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Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man.

Everybody has the idea of Santa in their head and in their heart.

The idea of God as a fatherly figure who looks down on us and worries about how we're doing or takes sides when we have fights - it's more irritating than Santa Claus. The world and the universe are far more wonderful if there's not a puppet master.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.

Santa is our culture's only mythic figure truly believed in by a large percentage of the population. It's a fact that most of the true believers are under eight years old, and that's a pity.

Santa was a fake.

I grew up believing in Santa Claus, and we still treat our house at Christmas with a huge reverence for that belief - even though our children are 19 through 23.

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.