regarding santa claus
was the jolly man in red and white:
A) a single magical master elf and judge/accountant/keeper of lists who in a single night sequentially visited all homes in Christendom to dole out gifts on the basis of the potential recipients' having "passed" or "failed" according to the simplistic criteria of certain ethical tests
B) millions of parents acting in parallel, who independently bought gifts, hid gifts, dispensed gifts under trees, all on the basis of household income, gift affordability, and sense of familial obligation while falsely attributing all this covert multiple parallel activity to an open singular sequential fiction with eight tiny reindeer
C) a singlular Catholic saint noted for his gift-giving
D) the time-eroded remnant of circumpolar shamanic ritual practice, in which myriad shamans, over thousands of years, claimed to climb from this world via a tree, then to "fly" between the worlds through the ingestion of hallucinogens present in circumpolar strains of the red and white (santa's colors) mushroom Amanita muscaria, helped along the way by tryptamine "elves" -- said mushroom often being located as a result of the shaman's noting the "flying" (i.e. Amanita-affected) behavior of reindeer that had consumed the mushroom, the deer then often being killed and the urine in their bladders drunk off because it concentrated the hallucinogenic properties from the mushrooms the deer had eaten, so that the shaman might experience a swifter and stronger "flight"
i'm not really polling for answers on this one, but would be just as interested to see what your perspective and analytical responses might be :)
A) a single magical master elf and judge/accountant/keeper of lists who in a single night sequentially visited all homes in Christendom to dole out gifts on the basis of the potential recipients' having "passed" or "failed" according to the simplistic criteria of certain ethical tests
B) millions of parents acting in parallel, who independently bought gifts, hid gifts, dispensed gifts under trees, all on the basis of household income, gift affordability, and sense of familial obligation while falsely attributing all this covert multiple parallel activity to an open singular sequential fiction with eight tiny reindeer
C) a singlular Catholic saint noted for his gift-giving
D) the time-eroded remnant of circumpolar shamanic ritual practice, in which myriad shamans, over thousands of years, claimed to climb from this world via a tree, then to "fly" between the worlds through the ingestion of hallucinogens present in circumpolar strains of the red and white (santa's colors) mushroom Amanita muscaria, helped along the way by tryptamine "elves" -- said mushroom often being located as a result of the shaman's noting the "flying" (i.e. Amanita-affected) behavior of reindeer that had consumed the mushroom, the deer then often being killed and the urine in their bladders drunk off because it concentrated the hallucinogenic properties from the mushrooms the deer had eaten, so that the shaman might experience a swifter and stronger "flight"
i'm not really polling for answers on this one, but would be just as interested to see what your perspective and analytical responses might be :)