Santa Claus

Today's Boston Globe, G-Section, has an article titled "Claus in crisis".♠

It reminded me of a conversation I overheard last night in a local restaurant, "Chili's".

In the booth across from us was a family of four (I am assuming they were a family). A Father, a Mother and two young ladies who looked to be about twelve.

The Father was explaining to the girls the theory that Santa's trip around the world on Christmas eve was an engineering or scientific impossibility.  Here is an example of the kind of calculation done to show that it is Mission Impossible.

However, noting that the gentleman was wearing a red sweatshirt with the letters HBS on it, I wondered it he might have missed something.  Here we were, sitting in a franchise restaurant, and he misses the idea that Santa is a franchise operation.  It isn't one person doing all the traveling, but rather it is a whole army of different people, all commissioned by Saint Nicholas of Myra.  Why just look at all the different names Santa Clause goes by across the (formerly?) Chrisitian world—Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Sinterklaas, São Nicolau, etc.

Is it little wonder I am skeptical of Harvard Business School and its impact on the US economy.  I was not happy that then Texas Governor and Presidential Candidate George W Bush was a graduate of the Harvard Business School, but I took heart when all my friends who were registered Democrats told me that Bush was dumb as a rock and probably never learned anything there anyway.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Have you ever noticed that on the Globe web page they sometimes give articles titles different from what is used in the tree-based edition?  Fortunately they tend to stick with the author's name.