Leave Santa Alone!

he's white, male, and an industry leader in toy manufacturing- the very image of everything america considers important. he's also generous. if you want a role model on a diet, how about jesus and gandhi, or are they busy?

honestly, when you people live up to santa's standards, bring it up again.

until then, how would you like some milk and cookies? but there will be no more gardening tools under the tree. they offend.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_2?ie=UTF8&rs=554944&rh=n%3A228013%2Cn%3A551242%2Cn%3A128061011%2Cn%3A554944

The current incarnation of Santa came from the minds of Coca-Cola



Here's an image of the first Coca-Cola Santa.



Santa today is a bastardization of St. Nicholas, Odin and many other historical and mythical characters.

Santa was not portrayed as a heavy image then.

Why not make this fictional character thinner? We can do anything we want with an image.

Americans are fat because of Santa. Period. It has nothing to do with riding our Rascals to McDonald's every day.

I mean, once a year, he's absolutely ubiquitous, his substantial stature infating our ideal body image. Whereas our fat friends and relatives, who we see year round, in person, well, they don't count, because Wal-Mart doesn't sell inflatable renderings of them to plant in our front yards.

Coke created the modern archetypal Santa, but Thomas Nast and other late 19th century cartoonists created the first modern mass image of him, which the Coke artists drew on, and Nast et al had him fat and jolly sixty years or so before the Coke ads came along (there's a Dover clip art book of a hundred or so 19th century Xmas etchings, etc). Goes back to "A Night Before Crhistmas", which Clement Moore may, or may not, have written, about fifty years before Nast:


"His eyes -- how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,

And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;

He had a broad face and a little round belly,

That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;"


Santa's always been a fatboy. Pere Noel and Father Christmas have been tall and lean and bearded and hooded--someon back there I think talked about Santa having echoes of Odin, and they're much more Odinesque than Santa is.

Don't mess with the archetypes, is what I'd say. He's fat, so what. May the Fat-Is-Fine folks squash the skinny spoilsports.

Damn Santa.

can I please say thank GOD to that???

I was a bit of a skeptic as a child

I remember my mother making my brothers take me to go sit on santa's lap while she searched for kitchen towels.

God, I felt like such an a$$hole. How stupid did they think I was? I think I was probably 4.

It's all Norman Rockwell's fault, and the American foible for Santa.




St. Nikolaus (the European version) looks like this

Not just in the US - just check out this link about what is happening in England...

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=106580

God, I hadn't thought of chimneys. Now that they build a lot of houses and probably most apartments and condos without fireplaces, the chimney connects directly to the combustion chamber of the furnace, and that doesn't have a door, usually just an access plate for work on the burner. How is a fat Santa gonna get out of that to deliver the presents. Come down to that, how is a skinny Santa gonna get out? Christmas is in peril from technological progress here.

It's cold at the North Pole. If Santa didn't carry a little extra insulation, he'd freeze to death up there, and then where would we be?

Besides, if he were normal weight, he may only need six or maybe four flying reindeer instead of eight, which would put a lot of very talented flying reindeer on the unemployment dole.

Furthermore, what does it matter to us if Santa is a little chubby? Are we such snobs that we judge a man by what he looks like rather than by his deeds? It is not as if his life span was being cut short by obesity- I'll wager he's still fat and still delivering presents long after we've passed on.

Equus--

Hear! Hear!

Hath not Santa eyes? Hath not Santa hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as an Easter Bunny is? If you prick him, does he not bleed? If you tickle him, does he not laugh, with his abdomen like a bowl full of jelly? If you poison his milk and cookies, does he not die? And if you wrong him, do the reindeer not take revenge? If he is like us in the rest, he will resemble us in that.