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Showing posts from December, 2018

Father Christmas - Naughty or Nice?

At this time of year, serious-minded people start agonising over whether it is all right to ‘lie’ to children about Father Christmas.   Religious fundamentalists worry about whether they are offering children a false god who may seem more attractive than the real God – bringing tangible presents in your stocking instead of a lifelong, or multi-lifelong, journey towards holiness.   Fundamentalist atheists worry about whether fairy-tales entice children into believing in the supernatural instead of looking for materialist explanations for everything.   Psychologists worry about whether the sense of being watched may be oppressive. Speaking as both an autistic person who sometimes finds it hard to tell whether people are joking or serious, and a Christian who believes that honesty is important, I’d say they’re worrying about nothing.   As a child, I could easily see that Father Christmas belonged to the category marked ‘stories and make-believe’ rather than the one marked ‘lies’.   Mu

Christmas Nagging

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I know it’s been a while since I updated this blog.   Lately, I’ve got a bit blogged down in writing fanfiction  inspired by some of my favourite fantasy novels, or self-publishing an original novel online, Pilgrims ,  about a group of people on a sponsored walk from London to Canterbury.   I’ve also been reading other people’s fanfiction, particularly Mood Music ,  a Harry Potter fanfic in which Professor Snape and a Muggle shaman escape from the Death Eaters together,  written by the excellent  Whitehound . However, I have been jolted back into blogging by a magazine article about Christmas which made me shout, ‘They think people need to be told that?’   It started off, reasonably enough, by discussing the relative merits of real and artificial Christmas trees.   It concluded that artificial Christmas trees, considering the amount of energy they cost to make, would have to be re-used for twenty years to be more eco-friendly than cut trees.   After all, real Christmas trees come