pretending to believe (and maybe you should too), by Kate Cohen.  BTW, Cohen is not out to convert religious believers; rather, her book aims to support and persuade those who are religion-free to be open about *their* beliefs (and about their mere presence, in this religious rhetoric-saturated world).

In the book’s epilogue the author tells of an encounter she and Lena, the author’s then three-year-old daughter, had in a grocery store checkout line.  It was a few days after Christmas; Lena and her mom were standing behind a father who had his two preschoolers in his cart. The father turned to speak with Lena.

” ‘Did Santa bring you something good this year?’ he asked.

As you know, I grew up Jewish in a small town in Virginia.  And, as you know, I’m fond of Christmas.  When someone wishes me a ‘Merry Christmas’ I typically respond with a hearty, ‘And a Merry Christmas to you.’  but this felt different.  Asking a random child about Santa Claus in Albany, New York, where Yom Kippur is a public school holiday, struck me as a bit careless.

Indeed, my daughter looked confused, even troubled.  I was straining to think of a polite way to tell the guy he was a jerk when Lena did it for me.

Solemnly, she said, ‘Santa Claus is just pretend.’  He looked stricken and came closer, glancing back at his two little cart riders. ‘Don’t tell my kids, okay,’ he said to Lena.  ‘They still think he’s real.’  Lena nodded, accepting the burden of discretion.

I was so proud of her for speaking up, and then so sad that she was immediately asked to keep quiet.  To be a nice girl, she was expected to hold her tongue.  She was expected to hide the truth as she knew it and respect a lie that others had constructed.  A pleasant, harmless lie, you might say.  But a lie, nonetheless. “

( excerpt from Kate Cohen’s, We Of Little Faith:
Why I stopped pretending to believe (and maybe you should too), my emphases )

 

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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week    [5]

 

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May you never feel compelled to respect even “pleasant and harmless” lies:
May you enjoy the beach (and watch your step);
May you have the happiest of whatever you celebrate;
…and may the hijinks ensue.

 

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

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[1] Specifically, in our pear tree.

[2] Why is it called a village, and not a town?  I’m not sure who is the demographics Boss re such things.

[3] The name of the annual “dog festival” held in the late summer in Manzanita.

[4] Or worse.

[5] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.   No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org