Choices and Do I Believe in Santa Claus?

By Harry Hopkins

As Paul wrote in Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

When I was a child, I believed in Santa Claus. I have vivid memories of the approaching Christmas Eve and the mounting excitement of looking forward to Santa squeezing down our chimney and leaving me some presents. I never for a moment doubted his existence, but I confess to wondering just how he could deliver to all the children in the world in a single night. How did he manage to drink all the milk and eat all the mince pies that were left for him? How did the reindeer negotiate the snowless rooftops pulling that toy-laden sleigh and how come nobody saw them? I had all these questions and more and yet still I believed. Because my parents told me so. My parents were my bedrock and my source of knowledge of the world around me. If they told me that a kindly, generous, child-loving entity lived at the North Pole and once a year took it upon himself to visit and delight all the children, why would I question it?

Growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, it was the BBC who provided the gold standard for what was going on in and around the world. As long as life went on in our cocoon of ease (and it did go on well for us baby boomers) and we enjoyed our home comforts, annual holidays and our superannuated jobs, we could listen to the BBC and receive their news with a degree of dispassionate compassion.

As a young teenager, it was the Vietnam War that made me question the wisdom of my ‘superiors’. The huge demonstrations in the USA were powerful stuff and indeed brought down Lyndon Johnson, in spite of his dedication to a ‘Great Society’. Who among us, of a certain age, can ever forget the horrific photo of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running down a road trying to escape the napalm dropped by American planes?

Politics became for me not a question of right, left or centre, but a question of right or wrong; it brought home that it is always the innocent people who suffer when governments revert to war as ‘politics by other means’.

March 2020 was a seminal time for everyone across the world. Those of us who were already of a questioning mind and with a degree of historical knowledge to appreciate the financial focus of the military and pharmaceutical industrial complexes knew from the outset that the covid narrative was something to be very suspicious of.

All of us depend on our understanding of the world by our five senses. This restricts our direct knowledge of existence to our own immediate surroundings. As children we believed in Santa Claus because we were told he existed and this was taken on trust. Similarly, as adults we were told in 2020 that a deadly disease was on the prowl and that we had to obey those who governed us to prevent the spread of infection. We were to ‘trust’ them unquestioningly.

I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that in spite of my questions concerning Santa Claus and the sheer implausibility of his existence, I still believed in him. But now as a mature adult I could make choices not limited to what I was being told by a loving father but by the media and the government, who I knew didn’t bat an eyelid over human lives if it interfered with policy. It’s not necessary to repeat all the nonsensical Covid actions and procedures they pressed upon us because they are now history and the cat is out of the bag. But to me, at the time, the masks, social distancing, empty hospitals, politicians still enjoying parties and then jab after jab was akin to Santa travelling across countless roofs the world over and delivering goodies to millions of children in a single evening; unbelievably farcical.

The vast majority made a choice. They chose to believe what they were told and they will have to live with that decision. Let’s hope the reports that are coming out about saline solutions and placebos are true, because this will be the salvation for very many people who didn’t have the wherewithal to make the right choice.

Let the story of Santa Claus be a lesson to us all. We believe this sort of stuff when we are children, but when we grow up we should be able to think for ourselves and make choices that are appropriate to the far-fetched nonsense we are fed. The words of Paul writing to the Corinthians ring loudly in my ears: “When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”