There could be an argument in favour of using the illusion of Santa Claus to jollify our lives — especially when we don't know what we're doing or what the future shall bring us. At least we can fudge things for a few moments, though for some people, Christmas can be a time of sadness and loneliness...

In 1897 the American Civil War correspondent and editor Francis Pharcellus Church wrote an editorial for the New York newspaper The Sun in defense of religious belief. The piece responded to a question by 8-year-old Virginia O. Hanlon and included what has become the famous catch phrase, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

...

But why does Church argue for making the leap to Santa belief, rather than standing pat with Santa agnosticism? Here Church brings in his second, pragmatic point. We should believe in Santa Claus because it will make our lives better if we do. Echoing Nietzsche’s defense of art, Church argues that we need poetry, romance and childlike faith to make life tolerable. Life without Santa is dreary and unromantic, and life with Santa is fun and magical. So we might as well believe in him. We also, according to Church, should believe in fairies dancing on the lawn, and an unseen world full of “supernal beauty and glory.”

As a war reporter, Church saw mass slaughter carried out in the name of unseen ideals. He needed to believe in fairies, but we may balk at his Victorian tone with its creepy veneration of childhood and high-toned glurge. So it’s worth restating his point about the benefits of a belief in Santa in more modern, prosaic terms.

The sine qua non of Santa is that he brings Christmas gifts, and the real benefits of Santa belief relate to the practice of gift-giving. Gift-giving, as O. Henry points out in his story “The Gift of the Magi,” seems to wither under rational scrutiny. In the story, you will recall (and if not, spoiler alert), the husband sells his favorite possession, a watch, to get his wife a comb for her beautiful hair, only to learn that she has sold her hair to a wigmaker in order to earn the money to buy him a fob for his watch. From a utilitarian point of view this gift exchange was a fiasco. If we believe in Santa, we believe in an aspect of gift-giving that resists rational analysis. Further, if we believe in Santa, a mysterious figure who comes in the middle of the night, we make a deliberate move toward obscurity — we prevent certain emotional underpinnings of our lives from being demystified. And that, Church argues, is good.

Let’s say we agree with Church that Santa belief is a worthwhile state to get ourselves into because it protects the practice of gift-giving against the onslaughts of utilitarian rationality. Is it possible to do so? At first glance it would seem that the only way to do that would be through some sort of self-deception. Some part of me knows that the presents come from a supply chain stretching back to China, so if I want to believe they come from a jolly old elf, I need to lie to myself. I could perhaps use some combination of meditation techniques and psychoactive drugs to induce Santa belief. Maybe I could take psilocybin and have a group of my friends chant, “Santa exists! Santa exists!” while I am tripping my brains out. Socially, we could form a benevolent conspiracy, telling one another that Santa exists even though we know he doesn’t. Parents do that to children.

read more: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/should-we-believe-in-santa-claus/?_r=0

------------------------------------

Gus: 

There could be an argument in favour of using the illusion of Santa Claus to jollify our lives — especially when we don't know what we're doing or what the future shall bring us. At least we can fudge things for a few moments, though for some people, Christmas can be a time of sadness and loneliness...

The Santa illusion has been mixed with strong religious belief to a large degree of confusion and has also been recently appropriated by commercial ventures because... because. Because money is powerful — and giving people an extra incentive to give gifts and generate goodwill is as good as any to activate our sense of sharing — so why not spend cash to share things that by the end of the rotation, may be useful or not. Mostly not — or drunk within two days. But that's the spirit: we shared.

So, could we not jollify our life without inventing a lot of illusions?... Were would be our motivators? Naughty or nice? Are we incapable to do the right thing if we do not have a mythical figure to point out our righteous and wrong ways?... 

To some extend, it appears that most humans have never tried to go cold turkey on anything spiritual. One might go cold turkey on spirits but it is much harder to forgo the spiritual, aka abandoning the Santa and the godly myths, in order to be joyfully accepting of reality and its uncertainty. It seems that since our infancy we are lied to and we are often encouraged to lie to our self or to others, discreetly, as deceit becomes a major survival weapon in many situations, since when we tell the truth, there is a great chance that people "won't believe us". We like the hidden and the untruth. Uncanny. 

So we do not see the process as deceit or lies, personally and socially. We accept Santa and other spiritual elevations as our solution to our angst against finality and pain. We invent eternity and Santa. And this could be our major defence against the odds of not surviving. Not understanding who we are without the myths of who we are, we could decide to shoot our self... 

Through myths, rituals and traditions, we give our selves a purpose that is more important than who we are and fulfil this ideal by going gangbusters with this — busting our natural origins in the process. This invention of illusions has been the most powerful tool in human development. More than the invention of the wheel, the delusion of the will made us. This purpose has given us our artificial markers for "good and evil". It is our conscience placebo.

But in most situation, we also forget our past sins to point out others' sins...

For example the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues of Bamiyan in 2001 to everyone (except the Taliban) great horror. A great shame... Representations of gods and of humans in most cultures has been contentious... Islam forbids the depiction of such. And the Catholic church does as well, but for many years it was in need of ways to convert people by using "images" since no one could read. 

In the 17th century, puritans in England decided to destroy all representative images in churches and so forth...:

Sudbury, jan. 9, 1643. We broke down 10 mighty great Angels in glass. In all 80... etc... and 20 Cherubims to be broke down...

This was reported by William Dowsing in 1648...

The damage was immense and intense. Church stained glass windows, castles windows with godly references were being broken beyond repair, with fanaticism and sledge-hammers.

Now do we have to destroy images of our myths in order to destroy the myths? Well, the major problem here is that the destruction was not meant to destroy the concept of myths but to replace an old one with a new one, that decreed by Henry the VIII, a century before. 

"Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and established the Church of England – all to get his first divorce. This also allowed him to seize church land and property (a great help in financing costly European wars). Under Henry VIII, England witnessed the wholesale destruction of beautiful monastic buildings and libraries."

- See more at: http://www.hrp.org.uk/learninganddiscovery

/Discoverthehistoricroyalpalaces/monarchs/henryVIII#sthash.U9lW3CNP.dpuf"

I suppose most of the cinematographic interpretations of Henry the VIII could make him look like a young Santa, in need of biffo with Europe and desperate to have an heir...

Actually Santa Claus is the revival of a long lost tradition of peddling illusions:

Father Christmas dates back as far as 16th century in England during the reign of Henry VIII, when he was pictured as a large man in green or scarlet robes lined with fur.[21] He typified the spirit of good cheer at Christmas, bringing peace, joy, good food and wine and revelry.[21] As England no longer kept the feast day of Saint Nicholas on 6 December, the Father Christmas celebration was moved to 25 December to coincide with Christmas Day.[21] The Victorian revival of Christmas included Father Christmas as the emblem of 'good cheer'.[22] His physical appearance was variable, with one famous image being John Leech's illustration of the "Ghost of Christmas Present" in Charles Dickens's festive classic A Christmas Carol (1843), as a great genial man in a green coat lined with fur who takes Scrooge through the bustling streets of London on the current Christmas morning, sprinkling the essence of Christmas onto the happy populace.[21][22]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus