When I found out the truth about Santa Claus, it precipitated my first crisis of faith. Not my faith in God or anything like that, my faith in my parents and the other significant adults in my life. Before that I believed everything I was told by the adults I knew. I took what the other kids said with a grain of salt, but I believed what the grown ups said without question. I wasn't mad at my parents for lying about Santa, I knew they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do, but it made me wonder what else they had been lying about. For this reason, we told our daughter the truth about Santa right from the start. We explained that the Santa story was part of our folk culture and, as such, should be respected, and that she shouldn't disillusion the other kids she knew because their parents might have different values than we did, and that should also be respected. It worked out pretty well, our daughter told us decades later that, while she was a little disappointed about missing out on part of the magic of Christmas, she respected us for our honesty and seldom doubted our word about the other things we told her later.
Ever since Biblical times, different cultures have had taboos about eating one thing or another. I've often wondered how much of that was just a cultural thing and how much of it had some nutritional validity, like the Jews with their pork. We now know that eating undercooked pork can give you trichinosis, but I wonder if that was the real reason Moses told his people to not eat the stuff. Some cultures think that it's just fine to eat dogs, cats, monkeys, and even each other, but ours doesn't. They told us in the army that, in a survival situation, you can eat just about anything except polar bear liver. They said that, because polar bears eat seals, and seals eat fish, there is so much vitamin A concentrated in their livers that eating one could be lethal to humans. I read years later that you can get the same effect from eating dog liver if the dog had eaten a lot of fish in it's life. Sled dogs in the arctic used to be fed a lot of fish, and people used to believe that, if you ate too much dog meat, it would make you crazy. Turns out there is some truth to that, especially if you eat just the liver and feed the rest of the dog to the surviving dogs, which is what they used to do in extreme situations. Nowadays, when they run those long distance dog sled races, if a dog gets injured of worn out, they evacuate it by helicopter and leave a bag of dog food in its place. This approximates the historical conditions in a safer and more humane manner.
I'm sure that those coon skin caps were popular in Davy Crocket's day. Walt Disney wouldn't lie about something like that, would he? The wearing of fur clothing must have started out as a practical thing, and only later became a fashion statement. After it became politically incorrect, the American fur business almost died out, but it has recently resurrected itself because of the increased demand from Russia and Red China. Funny, I always thought that political correctness was a commie thing, but those Chinese commies and Russian ex-commies, don't seem to care about it. One of my outdoor magazines runs a monthly feature that analyzes the fur market, both current and predicted. They say that most of the fur produced in the U.S. and Canada goes to Russia and China, and the rise and fall of our fur prices follows the ups and downs of the economic conditions in those two countries. It also helps if they have a hard winter over there, which they did last year, and North American fur prices currently are at record high levels. Go figure!
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