Santa Claus doesn’t exist; plan accordingly

Hopefully I didn't let the cat out of the bag to anyone reading today.  If so, I'm sorry.  (As long as I'm at it, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Great Pumpkin don't exist, either.)

The impossibility of such a character is easy to argue.  Let's say that there are about two billion people on the planet who celebrate Christmas, and that they all get something in their stocking.  (I'll give people the benefit of the doubt and say that they're all on the “nice” list.)  If they each get a stocking-stuffer worth $5, that's $10 billion just for the toys.  If this is all derived from passive income of 2% per year — which it would need to be if this whole international Christmas Eve jaunt were to be self-sustainable century after century — that means having something like $500 billion in the bank, which places him with a net worth of about an order of magnitude above Warren Buffett.  That, and as PositiveAtheism.org describes — (how's that for an oxymoron?) — just delivering the stuff is physically impossible.  Rudolph would vaporize in less than a second and Santa would be crushed at the back of his sleigh if they traveled as fast as the needed to, which is about Mach 3,000.

But, I probably don't need to convince you any more that Santa doesn't exist, because you're an adult.  Santa Claus is for children (though we never did the Santa Claus thing with our daughter).  And, as adults, we get to look forward to cleaning up all of that wrapping paper, packing up all of the decorations, performing a little more guilt-laden exercise following a few weeks of drinking a bit too much eggnog and eating a few too many holiday cookies, and — best of all — paying for all of the presents that “Santa” got for our children and for each other. Maybe we postpone this until New Year's when we Really Get Cracking At It And We Mean It This Time.  But the day of reckoning comes.

And we must plan for that day.  We planned a little bit, but I'm sure the credit card balance will give us a mild shock.  Not a huge one, but in between entertaining guests and getting gifts the bill will be a bit higher this billing cycle.  So if you've planned better than this, meaning that you had a set amount that you were to spend this holiday season and that you stuck to that amount, you've done a good thing!

If not, then you get to do what we'll have to do — dial discretionary spending back a bit. The party's over.  Times of want follow times of plenty.  If the festivities got ahead of your budget a little bit, then do the little money saving things again to offset the red ink.  (Red, as in the color of Santa's suit.)

The earlier, the better.