Santa’s Lap for Leopards

When you visualize somebody sitting on Santa’s lap, who do you visualize? I imagine tiny tots, the wonder of seeing a surreal grandfather doling out laughs and asking what they’d like for Christmas. Most Santas I’ve seen ask loudly what they would like for Christmas, then liberally spot the answer with “Ho Ho Ho”s so the parents wouldn’t miss the crux, and repeat the child’s wish. That’s just what this veteran Santa was doing for twenty years every Christmas outside Macy’s in San Francisco’s Union Square.

What must happen, but this year, the fates deigned otherwise and he was fired because he cracked a joke to a couple who took offense when they sat on his lap. Now reading parts of this story had me wondering – why do adults want to sit on Santa’s lap?

I looked it up and it turns out the average weight of a adult man equals that of a leopard that has spent more time eating than exercising his muscles – the higher end of the scale in other words. The obese leopard. The one huffing and puffing after a bison in the forests, while looking wistfully at the deer and the zebras. Would this man who plonked his weight on Santa be willing to carry an obese-leopard everyday as part of his job and not even joke about it? Come to think of it, Santa might have been better off having obese l’s on his lap, as they would not have take offense to this joke:

When the couple asked why Santa’s jolly, he reportedly responded by telling them he knows where all the naughty boys and girls live.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/06/MNC91GML7O.DTL

Why people with no sense of humour would want to sit on Santa’s lap beats me.