On Friday night, I joined Allan Wilson and Zoe Meletis in arguing the anti-Santa position at the 19th annual Santa debate at UNBC's Canfor Theatre. With the anti-Santa debaters having an 0-for-18 record in arguing against the pro-Santa crowd, I'm confident that by the time you read this, we'll be 0-for-19. Nevertheless, I brought my A-game, which is published below:
The Prince George Citizen's crack team of investigative journalists has pursued the Santa conspiracy extensively. Here is what we have uncovered:
- Canada Post processes mail sent to Santa and recognizes his mailing address as the North Pole and a postal code of H0H 0H0. Yet the Canada Post website does not recognize this postal code when doing a reverse search. Furthermore, if Santa really does live at the North Pole, his Canadian postal code would start with an X, which is the first letter of the postal code for all mail bound for the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. If his postal code is correct, Santa actually lives in Montreal, since that is where all mail goes that starts with an H in the postal code. Despite repeated Freedom of Information requests for documentation to explain this discrepancy, Canada Post has refused to cooperate.
- The Department of National Defence assists its American counterparts in tracking Santa's flight on Christmas Eve. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and corroborated by both retired and current senior officials at DND and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service show extensive military testing of new and secret weapons have been conducted each Christmas Eve. That's not Santa you saw on the radar in previous years, that was test flights of the F-35 fighter jet. Last year, it was the latest American drone dropping bombs, not presents, on unsuspecting homes.
- Some of our media colleagues have contributed to the Santa myth to appeal to advertisers. The famous "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" editorial was published in 1897 in the now-defunct New York Sun. The New York Times, which is still with us today, exposed the fraud in January 1898. The Times revealed that the editor, Francis Pharcellus Church, was a shameless drunk drowning in gambling debt who received a substantial payment of cash in a brown paper bag to write "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."
- Top-secret documents uncovered in China and the former Soviet Union show Santa Claus was developed as a Communist propaganda weapon in 1952 to poison the minds of young children growing up in NATO countries. The implications of showering children with images of a man in a "red" suit, drinking from a "red" bottle of soda, was clear to the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who mentioned it in his 1954 bestseller Seduction of the Innocent. Sadly, the media of the day ignored that part of his book and focused on Wertham's attack on comic books instead.
- This toxic contamination of modern culture by the Santa myth continues to this very day. Our colleagues at the Toronto Star were good enough to release to The Citizen another still from the now-infamous video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking what looks to be crack cocaine. Ford's lapse in illicit drug use and alcohol dependence was not due to the stresses of his job but because of the influence of another jolly fat man, who encouraged him to just try it once, it would be fun.
I rest my case.
