Joy of Christmas

Archive for December, 2007

‘Let me tell you about the very rich,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. “They are different from you and me.”

“Yes,” Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have responded, “They have more money.”

Fitzgerald’s observation is certainly borne out in survey of what the world’s super rich plan to spend their money on this holiday season. A custom-made, jewel-encrusted saddle for a pony, a $30,000 couture dress for a four-year-old and a $200,000 restored classic Camaro are just some of the items on the shopping lists of those who don’t have to pinch pennies.

According the 2007 holiday spending survey by Elite Traveler (a lifestyle magazine distributed aboard private jets and mega-yachts) and the Prince and Associates market-research group, the super rich, untroubled by the subprime mortgage crisis or pretty much anything else, plan to increase their holiday spending over last year by anywhere from 17 to 67 per cent across a broad range of categories.

But first, let’s be clear on exactly who was being polled. They totalled 843 individuals around the world contacted through lawyers and financial advisers. Of those surveyed, around 270 were the super rich (referred to as the “elite affluent” in the survey) who had a net worth of $10-million or more (and often a great deal more). The remainder were their relatively poor cousins, the “mass affluent,” whose net worth was a paltry $1-million to $9.9-million.

More than 60 per cent of the elite affluent said they will be travelling by private jet during the holiday season – which presumably means their luggage won’t get lost – and 28 per cent will use the jet for private shopping.

More than a third will be giving “jet cards” as gifts to their family and friends (perhaps some of those poor souls scraping by on less than $10-million). The cards start at $40,000 for 10 hours of flight time.

Oh, what the heck, we’ll take two. It’s Christmas, after all.

“Clearly, the super rich are not impacted by the subprime crisis that has other sectors of the economy nervous this holiday season,” Douglas Gollan, president and editor-in-chief of Elite Traveler, said in a statement.

Mr. Gollan noted, “The super rich segment will be the most important source of business for providers of luxury goods and services as the ‘mass affluent’ trade down and con-serve. … The private-jet set is absolutely going about their spending in a business-as-usual way and … as our survey shows, spending considerably more.”

But considerably more on what? Well, on average, the super rich will spend $152,400 a person on jewellery this year (up 67 per cent from 2006) and $39,300 on electronics (up 53 per cent).

Further expenditures will include $487,900 on yacht charters (up 19 per cent), $86,200 on villa rentals (up 23 per cent), and $31,100 on wines and spirits for entertaining (up 39 per cent).

But, it being Christmas, they’ll also be giving $116,300 to charity (up 23 per cent) and spending $10,200 on gifts and services for their pets.

The so-called mass affluent, meanwhile, plan to be far more careful with their cash, spending $995 on their pets, $4,900 on jewellery, $3,300 on electronics and exactly nothing on yacht charters.

Not surprisingly, zero per cent of the super rich said that rising gas prices would affect their holiday travel plans.

Every holiday is a festival of obsessive-compulsive behavior, but none more so than Christmas. In America, single minded repetition is a big part of what makes the yuletide bright. Think of all the things you’ve done over and over and, yes, over again: the tree decorating, houselight stringing, card mailing, gift buying, stupid Santa hat wearing. And of course the ritual family trip to see a holiday show everybody’s seen every year since anybody can remember.

For many, that show is “A Christmas Carol.”

Though it may not be impossible to gauge how many productions of “A Christmas Carol” will be performed around the nation this season, it’s a bigger job than I’d care to undertake.

A quick survey suggests stagings, professional or amateur, blanketing the states like Christmas lights in Sauganash. It will be given lavishly this year at places such as Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and danced by high school students in Leelanau County, Mich. Doolee.com, the theatrical database, lists no fewer than 82 English-language stage adaptations by everyone from the late drag artist Charles Ludlam to Patrick Stewart and Israel Horowitz.

This popularity is nothing new. Charles Dickens’ tale of an embittered moneylender named Ebenezer Scrooge was a hit from the start. Originally a novella—written, illustrated, and rushed into print over the course of a few weeks to satisfy a debt—it famously sold out its first press run of 6,000 copies (at five shillings apiece) in the days between Dec. 17 and 25, 1843.

Dickens himself devised an adaptation for public readings that helped make him, as Dickens scholar Philip Allingham has put it, the Victorian era’s “Ringo Starr and Leonardo DiCaprio and Margaret Atwood all wrapped up in one.”

Scrooge’s spirit-guided rediscovery of his humanity (like the matriarch in George Barker’s classic wartime sonnet, he moves “from mourning into morning”) has been in heavy demand and multiple media ever since. The first film version appeared in 1908; the many televised tellings include “A Flintstone Christmas Carol,” from 1994; and it’s reported that Jim Carrey will voice Ebenezer (along with the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future) in an animated rendition scheduled for 2009.

It’s fitting that “A Christmas Carol” should have become the focus of so much of our holiday OCD, since it’s often cited as one of the major reasons we observe our modern Noels the way we do. The story is widely seen as a watershed in that it took the Bethlehem, if not the Christ, out of Christmas—relocating it to snowy Victorian London; transferring its focus from church ceremony to home celebration, from prayer to good deeds, and from the religious miracle of a divine baby’s birth to the secular one of a self-pitying old man’s rebirth. Naturally we obsess on it every Christmas—for many of us by now, it is Christmas.

You can see it performed this year (and, no doubt, next) in a variety of incarnations, including the spiffed up, the pared down, the jived out,

Residents didn’t want to have themselves a merry little Christmas tree. They wanted a big one.

When city officials planted a 7-foot-tall Christmas tree next to a 20-foot-tall menorah in the plaza in front of City Hall, some residents barked. They telephoned City Hall, wrote letters and testified at a public hearing that the tiny tree in the shadow of the huge Hanukkah symbol was an insult to Christians.

“What’s up with the giant menorah and the Charlie Brown Christmas tree?” resident Rick Hoffman asked.

City Manager Edwin Eaton said he had looked far and wide — all the way to Canada — for a bigger tree but couldn’t find one.

“This year is going to be kind of a ‘bah, humbug,’ Christmas,” Eaton had said.

But on Wednesday the city of about 35,000 residents 25 miles southeast of midtown Manhattan found a tree to match the 20-foot menorah: a 20-foot blue spruce.

The old tree, a Bacheri spruce, was pruned of its lights, dug up, and taken to a mall.

A lighting ceremony for the new tree is scheduled for Friday.

For one Wichita Falls nonprofit, the best gifts at Christmas come with a “To” but not a “From.”

“We’re blessed with a lot of donations this time of year,” said Becky Browning, marketing director of the Wichita Falls Faith Mission, “but the anonymous ones show the true spirit of what Christ’s love is for all of us.”

Browning found herself Tuesday sorting through a bunch of brand-new toys that had been dropped off at the mission just an hour before – from someone who didn’t leave his name.

“That’s the Christmas spirit, something that came out of the goodness of his heart,” she said. “Not all donations are out of the goodness of someone’s heart. But an anonymous seems to always be.”

The toys came in response to the nonprofit’s plea for Christmas gifts for the younger Faith Mission clients, homeless children who would otherwise not receive a present this year. Several children have been “adopted,” Browning said, but 58 names remained on the list Tuesday.

If those children aren’t adopted, “what we’ll do is do the best that we can.”

She relies not only on the generosity of individuals, but Browning will receive donations from several groups after the adoption period is over, calling to ask if they can be of any help.

“Our phone has been ringing off the hook,” she said.

On the hook, a bunch of new coats someone dropped off earlier in the season, leaving no contact information, no way for Browning to personally thank the donor. That doesn’t lessen her appreciation – quite the opposite.

Such serendipitous donations do a heart good.

“Absolutely,” she said, “especially when you see that their generosity may have come out of some extreme circumstance they’ve experienced and now they want to ‘pay it forward,’ like the movie, give back because someone gave to them.”

The smallest gift can also warm a heart.

While nonprofits survive on collectively large donations, they realize the bulk of the contributions will be hundreds of “little” ones.

“Bigger is not always better,” said Tricia Golding, marketing coordinator for Hospice of Wichita Falls. “Some of the most wonderful things that happen to us here at Hospice are when people give just $10,” the donation price for a “bulb” on the annual Tree of Light.

“There are those individuals who give $10, and you know they’re doing without something else, just to be able to give. Hospice made such a difference in their lives.”

And as the parable teaches us, “That $10 for them might be like someone else giving $10,000,” Golding said. “The blessing is in the giving.”

Sheila Catron, executive director of the Children’s Aid Society, loves to see new items donated to her youth shelter. However, she won’t turn away gently used items.

“We get a bunch of used things this time of year when people clean out their closets,” said Catron, who was sorting through a box of donations Tuesday. “So it’s always a big help to us to get anything.”

But those she serves – homeless, abandoned, abused and/or runaway children between the ages of 18 months and 17 years – are thrilled to get something new.

On Thursday, the children will be treated to a coat party, where each will get a new coat.

“And we want you to keep the tags on them,” she said. “They love to get things with tags, because that shows it’s just for them.”

Often arriving at the shelter with little more than the clothes on their backs, the children are quickly supplied with necessities and a few items to make their lives as “normal” as possible.

For the younger children, that’s called a “lovey,” a teddy bear or blanket to call their own. For the older ones, that may be a radio for their room, some gadget they see the “normal” children have.

“They all go to public school here,” said Catron, who sheltered some 700 children over the past year, nearly 300 new to the system. “It’s not like they live away from everyone else and can’t see what other children have.”

One thing on Catron’s own Christmas wish list is a new van.

“That would be such a blessing,” she said. “We have so many children that we can’t transport them all at the same time. We have to take several trips to get them to one place. A new van would keep the children together, and we wouldn’t always be late for things.”

Nonprofits that center their biggest fundraising campaigns around the holidays capitalize on the spirit of giving, when individuals give out of the goodness of their hearts to those they may never meet.

“Our biggest donation time is Christmas, with the bulk of our contributions during the month of December,” said Catron. “That really does make our year, because we are able to live off those donations long after Christmas.”

Doris Ingram looks forward to it every year.

So do her children.

“It’s a really Merry Christmas tradition for the children,” said the director of the Ben Donnell day-care facility of Child Care Inc.

Twenty of the day-care’s toddler-aged children were visited Tuesday by none other than Santa Claus himself.

But this wasn’t your granddad’s Santa Claus; this was his Dutch representative, Sinterklaas, who came to the day care with members of the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training program Dutch detachment.

“This is our way of saying we are part of your community,” said Lt. Col. Willem Van Gaalen, commander of the Dutch detachment at Sheppard Air Force Base.

Gaalen said that in the Netherlands, Saint Nicholas’ Eve is the chief occasion for gift-giving, much like Christmas morning in the United States.

“We call him Sinterklaas, which is really close to Santa Claus,” said Van Gaalen. “The message is the same.”

The Saint Nicholas’ Eve holiday takes place Dec. 5, and usually includes a visit by Sinterklaas who arrives on a white horse with his gold staff in one hand and his big book of names on the other, bringing gifts and holiday cheer to all the children.

Yani Van Santen, a member of the Dutch detachment, said that the age-old tradition behind the visit by Sinterklaas is based on a special birthday celebration.

“The old story is that Santa Claus was bishop and on his birthday he gave presents instead of receiving,” Van Santen said.

And much like the traditional Santa Claus, the children flocked to the white-bearded fellow with the gifts.

“They look forward to this every year,” said Ingram, as a young boy ran up to Sinterklaas to receive his present.

“This present is especially for you,” Sinterklaas said as he shook the boy’s hand.

Ingram pointed out the good relationship that exists between the daycare and the Dutch detachment.

“We give them all the names of the children and they bring the gifts,” she said. “We don’t ask for anything in particular.”

Through the involvement of the Dutch detachment at Sheppard, Sinterklaas has visited the Ben Donnell day care for more than 25 years, bringing gifts and holiday cheer to countless families.

“We have a good relationship with the Ben Donnell day care and its families,” Van Gaalen said. “All the families like it.”

But in the end it is all about the children to Van Gaalen.

“It’s great to see the kid’s faces happy,” he said.

IT’S the season to splurge. Whichever way you look at it, the Christmas shopping season is the retailer’s dream. Australians last year spent a record $23.7 billion in December alone, according to the Cashcard Retail Activity Index, while a Galaxy report earlier this year attributed some $9.8 billion of this directly to Christmas gifts.

Indeed, if Australian shoppers follow the example of last year, some 200 million items will be purchased to be passed on as gifts this Christmas season.

Sure, socks, underwear, sweets and booze will account for a fair whack of this, but electronics goods are also likely to be a popular gift item under Christmas trees this December 25.

Most of these will no doubt be compact, personal gadgets: cameras, phones and music players. Digital cameras, for example, have already enjoyed a sales renaissance in Australia after a slump last year recording a 9 per cent increase in sales this year.

Similarly, sales of portable music players have had a heady few years, and because such players have become cheaper, have stacked in more memory and become more feature-rich, sales are expected to remain strong.

In 2004, market tracker GfK says, the consumer electronics market grew by some $300 million, and in 2005 by a further $400 million. Last year it got close to the $1.6 billion mark in Australia, tracking at close to a 22 per cent increase over Christmas.

All that money wasn’t spent on small personal goods. Plasma and LCD screens, for example, last year started to become a popular luxury Christmas purchase. The trend is expected to continue as such screens get cheaper, along with peripheral equipment such as players, media centre technology and content to go with them.

High-definition players and consoles are now close to the retail sweet spot of $600-$700, putting them within reach of those who want to make the most of their high-definition screens.

This year also marks the first Christmas when all the major games makers will have new-generation equipment.

Nearly all games equipment makers have recently cut the prices of their consoles to make their offerings more affordable.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, for example, which also doubles as a standalone Blu-ray player, can be bought for $699. Its initial $999 price tag deterred casual buyers. Microsoft, which estimates that up to 45 per cent of its games business is done over Christmas, has in turn cut the entry price on its Xbox 360 console to $399, putting it on even terms with Nintendo’s Wii console.

Another trend of the past few years is the growth of online shopping. With shopping centres becoming ever more crowded as November gives way to the December crushes, it seems more and more Australians are opting to shop from the comfort of their home offices or work desks.

Internet analyst Hitwise, for example, has already shown growth over the past month in Australian internet traffic using online merchants.

For the week ending November 24, websites in the shopping and classifieds category made up 6.34 per cent of web traffic, slightly more than the 6.17 per cent for the same time last year.

Online auction website eBay Australia dominates the sector, with 28.74 per cent market share, followed by eBay’s US website, Amazon.com, Trading Post Online and Emailcash Australia.

Other websites attracting attention include DealsDirect, oo.com. au and Peters of Kensington.

Hitwise says some of the most popular search terms have been “iPod Touch” and “Halo 3″, indicating where a lot of this year’s gift planning is turning.

The growth in online shopping may be attributed to some people turning away from traditional shopping for gifts.

A recent Galaxy poll commissioned by eBay Australia reveals that 93 per cent of respondents find Christmas shopping stressful.

Reasons for their stress include crowds, long queues, parking hassles and spending too much.

“It’s one of the main reasons why people are shopping online,” eBay Australia spokeswoman Sian Kennedy says. “There’s also the fact that you can go to David Jones and buy what someone else is going to buy – it’s not something unique. The good thing about eBay is that we’ve got lots of interesting things, like collectables, that people really want.”

There has been a big increase in activity, both buying and selling, leading up to Christmas, Kennedy says, and she expects a second wave to begin on Boxing Day.

“We always have hundreds of people logging on to the site trying to sell unwanted gifts that they’re never going to use.”

A Swedish head teacher has decided to take Santa Claus out of Christmas this year, at least for in-school festivities.

“Father Christmas is, after all, based on the Christian St. Nicholas,” Peter Norlin told Blekinge Lans Tidning.

Norlin said all schools in the Brakne-Hoby area in southern Sweden should also avoid overtly Christian services. He plans to preside over his school’s celebration instead of bringing in a Christian minister and to ban any songs featuring Santa Claus.

He cites National Agency for Education guidelines on avoiding favoring any religion in school and making sure children of other faiths are not made uncomfortable. But the agency does not go as far as he does.

“As long as the celebrations focus on the ceremonial aspects, traditions and togetherness, it is up to individual schools to decide what songs they want to sing,” Maria Lilja, a lawyer for the agency, said.

In biblical Bethlehem, Santa makes his rounds in cool shades.

The dark sunglasses are a Palestinian addition to Santa’s traditional garb of red suit and black boots, meant to ensure that children in the tiny, tight-knit Christian community in Jesus’ traditional birthplace don’t recognize the man bringing them presents.

Each year, volunteer Santas fan out across Bethlehem and the nearby West Bank Christian communities of Beit Jalla and Beit Sahour to deliver presents to the homes of children in the community. And for a change after years of conflict, there is a spirit of optimism, with tourism boosted by Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts.

One of this season’s Santas is Khaled Rishmawi, 21, a Greek Orthodox Christian. He said he volunteered “to give back the joy Santa gave me as a child.”

“Every child must feel the joy of Christmas because they don’t have much joy. Their joy is when Santa Claus brings them a present,” he said.

Rishmawi is delivering about 50 presents purchased at Yasmina’s Gift Shop in Beit Sahour, owned by a distant relative, Hana Rishmawi. Popular items include Lego blocks, remote-controlled cars for boys and dolls for girls.

For the shopowner, these are good times. Tourism was ravaged by seven years of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians. But this year, the number of visitors is up following last week’s pledge to resume of peace talks.

In Rishmawi’s shop, families spend up to $50 (€34) on each gift, even if they have to pay in installments.

He said his business grows a little every year, a small miracle considering that Christians are a diminishing minority — just 2 percent of the West Bank’s 2.4 million residents. Economic hardship — the result of years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and growing Muslim fervor have fueled the Christian exodus.

In October, 40,000 tourists entered Bethlehem, the highest number in years, in buses passing through a checkpoint gate in the separation barrier. Although tourists don’t stay long — an average of two hours — it’s still one of Bethlehem’s better years since the second Palestinian uprising began in 2000.

“If the politics goes to ruin, tourism goes to ruin,” said George Juha, a local restaurant owner.

This year’s mini-boom has given Hana Rishmawi a dose of holiday cheer, but it also has been a source of stress. For the past 20 years, he dispatched about six Santas to deliver presents to more than 100 children. He said the operation has become so complicated that he’s thinking of scaling back.

Rain wets the presents — and it always seems to rain on Christmas, residents say. It also muddies the roads and causes aging cars to get stuck or break down. Once they reach the children’s houses, Santas are often shooed away because “the children are asleep, can you come back later?”

“It’s a headache,” he sighs.

A tired Hana Rishmawi has already told parents that they can choose between a home-delivered present, or his preference: picking up the gift from a hall decked-out with Christmas decorations, where his son will play cheery music, and a Santa will be on hand to take photos with the kids.

While the red-suited Santa is largely a Western custom, it has become one of the most beloved Christian traditions in the West Bank.

Bernard Sabella, a 62-year-old social activist, said when he was a child, he’d wake up to candied nuts, chocolates and balloons on Christmas.

“When we’d ask where the presents came from, our parents said Baba Noel, but we never saw him,” Sabella said, referring to Santa by his Arabic name. Father Marwan Deidis, 33, had a visit from Santa throughout his childhood Christmases.

Most of Rishmawi’s Santas have been young male relatives, though there have been a few women and Muslims in the bunch.

Santas follow strict rules: They’re expected to ring a hand-held bell, call the children’s names, take a photo, and — occasionally — remove the fake beard and dark sunglasses to reassure teary children that there’s nothing to fear.

The government of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad says it will spend $100,000 (€68,000) decorating Bethlehem and nearby villages — double what rival Hamas spent on the town when it was in power last year.

The prime minister also promised a $1,200 (€820) cash bonus to broke shopkeepers to keep their stores open for the next six months, starting with Christmas season. The arrangement will begin in Bethlehem, and spread to other West Bank towns, said Khuloud Deibas, the tourism minister.

A 70-year-old man working as Santa Claus says he was sacked from a Cairns department store for saying “ho, ho, ho” and singing Christmas carols.

In a case of political correctness seemingly gone mad, retired entertainer John Oakes says he was fired from his job at Myer for his rendition of Santa’s famous laugh.

His employer, Westaff, last month sparked national outrage when it ordered its Santas to say “ha, ha, ha” instead of “ho, ho, ho” because it could be derogatory to women.

The streets have names like Candy Cane Lane, Christmas Boulevard and Mistletoe Drive.

Bigger-than-life statues of Old Saint Nick and red buildings with green roofs are everywhere.

And the Christmas tree in the lobby at Santa’s Lodge hotel is never taken down.

Welcome to Santa Claus, Ind.

There’s the Silent Night Café, Lake Rudolph Campground and RV Resort, Frosty’s Fun Center Miniature Golf and Arcade and Santa’s Medical Center.

And Crystal Buehler, general curator at the Santa Claus Museum, plays Christmas music year-round.

Every day is Christmas Day in this Southern Indiana burg of 2,200 – a number that has more than doubled since 1990.

“The town oozes holiday spirit,” describes Melissa Miller, executive director of the Spencer County Visitors Bureau. “There are no grinches here.”

Especially now, when residents and businesses put on their holiday best. On Saturday and Sunday , the village stages its annual “Christmas in Santa Claus Festival,” highlighted by Santa’s horse-drawn sleigh ride and parade and a free, 15-mile auto tour through the 12 holiday-themed and lighted neighborhoods of Christmas Lake Village, where many of the town’s residents live.

Settled more than 150 years ago by German immigrants the settlement originally was known as Santa Fe (spelled Santa Fee). But when the town of about 50 applied for a post office in 1856, it had to change its name because there already was a Santa Fe, northeast of Kokomo.

Now, just how the townsfolk settled on the name of Santa Claus has been lost to legend. But the tale Buehler prefers to recite is the one about the town meeting to choose a new name on Christmas Eve in a one-room log church. Allegedly, a brisk winter’s wind blew the door open, and the sound of sleigh bells was heard in the distance. An excited little girl shouted, “It’s Santa Claus!”

Santa Claus, Ind.? Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Summit over.

Now at its fourth location at the north end of the Kringle Place mall, the world’s only post office bearing the name of Santa Claus receives more than a half-million pieces of mail a year – about 10,000 of them from children addressed to Santa and the rest from adults wanting the Santa Claus, Ind., postmark on their Christmas cards. Every year since postmaster general James Martin did it in 1914, volunteers (they call themselves Santa’s elves) have sent hand-written replies from Santa to the children.

According to postmaster Marina Balbach, the post office usually gets about 13,000 pieces a month.”We do more than that each day during the Christmas season,” she said.

The post-office’s claim to fame has not been without controversy. In 1931, U.S. postmaster Walter F. Brown attempted to force the town to give up its name to ease the load of the mail the post office received around Christmas. But with the support of Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley, who sent Brown a four-foot wide postcard carrying the Santa Claus post office cancellation, and the Indianapolis News, which asked its readers to send letters of protest to the paper, Santa Claus was saved.

Newspaper clippings chronicling the controversy, plus photos, memorabilia and letters to Santa dating back to the 1930s, fill the Santa Claus Museum, two doors down from the post office. Exhibits in five rooms detail the history of the town and its post office and the evolution of Santa Claus Land to today’s award-winning Holiday World, which draws a million customers a year. There’s a table for children to use to write their letters to Santa.

Visitors approaching the town from the north (Indiana 162 off I-64) will first notice the massive Holiday World complex and its famous wooden coasters dominating the skyline to the west.

Take a right at the junction of Ind. 162 and 245 to follow Christmas Boulevard into town. Veer slightly to the left on 245 and travel a one-tenth mile to the town’s original 22-foot-high Santa statue, dedicated “to the children of the world” in 1935.

The statue sits on a base in the shape of a star, symbolic of the star of Bethlehem. The 40-ton statue is faded and crumbling. A glossy fiberglass replica stands in front of the new Santa Claus Town Hall.

Continue south on Ind. 245 for about a half mile past the old statue to the site of the original downtown Santa Claus, where Santa’s Candy Castle is located. The original Candy Castle, dedicated on Dec. 22, 1935, was one of several buildings in Santa Claus Town, purported to be the nation’s first theme park. Kevin Klosowski restored and re-opened the candy shop and its museum in 2005. The candy shop claims to have the world’s largest selection of candy canes.

The 35-year-old entrepreneur says he “dropped out of corporate America in Chicago” to rebuild and preserve Santa Claus Town, with plans to recreate the Toy Village and Santa’s Workshop for a “whole new generation.”

“I love it here,” said Klosowski. “It’s quiet. It’s safe. It’s friendly. I have three kids 7, 5 and 2 and I have a choice of two four-star schools they can go to. I love the family values here.”

No grinches either.

When Millville bought new holiday decorations for its downtown, it opted for lighted snowflakes to hang on streetlamps along High Street.

Mayor James Quinn said it was a safe decision, as the snowflakes were a generic, secular decoration that wouldn’t offend anyone who might otherwise raise a legal stink over the city opting for something related to the season’s religious holidays.

But on two corners, the streetlamps have lighted Santas, which are designed to welcome people to the High Street business district. Those seemingly harmless displays have Quinn worried.

“That may be offensive,” he said.

Quinn isn’t alone in worrying about the ramifications of how municipalities decorate for the holidays: The New Jersey State League of Municipalities is warning local governments that the wrong decision can get them into legal trouble.

Citing a number of lawsuits in New Jersey and other states filed by people or organizations opposed to municipalities using any kind of religious decorations for the holidays, league officials say local officials should get a legal opinion if there’s any doubt about what they intend to display on public property.

The league is providing some guidelines, but there’s a still a lot of potential problems because “the law remains unsettled in this area,” according to league Executive Director William Dressel.

“Municipal holiday displays that are limited to more secular images, like Santa Claus and Christmas trees, are likely to survive constitutional scrutiny,” he said. “However, it is still unclear under what circumstances more religious symbols, like creches, menorahs, or in related cases, copies of the Ten Commandments, may be displayed by a municipality or on municipal property. It is hard to formulate any set of rules to ensure that a given display is constitutionally permissible if it has any religious symbols in it.”

The fear of a lawsuit has municipalities going more generic and less extravagant on holiday decorations during the season when Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa all converge. Some organizations and people believe decorations linked with those events are offensive and don’t belong on public property.

In the past decade, New Jersey courts have ruled on several lawsuits stemming from how municipalities decorated for the holidays. League officials say the outcome of those cases varied and were based on everything from what message the decorations were intended to give to the court determining whether the plaintiffs had enough exposure to the display to be truly offended.

Municipal decorations are now more generic. Gone are years when creches, or Nativity scenes, were set out in front of Wildwood’s municipal building, and signs saying “Merry Christmas” were common outside of municipal buildings.

Ocean City Director of Community Services Mike Dattilo said the resort’s decorations are now very broad: There are white lights on streetlamps and a tree in front of City Hall. A giant card on the front lawn of the municipal building is designed for “the season in general.”

Egg Harbor Township workers Monday put a wreath on the doors of the municipal building. That will be joined by a lighted tree.

Township Administrator Peter Miller said the decorations are part of decision by township officials to keep the display “seasonal and not religious.”

“Elected officials didn’t feel strong about having a religious theme,” he said.

Linwood will decorate City Hall as it has for the past several years: An electronic Santa Claus will waves to passers-by. There will also be a dreidel.

Linwood Public Works Superintendent Hank Kolakowski said the city feels safe in using the Santa Claus and dreidel decoration because nobody has complained about them.

“Everybody seems to be pleased,” he said.

League officials acknowledge that not everyone will be pleased, and some people will pressure local governments to include religious themes on the argument that not doing them violates free speech provisions of the First Amendment.

Giving in to that argument could be dangerous, league officials argue.

“There is a real danger to the municipality accepting that argument, since that would effectively render the area where the holiday display is placed a public forum,” Dressel said.

“Once that occurs, it will be extremely difficult to prevent other displays that individuals or groups wish to see at that location in order to convey their particular message. That could include groups or individuals who want to put up signs for political candidates, advocate a particular political position or advocate on any side of such controversial issues as abortion, racial diversity, war and peace, etc.”

It would take the magic of Christmas to stay warm outside in the cold we saw this weekend. Hundreds of people managed to, waiting in line to board a Green Mountain Railroad train that’s been renamed. Conductor Brian McGregor chuckles, “It’s ‘The Polar Express!’”

The Polar Express is a beloved Christmas book for children, and now a movie, too. In the story, a little boy’s love for Christmas is re-kindled.

Now, communities bring the tale to life with celebrations. In Lyndonville, a train was bound for “the North Pole,” just a couple of minutes from the Freighthouse store and restaurant. All it took was a ticket and and some more holiday magic.

The Freighthouse sold 1,200 tickets for this weekend’s Polar Express rides, which included readings of the book, carols, and small presents from Santa and Mrs. Claus. The business will donate the proceeds to community groups.

When asked what he was most looking forward to about his ride on “The Polar Express,” Mason Castle beamed, “Excitement!”

Rylie Nichols was excited to ask Santa for a camouflage bb gun. She promised she was nice this year, and not at all naughty.

“The Polar Express” departs from several communities across our region, including from Burlington December 15th and 16th. That event is a benefit for the Vermont Children’s Trust Foundation.

Kids bring books to that Burlington event, where they’ll benefit the Children’s Trust Foundation’s literacy programs and the group’s abuse prevention efforts.

All is well for Christmas in the new Gilded Age.

“It’s very, very strong in my market,” said Doug Turner, president of Millionaire’s Concierge, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based business that provides fantasy trips, exclusive vacations and five-star gifts for big spenders around the globe.

“My business is doing better than it ever has,” said Mr. Turner, whose business was dubbed by Oprah Winfrey as a personal “yellow pages for the rich and famous.” ” I’m dealing with a sea of money here with plenty of people who have plenty of cash and have nothing to do but spend it.”

This week, Mr. Turner sold a $200,000 fantasy trip for five to the Super Bowl, complete with private jet travel, first-class accommodations and VIP access to the event and its exclusive, celebrity-studded game parties. He also sold tickets for a walk-on role on the popular television show “Desperate Housewives,” as well as a drive in a Formula One race car and several rides in a fighter jet.

“There is no bad economy in my world,” Mr. Turner said, explaining that he is limited only by a client’s imagination and wallet. “It’s a great Christmas. The rich are getting richer and everything is just more, more, more.”

Upscale retailer Neiman Marcus reports similar interest in over-the-top gifts. For the past 81 years, the company has published the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, a catalog of pricey specialty gifts and experiences to satisfy the most particular of buyers. The company once offered a private concert with Elton John for $1.5 million, which was snapped up by a bride looking for entertainment for her wedding reception.

Already this year, Neiman’s exclusive $110,000 his-and-her’s chocolate portrait — done in Bosco syrup by international artist Vik Muniz — has sold “to a man looking for a unique gift for his mother,” said Ginger Reeder, vice president for corporate communications at the Neiman Marcus Group.

Also sold out, a full month before Christmas, are 50 limited-edition Lexus IS F sedans. At $68,000 each, the gift includes a half-day of driver training at the Skip Barber Racing School.

In the retail trade they call it “Black Saturday”.

It is the first Saturday in December; many consumers have just got their final salary of the year and they quickly realise they’ll have to blow a sizeable chunk on Christmas presents.

And the seasonal stress sets in.

Oxford Street, teeming with shoppers at this time of year, is surely a place to be avoided if you find it all a bit overwhelming?

Everyone else seems to be ambling along while you are on a frenzied mission to get your presents and get home as soon as you can.

But the mood has been lifted here this Saturday by the absence of traffic – meaning those shoppers have more room to continue at their snail’s pace.

Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street are closed to cars and buses for one day only.

At Oxford Circus, quite a few bemused shoppers congregate at the traffic lights, only to realise they don’t have to wait to cross the street.

The tide of shoppers is free-flowing, leaving the pavements a lot less clogged up than usual.

This was a pleasant surprise for Anthony, a British businessman who lives in Iceland.

“I’ve been saying for years they should make this area permanently pedestrianised,” he says. “I usually avoid coming into London at this time of year and do my shopping in the US.”

Street entertainment, free drinks and gifts and plenty of people giving out information do seem to be making for a more civilised shopping trip.

But most people say they were unaware of the pedestrianisation, so they would have come anyway.

Amanda and her mother Trish emerge from a very crowded Top Shop on Oxford Circus laden with bags. Surely they must have got a free gift for their trouble?

“I did get one, though I had to spend over £100 to get it,” says Amanda.

She seems fairly pleased with her freebie – blue woolly mittens – and admits she might be thrifty enough to parcel them up as a Christmas present for somebody.

“But I spent £48 in there and I didn’t get a free gift,” says Trish, “so I’m going to go back in there and slap somebody! No, I’m joking!”

The store’s style adviser manager, Tanya Sharpless, says every customer should get a free gift as staff are handing them out in the queues.

The store does seem well geared up for the volume of people, with no shortage of staff around, and chocolates and water on hand in case they feel dehydrated.

As for trade, Tanya says there has been “a higher footfall in the store today”. More people through the doors, in other words.

“We try to make the experience as nice and as positive for them as possible,” she says.

“It’s good to offer customers one day at this time of year when everything is about them.

“People who come to London know it’s the busiest time of year, but they do seem to be having fun today and making the most of their pay packet.”

Beth Hughes, who is 15 and from Northampton, is grabbing a drink between purchases. She says she is enjoying her first shopping trip to London.

“I thought the crowds would be a lot worse,” she grins. “And I did get a free drink.”

Jace Tyrrell, from the organisers New West End Company, which represents West End retailers, says businesses and consumers seemed to welcome the event. “The idea is to treat people like VIPs – and the crowds are coming in.”

He says they are expecting shoppers to spend over £100m on this day alone.

He countered suggestions that it would cause traffic chaos outside the zone.

“This is the third year we’ve done it, and we work with Transport for London and warn taxi drivers to make sure there are no major transport issues as a result.”

Every year at this time for the past 20 years or so, the Sikeston Public Library staff get into the spirit of the season by offering Fine Free Week.

From now through Dec. 15, for every overdue library item returned in usable condition, patrons can bring in a new toy or nonperishable food item, and the fine will be forgiven.

According to Sue Tangeman, library director, this is a great opportunity for patrons with overdue materials to take advantage of Fine Free Week and help out those less fortunate than themselves at the same time.

“It is a win-win situation for everyone. Some of our regular library users take this opportunity to drop off items to contribute to the community,” Tangeman said.

The amount of donations during Fine Free Week varies from one year to the next, Tangeman said. However, she estimated between 75 an 100 items are collected each year.

A lot of people who respond have something barely overdue and just forgot to bring it back, Tangeman said.

“If you have five things overdue for two years, and you bring in five cans of corn, it puts you in good graces with the library,” Tangemen said.

Fines stop at the item’s cost, which is variable, Tangeman said.

Tangeman said people in the community know to look for the event each year. The library staff also also sends out letters to people who have items overdue, some as long as a year.

“It also seems like once people see the sign (about Fine Free Week), that will call attention to others,” Tangeman said.

The items and overdue materials should be brought into the library so the right patron can be credited, Tangeman said. The toys and food items collected will be used locally.

Even if they don’t have overdue books, some people also use the library as a drop-off point to make donations, Tangeman said.

“It’s a unique way for everyone to benefit,” Tangeman said. “The library gets the items back. The patrons are cleared of their fines, and it helps families in the community.”

It’s a holiday tradition — the annual photo with Santa, a professionally made memento of the season.

In fact, the tradition started in Puget Sound.

It was in 1943 that Art French, a Seattle sports photographer with an office across from the Fredrick and Nelson’s department store, decided it was a good idea to capture the meeting of Santa Claus on film. French’s company, Arthur and Associates, claims to have launched the longest running Christmas tradition in the country.

In 1992, after the closing of Fredrick and Nelson’s, the company began sending out Santas to malls across the Puget Sound region, including the The Commons mall in Federal Way.

Not just anyone can be Santa’s photographic stand-in, though. It takes a special breed and special training.

“We run a Santa University,” said “head elf” Hillard Viydo. “We remind them of the names of the reindeer, to never promise anything but to never say no, and (to have) good listening skills. For the individual who portrays the character, it’s a real passion.”

Many of the Kris Kringle impersonators are retired teachers, like Bill Fischer and Einer Thomsen, or Santa Bill and Santa Einer as they are referred to, respectively.

Santa Bill has been working at The Commons mall for 15 seasons as Santa after a friend at Arthur and Associates referred him.

Over the years, Santa Bill has picked up a few tricks for dealing with those children who are less than enthused about their Santa encounter. A soft voice and eye contact usually works for him.

“I’m a people person, a retired teacher, so I’ve been around kids my whole life,” Santa Bill said. “I like the age group, seeing their eyes light up, watch them think and come up with what’s really important. I really enjoy seeing the happiness of the children and the parents.”

Of course there are those occasional kids who act up and pull Santa’s beard. Santa Bill, like almost all of Arthur and Associates’ Santas, doesn’t use a theatrical beard anymore.

This was not a company-ordered change. During the mid-1990s, the Santas began this change on their own, bypassing the professionally-coiffured yak hair beards that the company offered for their own natural beards.

Santa Bill starts growing his beard out in August to get the full beard by the holiday season.

Santa Einer starts growing his beard just a bit earlier, in July, and has been a Santa for 14 years, starting after his retirement from teaching.

“I’ve learned to use a nice quiet voice for the little ones that don’t want to talk to you,” Santa Einer said. “I’ll lean down and talk to them and in a couple of minutes, I’ve got them in my lap.”

A relative Santa newbie, Oscar Peterson is only in his second year at Arthur and Associates. He has been doing Santa jobs for six or seven years, starting after his wife gave him a Santa Claus suit for his birthday, Dec. 22.

“It’s delightful to talk to the little kids and parents,” Santa Oscar said. “Even some big kids come by, those in their 20s, and that’s kinda neat.”

Santa Oscar admits there are just some kids who aren’t going to like seeing Santa up close and personal.

“There are those that are crying and nothing is going to stop them so sometimes you try bringing them back several times and that usually works,” Santa Oscar said. “Usually there are problems with kids 15 months to 3 years.”

Santa Oscar’s work often follows him home though.

“I have to avoid wearing red during September through November,” Santa Oscar said, who lets his natural inch-long beard start growing out in July. “Once though, I was in a museum in Kentucky and one little kid kept coming over. I didn’t even have a full beard at the time.”

For many families, the Santa photo is a family tradition, one that doesn’t change with the age of the kids. Oftentimes when college kids come home, mom will send them to get their picture taken with Santa, Santa Bill said. Or whole families will often come on Christmas Eve — large families of 15-20 — and get one big photo taken.

And for those kids who cry, these Santas know just the trick.

A British politician is to raise the issue, of what he calls, “rising Christianophobia” in “some” local communities, in a parliamentary debate tomorrow.

Mark Pritchard has secured a 90 minute Westminster Hall debate in which politicians of all parties are expected to debate the issue.

Mr Pritchard said, “The roots of Christianity in Britain go back to the first century. Yet today there appears to be a reluctance by some public bodies and institutions to recognise our nation’s Christian heritage and history.”

He added, ” My debate will seek to encourage greater community cohesion and inter-faith understanding by recognising the many benefits the Christian faith has brought to Britain, benefits to science, the arts, music, architecture, philosophy, and philanthropy, down the centuries. Such benefits are to be celebrated not scorned or ridiculed”.

Mr Pritchard said that he would “seek to slay the fashionable dragon of political correctness” which was “assaulting” the nation’s Christmas traditions.

The holiday season is here, so it’s time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition. Australia is a gazillion time-zones ahead of the United States — it may even be Boxing Day there already — so they got in first this year with a truly fantastic headline: “Santas warned ‘ho ho ho’ offensive to women.”

Really. As the story continued: “Sydney’s Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say ‘ha ha ha’ instead, the Daily Telegraph reported. One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use ‘ho ho ho’ because it could frighten children and was too close to a ‘ho,’ U.S. slang term for prostitute.”

If I were a female resident of Sydney, I think I would be more offended by the assumption Australian women and U.S. prostitutes are that easily confused. As the old gangsta-rap vaudeville routine used to go: “Who was that ho I saw you with last night?” “That was no ho, that was my bitch.”

But the point is the right not to be offended is now the most sacred right in the world. The right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, all are as nothing compared to the universal right to freedom from offense. It’s surely only a matter of time before “sensitivity training” is matched by equally rigorous “inoffensiveness training” courses.

A musician friend of mine once took a gig at an elevator-music session, and, after an hour or two of playing insipid orchestral arrangements of “Moon River” and “Windmills Of Your Mind,” some of the lads’ attention would start to wander and they would toot their horns a little too boisterously, and the conductor would stop and admonish them to bland things down a bit. In a world in which everyone is ready to take offense, it’s hard to keep the mood Muzak evenly modulated.

For example, when I said the right not to be offended is now the most “sacred” right in the world, I certainly didn’t mean to offend persons of a nontheistic persuasion. In Hanover, N.H., home to Dartmouth College, an atheist and an agnostic known only as “Jan and Pat Doe” (which is which is hard to say) are suing because their three schoolchildren are forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Well, OK. They’re not forced to say it. The Pledge is voluntary. You’re allowed to sit down, or, more discreetly, stand silently, which is what the taciturn Yankee menfolk who think it’s uncool to sing do during the hymns at my local church. But that’s not enough for “the Does.” Because the Pledge mentions God, their children are forced, as it were, not to say it. And, as “Mr and Mrs Doe” put it in their complaint, having to opt out of participation in a voluntary act exposes their children to potential “peer pressure” from the other students.

U.S. courts have not traditionally been sympathetic to this argument. The American Civil Liberties Union and other litigious types might more profitably explore the line that the Pledge is deeply offensive to millions of illegal aliens in the public school system forced to pledge allegiance to the flag of a country they’re not citizens or even legally admitted tourists of.

Let us now cross from the New Hampshire school system to the Sudanese school system. Or as the Associated Press headline put it: “Thousands in Sudan call for British teddy bear teacher’s execution.”

Last week, Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher working in Khartoum, one of the crummiest basket-case dumps on the planet — whoops, I mean one of the most lively and vibrant strands in the rich tapestry of our multicultural world. Anyway, Mrs. Gibbons was sentenced last week to 15 days in jail because she was guilty of, er, allowing a teddy bear to be named “Mohammed.” She wasn’t so foolish as to name the teddy Mohammed herself. But, in an ill-advised Sudanese foray into democracy, she let her grade-school students vote on what name they wanted to give the classroom teddy, and as good Muslims they voted for their favorite name: Mohammed.

Big mistake. There’s apparently a whole section in the Koran about how if you name cuddly toys after the Prophet you have to be decapitated. Well, actually there isn’t. But why let theological pedantry deprive you of the opportunity to stick it to the infidel?

Mrs. Gibbons is regarded as lucky to get 15 days in jail, when the court could have imposed six months and 40 lashes. But even that wouldn’t have been good enough for the mob in Khartoum. The protesters shouted “No tolerance. Execution” and “Kill her. Kill her by firing squad” and “Shame, shame to the U.K.” — which persists in sending out imperialist schoolma’ams to impose idolatrous teddy bears on the youth of Sudan.

Whether the British are best placed to defend Mrs Gibbons is itself questionable after a U.K. court decision this week: Following an altercation with another driver, Michael Forsythe was given a suspended sentence of 10 weeks in jail for “racially aggravated disorderly behavior” for calling Lorna Steele an “English bitch.” “Racially aggravated”? Indeed. Ms. Steele is not English, but Welsh.

Still, at exactly the time Gillian Gibbons caught the eye of the Sudanese authorities, a 19-year-old Saudi woman was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail. Her crime? She had been abducted and gang-raped by seven men. Originally, she was sentenced to 90 lashes, but her lawyer appealed and so the court increased it to 200 and jail time. Anyone on the streets in Sudan or anywhere else in the Muslim world who wants to protest that? Cue crickets chirping “Allahu akbar.”

East is East and West is West and in both we take offense at nothing: Santas saying “Ho ho ho,” teddy bears called Mohammed. And yet the difference is very telling: The now annual Santa suits in the “war on Christmas” and the determination to abolish even such anodyne expressions of faith as the Pledge of Allegiance are assaults on the very possibility of a common culture. By contrast, the teddy bear rubbish is a crude demonstration of cultural muscle intended to cow and intimidate.

When East meets West, when offended Muslims find themselves operating in Western nations, they discover that both techniques are useful: Some march in the streets Khartoum-style calling for the pope to be beheaded, others use the mechanisms of the West’s litigious, perpetual grievance culture to harass opponents into silence.

Perhaps somewhere in Sydney there is a woman who’s genuinely offended by hearing Santa say “ho ho ho” just as those Hanover atheists claim to be genuinely offended by the Pledge of Allegiance. But their complaints are frivolous and decadent, and more determined groups use the patterns they’ve set to shut down debate on things we should be talking about. The ability to give and take offence is what separates free societies from Sudan.

SEX TOYS top the list as the ultimate red-face Christmas gift, followed by diet pills, self-help books and personal hygiene items like tampons.

Aussies are clueless when it comes to Christmas gift-giving and we are more than happy to re-package dud gifts, a new survey reveals.

A study by online shopping network lastminute.com.au reveals the top 10 weirdest, wacky and downright rude Christmas gifts people have embarrassingly received in front of their families.

Receiving a stripper on Christmas Day comes in at number five of the top 10 most inappropriate gifts, followed by men’s clothing given to a woman, and an unwanted pet.

Marie Cortazzo, who works in an adult department store, said sales did increase over Christmas as couples bought sex toys and adult products for each other.

“They always ask us to gift wrap it discreetly though,” Ms Cortazzo said.

“We have really elderly people come in and buy toys too. We have great fun here over Christmas.”

Ms Cortazzo said it was not uncommon for parents to buy vibrators and stimulators for their sons or daughters for Christmas.

“It’s true, they do. There’s all sorts of families out there,” she said.

And according to Aussie shoppers an acceptable amount to spend on your loved one varies depending on their importance.

People said they would be happy to splash $220 on their husband or wife and $180 on a boyfriend or girlfriend.

We spend $100 on mum or dad and $35 on our best friends and aunty or uncle.

If the budget is lean this Christmas. fear not. Almost 60 per cent of respondents supported the art of re-gifting, and more than half admitted to giving a gift to someone they had already received from another.

And if Christmas sneaks up on you again this year, the best excuse according to the survey as to why you are stooge at Christmas is:

“Your present is extra special and I had to order it – it’ll be on you doorstep any day now”.

Clinical psychologist and sex therapist Dr Anna-Marie Taylor said giving a Christmas gift was a sacred thing and sex-toys and diet pills should not be under the tree.

“If you are giving it under the Christmas tree it is definitely not appropriate. It is bringing something private into the public domain of the family,” Dr Taylor said.

Dr Taylor said giving strange gifts was demeaning to the person receiving them and showed a lack of thought and care for the receiver.

“It brings Christmas down,” she said.

And if you think giving your wife a sex-toy for Christmas will light the fire in the bedroom, according to Dr Taylor you may get a rude shock.

“A sex toy is quick way of pleasing someone, a strange and weird way of pleasing someone. Good sex is all about giving. The good lovers know that good sex is about giving of yourself and getting the other person turned on, therefore a gift that makes someone uncomfortable is for you not for them.”

Forget the North Pole.

Santa Claus and his elves should set up shop in Kyrgyzstan to optimize the delivery of Christmas gifts to 2.5 billion homes worldwide.

That’s according to Swedish engineering consulting firm SWECO, which calculated Santa’s optimal journey based on a range of factors from the Earth’s rotation to which areas of the planet are most densely populated.

The perfect location, SWECO found, is in the mountains of the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, near the border with Kazakhstan.

“By starting his journey there, Santa can achieve the most efficient around-the-world trip to distribute Christmas gifts,” SWECO said Tuesday. “He can eliminate time-consuming detours and avoid subjecting his reindeer to undue strain.”

SWECO said Santa could reach every home on the globe from that location in 48 hours — providing his sleigh can maintain an average speed of about 21 million kph (13 million mph) and that each stop takes no more than 34 microseconds. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.

“That is probably why we’re never able to see Santa, because he is just so super fast,” SWECO consultant Johan Larsson said.

NORTH POLE, Alaska – It’s early December here, and Mr. and Mrs. Claus are certainly busy.

For starters, there are all those visitors who have dropped by their spacious white-and-red house to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him exactly what they want for Christmas.

In the back, the elves – including dozens of extra little hands hired for the season – are rushing to get thousands of personalized “Letters from Santa” delivered to the local post office.

Outside in temperatures that have already dipped below zero, four of Santa’s reindeer are taking it all lying down in their pen, seemingly oblivious to the all-night mission they will once again be asked to fly in just a few weeks.

This is not the North Pole, of course, but the interior Alaskan community of the same name, 14 miles south of Fairbanks at 64.5 degrees north latitude – just south of the Arctic Circle. Not surprisingly, holiday banners, candy-cane street signs, and other Christmas-themed decorations remain up throughout the year.

And the star attraction in this low-slung community of about 1,800 is the rambling, 55-year-old emporium at 101 St. Nicholas Drive known far and wide as the Santa Claus House.

Like most of North Pole’s 100,000 annual visitors, my wife and I and our 5-year-old twin daughters came to visit the Clauses during the summer – in our case, over the Labor Day weekend, when more than just a hint of snow already hung in the gray northern sky.

We had no trouble finding it, not with the world’s largest Santa statue (42 feet tall and weighing 900 pounds) standing sentinel outside and an equally supersized two-dimensional image posing next to a 30-foot-tall, red-and-white- striped “north” pole.

Having already stocked up on T-shirts, stuffed animals, and other standard Alaska-themed merchandise at previous stops, we bypassed those items for the much larger Christmas Shoppe in back. Just as the promotional materials promise, it is indeed “Christmas every day.” Carols drifted through the air, while White Christmas, the 1954 Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye movie, plays continuously on an elevated TV monitor.

We had scarcely begun surveying row upon row of holiday merchandise, including some distinctly Alaskan items – Eskimo nativity sets, beaver-pelt pillows, and birch bowls – when the jingle of sleigh bells heralded the return of the jolly old homeowner himself, back from a coffee break. Attired in his traditional white-trimmed plush red suit, he climbed into his equally plush chair, and our girls, suddenly stricken with shyness, were his first photo-op customers ($5 with their camera, free with ours).

They were followed by a German couple in their 60s who could not quite make up their minds how seriously to take this distinctly American encounter, and two thirtysomething newlyweds from California who were a little shy about telling the old married man exactly what they wanted.

Any hopes Santa might have had for an afternoon nap went up the chimney with the arrival of a bus full of post-cruise seniors from Minnesota who had few qualms about either plopping onto his lap (mostly the women) or standing alongside (mostly the men).

While the grandparents dashed off their just-bought postcards so they could be stamped “Santa’s Official Mail” and placed orders for the Santa Claus House’s trademark “Letter from Santa,” we slipped outside to check on Dasher, Blitzen, Comet and Cupid. None of the four domesticated caribou looked the least bit flightworthy, but then they still had four months to get in shape – or so we explained to our daughters.

Placards attached to spruce trees explained the historical origins of such Christmas traditions as the 12 days, the candy cane and the Christmas tree – unexpected notes of serious religion in an otherwise constant chorus of commercialism.

If nothing else, the Santa Claus House comes by its commercialism honestly. Situated along a marshy creek known as Fourteen-Mile Slough, the site was homesteaded in 1944 by Bon Davis, who named the soon-to-be-established whistle-stop on the Alaska Railroad for himself.

The development company that bought out Davis renamed the settlement North Pole, to attract a toy manufacturer that could label its products “Made at the North Pole.” But given North Pole’s high shipping costs and shallow labor pool, no toy manufacturer ever materialized.

But Conrad and Nellie Miller, homesteaders from Washington state who had settled in Fairbanks in 1949 with only $1.40 to their names, did.

Miller, a traveling fur trader who had taken to dressing up as Santa Claus when calling on native villages in the winter, decided that North Pole – sitting between two growing military bases – would be the site of his own permanent trading post.

As the company story goes, Miller was building a wall one day in 1952 when he was recognized by one of the native children he had visited. “Hey, Santa Claus,” the boy called, “are you building a new house?”

It was a marketing match made in frontier Alaska, and Miller promptly ran it up the North Pole. A half-century later, and thanks to quantum leaps in transportation and communication (especially the Internet), plus the 1983 arrival of that fiberglass Santa – who started off life as a prototype for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair – the Santa Claus House is an institution, securely in the hands of the Miller children.

Toting some truly unique early Christmas gifts, we repaired to our rental sleigh and headed back to Fairbanks. As we drove north out of North Pole, I couldn’t help but marvel at the resourcefulness and determination of those territorial pioneers – and ponder the ultimate mystery of the Santa Claus House:

If every day here really is Christmas, when do they hold their “after Christmas” sale?

Grinning widely, Carissa and Trevor Matovina posed for their picture with Santa, then huddled with the “Jolly Old Elf” for some serious Christmas wishes talk while Mrs. Claus listened in.

It was all part of the annual Breakfast with Santa on Saturday, a Lowell-area tradition for about 24 years sponsored by Zeta Chi Chapter of Tri Kappa.

That tradition includes a special Christmas ornament for each child visiting Santa. This year’s ornament was a cleverly decorated dog biscuit.

With their new onaments in hand, Carissa, soon-to-be 8, and Trevor, 6, the children of Brandi and Ron Matovina, of Lowell, headed for the cookie booth where youngsters were already busily decorating with icing and sprinkles.

“The parents like the cookie booth, too,” Sue McQuiston, of Tri-Kappa, said. “They like the children doing it here and not at home.”

Nearby, McKenna Smith, 10, of Hebron, and her friend Sara Whiteley, 10, of Lowell, were putting the finishing touches on Christmas pages they had colored. When asked what she likes best, McKenna said, “I like the coloring. I like the donuts. I like it all.”

Ray and Denise Smith, McKenna’s parents, said they were part of three generations at Saturday’s event. McKenna’s grandmother, Donna Ingram, of Hebron, said she was attending the Breakfast for Santa for what she believes to be her 23rd year.

The morning included breakfast, a visit with Santa, face painting, a bake sale, craft items and vendor booths.

Popular Christmas movies would have you believe that Santa’s biggest problem is people who stop believing. (See Miracle on 34th Street, The Year Without a Santa Claus, Elf, etc.) But today it’s the believers who are causing Saint Nick so much grief. When announcing on Friday that role models have an obligation to promote healthy lifestyles, U.S. Surgeon General Steven Galson explained to the Boston Herald: “Santa is no different.”

But Santa is different. For starters, he’s not … well, you know … [Ed.: “Hey! My kids read this!]

Galson’s comment is merely one in a long string of outrageous accusations by health officials that show just how far removed from reality the anti-fat movement has become. Each preposterous claim seeks to place the blame for obesity on anyone other than ourselves.

Attacks on Santa highlight the absurdity and hypocrisy of many nutrition zealots. Over the years, food cops have lobbied for warning labels on milk, chips, menus, salt, and countless other foods. But now, that’s precisely the notion they’re arguing against. On the Fox News Channel this weekend, publicist-turned-food-cop Meme Roth commented on one soft-drink company’s use of Saint Nick on soda packaging: “I see a warning label. Drink this, and look how your body will look.”

Roth claims the time-honored tubbiness of Father Christmas sets a bad example: “We’re talking morbid obesity, which is not jolly.” Take her comments with a grain of government-rationed salt: Roth previously grouped voluptuous singer Jordan Sparks and wives too big for their wedding dresses into the same fat-and-unjolly category. But as recent studies demonstrate, Americans who carry a few extra pounds have the lowest mortality of any weight group.

Just look at Kris Kringle. He’s beaten the average life expectancy by over a thousand years without the help of Grinch-like food regulations.

Not a joke: A Hoffman Estates man was actually dragged by a car while defending his Christmas lawn decorations from vandals.

Phillip OBrill proved he really isn’t messing around when it comes to the award-winning holiday lights display on his lawn. He and his wife discovered up to eight diabolical vandals “stomping, ripping and breaking” his holiday decorations to pieces the other night. He stood in front of one of the vehicles as the hoodlums tried flee the scene, thinking that they would stop. The offenders must have been hopped up on PCP or those date-rape toys or something, though, because they ran the homeowner down. He got caught in the windshield wiper and was actually dragged down the street; at one point his foot was even run over.

He ended up spending a little time in the hospital to have his foot mended, but OBrill says there’s nothing the ne’er-do-well imps could have done to dampen his Christmas spirit. He said the cost of the damage was around $1,000, but his friends and neighbors are going to help him restore the lawn to its former glory. While his warm holiday feelings remain as strong as ever, he still said he was surprised by the attack, explaining:

“You always have problems with them putting the animals in compromising positions and stuff like that, but I’ve never had damage like this.”

We are inspired by OBrill’s Christmas spirit, and the Whoville mentality of his neighbors. Hopefully the culprits will think about all the damage they’ve caused and their hearts will grow ten sizes.

What do your kids want for Christmas? Maybe a Nintendo Wii, a flat screen tv, or a Dora the Explorer playset. But have you ever wondered about gifts from long ago? Here’s Tom Gerhardt with more.

North Dakota became a state in 1889, but I’m about to show you a Christmas present from before that time. In this months edition of Inside History, a look back at what past generations of North Dakotan’s woke to find under the tree. This table of toys represents one hundred years of gifts given by North Dakotan’s at Christmas. There are stories behind each one. The Christmas spirit was alive and well in the Burn family of Mott around 1910. A fire destroyed their farm, but not their kindness

But that winter for Christmas the neighbor lady made her a pair of mittens and her folks went to town even though they’d been burned uplost everything and bought her this toy doll house

Tom:”This box of log maybe something you’d find under the tree todaybut have you ever wondered about what would have been under the tree 100 years ago? This bank is the oldest toy dating back to the 1880′s. Gay Gidly’s family lived near Glenburn

Mark:”What it is is a toy mechanical bank. You put your coin in the eagles beak and then as you press down on the snake the eagle moves forward dropping the coin in the nest underneath the little eaglets

And here’s a toy many boys can relate toa Tonka truck donated by the Westbrook family from Lehighnear Dickinson

Obviously, like many of our toys, its been well loved. Its got a little bit of paint blotches, a little bit of rust on the wheels and the cab has sort of come off. You can still go out to the toy stores today and find brands the Tonka brand, classic toy everyone remembers them. And to help kids put together their Christmas wish lists….take a look at this…

You notice their 1895 catalog they have little toy wagons and of course sleighs for kids coasting sleds all the things that were available in 1895 out here in North Dakota. Did you see some of those prices? Times have changedbut the thrill of opening presents has not. Maybe a gift you get this yearwill one day end up on display at the Heritage Center