Santa Lives!: Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus

107 Pages·2005·0.97 MB·English

by  Ellis Weiner

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Santa Lives!
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ELLIS WEINER
Riverhead Books
New York
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THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,
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Ltd.)
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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2005 by Ellis Weiner
Cover design by Benjamin Gibson
Book design by Tiffany Estreicher

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First Riverhead trade paperback edition: November 2005

MSR ISBN 0 7865 6021 5
AEB ISBN 0 7865 6022 3

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CONTENTS
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Introduction 1
Chapter One
The Ontological Argument 11
Chapter Two
The Causal Argument 21
Chapter Three
The Argument from Design,
or the Teleological Argument 35
Chapter Four
The Experiential Argument 53
Chapter Five
The Argument from Morality 71
A Final Word 89
Appendix: Lesser Arguments 93
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Santa Lives!
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Santa entering chimney. Although the
moon is behind him, his face is well lit—proof
of his quasi-divinity.
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Introduction
T
HE figure of Santa Claus is shrouded in mystery
and contradiction.
Well before the founding of the Christian Church,
men (and women, if the men let them go outside)
would gaze up at the heavens during the bleakest,
longest nights of the year and wail, although probably
not in English, “Who will deliver us from this endless
wintry gloom? What can sustain us through the long
nights ahead besides heavy drinking, the worship of
moss, and staring at endless reruns of the Bronze Age
equivalent of Law & Order?” Then would every heart
beat with a single desire and every voice give utterance
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INTRODUCTION
to the same wish: “Isn’t there some big fat man up there
who can come down here and give me free stuff?”1
In response to such universal human longing, Santa
Claus appears.
And yet, from the first, he is a figure of controversy.
It begins with his very name: Santa, scholars tell us, is
the feminine form of the Spanish/Italian/Portuguese
word for “saint.” But Clausis a masculine Nordic/Ger-
manic name. Is Santa Claus a girl with a boy’s name or
a boy with a girl’s name or what? It’s worse than Leslie
or Alex!
No wonder, then, that when we (henceforth, by “we”
I will mean not only those of us in the intellectual elite
but everyone else, too!) first think of Santa Claus, we
1Early polytheistic cultures had their own proto-versions of Santa
Claus, the most familiar ofwhich comes down to us from the ancient
Egyptians, as seen on the funerary offerings on the tomb of Ka aper
(2465–20 B.C.; Old Kingdom, early Dynasty 5). The painted lime-
stone bas reliefdepicts, among the familiar images ofvessels, snakes,
birds, and eyes, a portly, bearded man standing in a chariot equipped
with snow runners and being drawn by a team ofcreatures, each fea-
turing the head ofa reindeer and the body ofan elf. (History is silent
on where, in ancient Egypt, there was snow. Indeed, we know of no
hieroglyph for the idea, although the Egyptians did possess twenty-
three different hieroglyphs for “sand.”)
Among the ancients the Claus figure finds its most enduring
form in that of the Roman deity Gratuitas (goddess of tips). Santa
and his precursors disappear entirely with the advent of Judaic
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2