And what more fitting than that they should light upon that hoary old imposter masquerading under the several aliases Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle, and Father Christmas?
At once the Propaganda was started.
Press agents were engaged, lecture tours arranged, magazines subsidized.
No matter what it might cost, this “Vulture gnawing at the Palladium of Infant Emancipation” must be destroyed!!
Santa Claus, once, in the memory of living men and women, adored by children and winked at by their parents, was now branded as an imposter, a mountebank, a public nuisance, and a perverter of infant intelligence.
Santa Claus was an outlaw from the Commonwealth of Reason.
It was “thumbs down” for Santa!
It may be well to explain right here (since none of the events chronicled in this History has yet happened) that the movement for the Emancipation and Self-Determination of Infants, which has now taken such great strides, had its initiation in the presidential term of Miles Standish Sovietski when Congress extended the franchise to every child over five years of age who had made any serious contribution to literature or higher mathematics.
It was in the same year that President Sovietski signed the Sixty-fourth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, prohibiting the publication of fairy tales, and Congress suspended the Limitation-of-Search Act in order that private libraries and nurseries might be raided without warning and all copies of the forbidden works summarily seized and destroyed.
Simultaneously with the federal enactment, the states of Washington, Illinois, Nevada, and Oregon, ever in the advance of any great intellectual movement, passed laws prohibiting “the personification or representation, public or private, in theatre, music hall, club house, lodge, church fair, schoolhouse, or private residence, of any supernatural, fairy, or otherwise mythical person or persons or fraction thereof.”