Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Clause

Hope Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Clause By Brian Lageose on December 27, 2025 • ( 3 Comments ) From one jolly-bellied man to another… Image by Author, created at NightCafe. Dear Santa, Hey. I hope you’re doing well. And I apologize for not writing to you for the last 50-odd years, back when I used to scrawl my scribbles on a wide-spaced sheet in my Big Chief tablet, a writing platform that every child of a certain age used to have in their elementary-school years. (Those tablets and those years are long gone, along with, hopefully, some of the cultural appropriation behind the name of said tablet. I’m fairly certain no self-respecting tribal chief signed off on that mess. Then again, Americans have a history of not respecting those who came before them and nobody bothered to get clearance concerning the appropriation.) Anyway, I didn’t reach out to you for a long time because a certain incident happened along about my eighth or ninth year on this planet, somewhere in there. I’ll refrain from going into too much detail. But suffice it to say that, one Christmas Eve, when I should have been in bed at my Granny’s house but I wasn’t, I ran across one of my uncles doing something that you and your elves should have been doing. To get specific, said uncle was in the midst of putting-together a toy that would be presented to me the next morning as if you (or your diminutive staff) had concocted this gift-testament to my angelic behavior during the preceding year. I had lots of questions after that happenstance moment, with most of the queries centered on why people who loved me would lie about what is really going on in the world. I must say that my faith in you faltered. Okay, it went beyond that. My faith extinguished. (A similar flame-snuffing would occur a few years later when I finally questioned the teachings of the Southern Baptist church that I was forced to attend as a child, but we’ll save that development for another letter, one that should probably be sent to someone else.) Suffice it to say that the visual of my big uncle carefully constructing something that should have been built by smaller people was a harsh stepping-stone to realizing that you can’t always believe what you’re told. I strayed from the Concept of You for a very long time, door shut, no looking back. But lately, as the world around me has become increasingly shaky, with incessant amounts of stupid people procreating more stupid people, I need to find something to believe in again. I’ve searched high and low, looking under rocks and knocking on doors and rabbit-holing my way across the Internet. (Do you know about the Internet? You may not, considering your remote-ass location at the top of this troubled world, and there are times when I wish the rest of us didn’t, either. It can be a nasty, hate-filled thing,...

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