From Santa Claus in Bernard Star

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 00:22:18 -0000, victoriatangoman
wrote:
(...)
> Ew. I just had visions of Santa is a skimpy red swimming speedo. With
> suspenders of course.
(...)

The wonders of the Southern Hemisphere. Here in the region of Brazil
where I live he will have to use a raincoat (a red one, I imagine),
because it has been raining almost uninterruptedly for a week or so;
think of a "Gray Christmas"...

Anyway, Omar raised an amusing point: supposing that the Santa Claus
legend survives enough to see the first space settlements, what would
be the "refactorings" needed to make it more "plausible" for space
children? Obviously, the reindeer are antigravitational, and so the
Earth gravity well is no problem for them; however, would they use
spacesuits tailored to reindeer? And what about the sleigh? Will it be
pressurized and perhaps have a radiation shelter in case of solar
storms during Xmas? (On a second thought, that does not seems to be
necessary. Assuming that Santa Claus and Saint Nicolas are, in some
obscure way, the same person, then he is a ghost and radiation should
not be a worry for someone who is already dead.)

Or perhaps space settlers will finally admit that Santa Claus has the
teleportation technology. Otherwise, how could he get the presents
inside houses without chimneys, like mine? Besides, since obviously
the bag is not big enough to accommodate all the billions of presents,
then one of the possible explanations for how billions of presents
come out of it is that the bag is a wormhole generator connecting the
sleigh to the North Pole, and wormholes are a teleportation technology
of sorts. Finally, again assuming that Saint Nicolas and Santa Claus
are (inexplicably) the same person, it is recorded that Saint Nicolas
performed miracles of teleportation and ubilocation. So, space
settlers could just assume that Santa Claus teleports the whole combo
sleigh-reindeer to the pressurized volume of the habitat.