The Seattle Times Christmas edition features more than a bundle of after-Christmas-sale flyers — it also showcases a nice collection of local folks doing good. Among them, this guy. Trivial side note — nice picture of our west-facing shore behind him, too; so many people think West Seattle=Alki=downtown skyline views.

Honestly, this is intended to be a blog about West Seattle — what’s going on, and what’s not going on, on this side of the city, the quasi-peninsula that used to be a city all its own.

However, today, while this is still in stealth mode, we just have to say something about one of the “who stole Christmas?” controversies raging wildly across the Web.

The East Coast substitute teacher who revealed the truth about Santa Claus to a class of first-graders wasn’t all wrong.

“Those same children are going to know someday that what their parents taught them is false,” she explained, according to newspaper accounts. True. Exactly why we chose not to start the whole Santa mess with our kid, and honestly, we’re surprised more modern parents haven’t chosen to go that same route. Were we the only ones who felt betrayed when we realized we’d been deceived all those years? Did all the rest of you really just go “Oh, OK, whatever, fine,” when you found out? Didn’t it make you wonder what else your parents were lying to you about?

And yet … there is another side of Santa, also represented in the article we read about the East Coast controversy. One of the miffed parents mailed the substitute teacher a copy of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.”

To this day, we do believe in that Santa — the symbol of unconditional giving, and therefore love. That’s the Santa we taught our kid about, not the one that scratches up the roof, tumbles down the chimney, and cleans out the cookie jar.

Merry Christmas. No, we mean it. Not just Happy Holidays.

Much more to come …