“So, how do you explain Santa?” I’ve been asked. And until recently my humble reply has been along the lines that — thankfully — I hadn’t needed to yet, but I was adamantly against lying to children. Fair enough, right? Sure. That is until the Girl, now good-and-properly two years old, happily a toddler, and (thanks to the saturation of the Kris Kringle story from a laundry list of sources) became fully convinced that in a couple more “sleeps” Santa is going to squeeze through the chimney of our gas fireplace, eat the cookies she helped her mom bake, and leave behind a new jigsaw puzzle under the tree.

At about ten bucks the average family can buy a couple volumes.

This movie, I think, illustrates two different, but related and important points for me — first regarding the nature of my attitude towards critical thought and the spirit of this blog itself, and second a (perhaps poignant) point about how I as a kid viewed the moral authority of a movie like Ghost Busters in relation to my world view.