I showed it to my girls so they could understand that Christmas is about doing something for others, about sacrifice and about love. I don't think they got it, but I'll link it here and maybe we'll run across it again when they are older.
I love so many of the comics that Kate Beaton has done and this one in particular shows something very well without trying to say it. That's something to value in media. It's not the picture that's worth the thousand words, it's interpreting something into a relevant context that increases the density of the information.
*update*
Posting this made me think more about the comic and what it said to me. It just now made me realize that maybe the reason that Santa is such a HUGE Christmas icon isn't because of the presents or the Coca Cola commercialism. Its really because Santa dies. Santa is the sacrificial lamb we offer up to our childhood, and he's reborn every year when we wind up our kids with visions of sugar plums. We don't do it because its perverse but because it's important for human development that this wonderful thing get sacrificed. And I'm going to stop trying to say this thing now.
