Mr. Claus

Not that this matters in the whole scheme of the universe, but it just bothers me when names and things are misspelled. As a child of the 1950s, spelling was drilled into our heads by the nuns, and misspelling a word was as bad as saying a bad word. Spelling every word correctly is so ingrained in me that I proof-read everything not once but twice, and if I do go back into these essays and find something misspelled, I will immediately edit and correct it, no matter how long ago it was typed.

But of all the words to misspell, you would think that everyone in the western hemisphere would know how to spell Santa Claus. Not so, Virginia... not so.

There was a movie out a few years ago with Tim Allen, titled "The Santa Clause." The Clause in the title was not Santa's last name of Claus, but was meant to be Clause, as in a contract or an agreement. However, Hollywood being the great social and cultural icon that it is (and there I surely jest in a big way), everyone on this side of the planet took that title to heart, and half of the population now thinks that Santa's full and correctly spelled name is Santa Clause. You can see Santa's name misspelled all over eBay, various Internet sites, and hundreds of thousands of holiday ads in newspapers and magazines.

As I said at the beginning.... with everything going on in and around the world, that "e" at the end of Santa's name is the tiniest speck of a microscopic blip in the universe, and it doesn't hurt anyone and won't change anything. But it just bothers me to think that a title of a movie coming out of godforsaken Hollywood could make so many people think that Santa's name has that e at the end of Claus.

Get real, people...... take out your vintage Christmas books and look at Santa's name. Nowhere, ever, in any Christmas story, are you going to find that Santa Claus is spelled with an e at the end.

Pay attention, class: The correct spelling for the name of the jolly red-suited guy who finds his way down your chimney on Christmas Eve is SANTA CLAUS. Now... write that name a hundred times on the blackboard, then hand in a two-hundred word composition on the history of Santa Claus who was doing just fine on his own till modern-day Hollywood got hold of him.