Last night I spent a considerable amount of time drawing and inking our Christmas card. I often half-watch television or videos when working on cartoons, once they have reached the "making the images look right" stage, as opposed to the "contemplating the blank paper and figuring out what to put there" stage.

I half-watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which as an adult is entertaining mostly for the camp value. The The Polar Express started up. I didn't really want to watch it, but the other choices were a Survivor finale and White Girls (we don't have cable), so I ended up with The Polar Express anyway.

It wasn't quite as bad as I feared -- yes, the motion-capture animation had that creepy puppets feel, and yes, the sense of wonder was excessively and annoyingly forced by the soundtrack. But it did have a few surreal moments, and for the most part its worst sin was being kind of dull. I say "for the most part," because it also had a thematic annoyance common to Christmas-themed entertainment: it was about the magic of believing in Santa Claus.

(I'm going to assume, at this point, that any kid old enough to stumble across this on the Internet is old enough to know that Santa Claus does not, in fact, exist. Okay? Okay.)

I really like a different take on that theme, Miracle on 34th Street, but the 34th Street message is more, "anybody who embodies the spirit of Santa Claus is, in all the important ways, Santa Claus. And who knows, there might be an actual literal Santa Claus out there somewhere, but he isn't quite like our conception of him."

The Polar Express message is, "belief in an actual literal Santa Claus who lives at the North Pole and everything is such an essential part of childhood that without it, there's something wrong with you."

So, get that kids -- if you don't spend your formative years believing in the literal truth of something that your parents are deliberately lying to you about you are missing out. And then, after you grow up, your parents will wonder why you don't take their religion seriously.

I don't remember having a literal belief in Santa Claus -- if I ever did, I was too young for me to be able to remember it now. I remember thinking Santa Claus was a pretend game that parents played with their children. It was violating the rules of the game to admit that you knew he was made-up, that the handwriting on the gifts from "Santa" was obviously your mother's, that you had heard your parents assembling the bike after you had gone to bed.

I assumed that other kids had the same view of Santa, so it was a bit of a shock to me to find out that many children -- most children? -- remembered believing in a literal Santa Claus, and then gradually losing that belief.

I suppose it makes sense. Children come into the world without knowing anything about the rules of that world -- for all they know, it really is possible for one man to live for hundreds of years, levitate up and down chimneys that are narrower than he is, fit millions of toys into a single bag, and then deliver them to all the (Christian) children on the planet in a single night.

And, gradually, they figure out none of that is even remotely possible.

Maybe Santa fills an important role in childhood development -- it's probably good for children to find out sooner rather than later that their parents and society lie to them.

I still prefer the pretend-game view of Santa. Belief in an actual literal Santa has troublesome implications. Because if you are a poor child, and you have been schooled by your parents and society to believe that all Christmas gifts are delivered by Santa Claus, it is hard to miss that he gives rich kids more and better stuff.

The message: this mystical figure, which distributes presents according to how much you deserve because of how good you have been this year, clearly thinks the rich kids are better and more deserving than you.

Which I guess makes Santa Claus a Republican.