Thoughts about The Santa Clause 2 after watching it for the first time in a decade

Spoilers, I guess, if you care about that sort of thing

• The premise is silly and unrealistic, even for a Santa Claus movie. Why should Santa be forced to get married in order to be able to remain being Santa Claus? I guess the position is thousands of years old, so it makes sense the contract's author(s) would hold antiquated positions on marriage.
• Who made the Santa Claus contract and its subsequent clauses? Who is hiring Santa? Who established Santa? God? Santa hangs out with Mother Nature, Father Time, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, and Cupid, but it's clear none of them have anything to do with the Santa politics and there is no mention of God.
• Are Mother Nature and Father Time married?
• I'm guessing the contract writer would have been more powerful than all of them, because then couldn't the current Santa Claus rewrite the contract? I guess it's not like the President rewriting or overwriting laws he doesn't like or adding amendments or whatever.
• What does Mrs. Claus do anyway? I always had the vague impression that she just baked cookies for Mr. Claus, maybe cooked all the food for him and all the elves, and occasionally took pictures with children along with Santa. Why is it so important for Santa to be married if that's all she does?
• Does that mean you can get out of being Santa by getting divorced? What if your wife dies? Are you forced to remarry?
• What if Santa's gay? Does he still have to get married? Santa & Mr. Claus? I have no doubt such a contract as antiquarian and matrimonial-minded would be completely heteronormative; that wouldn't even occur to the contract writer. 
• When Scott accidentally killed the original Santa and put on his clothes, he became Santa (the first Santa Clause movie). This is very folklore/fairytale standard, but in light of this movie's new information we know that Santa must have a Mrs. Claus in order to continue, so...
• What happened to the original Mrs. Claus? Did she die at the same time as her husband? Did she also disappear the way the original Santa's body did? 
• Did the original Santa die because he didn't have a wife? Is having a Mrs. Claus insurance against being killed and replaced as Santa?  
• Is Santa Claus immortal, if he is not killed? Santa Claus as immortal has been suggested by all the Santa Claus mythology I have read and seen (that I remember anyway), but nothing of it apart from the Santa Clause movies suggests Santa can be killed. 
• If Santa is immortal, does this mean Mrs. Claus is too?
• If Scott as Santa Claus lives for hundreds of years, what happens to his family? Does his son grow old and die while Scott is forever a portly white-haired man?
• If Santa's family have all grown old and died without him, why is he so jolly? Does being Santa mean you have amnesia? Only knowing all the children's names in the world and whether they are naughty or nice, but not who you used to be?
• I have questions about Bernard, the head elf. 
• All of the elves, while hundreds of years old, remain children on the outside, but Bernard is supposed to be a teen. Why is this? 
• Was he the son of the original Santa, or maybe even of the Santa before him? Does he resent the new Santa(s), who has killed and/or taken on his father's role and whom he has to serve? He is the crankiest elf we see. 
• Bernard is also a clear Jewish stereotype. Why, in a movie about Christmas and its icons?
• Do elves just age very slowly? Like all the elves who look six years old are actually six hundred years old, while Bernard, who we'll graciously say looks 18 years old, is actually 1800 years old? If he's so old, then he must be very wise. Why can't he be Santa then? Is it because he's not jolly enough? Scott is very sarcastic and he still became Santa Claus.
• Why are there no other teen-looking elves? What happened to Bernard's cohort? Do we just not see them in the movies? 
• Was Bernard the First Elf? I don't remember how elves are born or where they come from. How many elves are born at once, and how? How long do elves live? Are they immortal? Is Bernard near death?
• Why did the elves wait so long to tell Santa that he had to get married in order to continue being Santa Claus? Scott became Santa when his son Charlie was about eight years old, according to Wikipedia (I thought he was 6; he seemed so little to me). In The Santa Clause 2 Charlie is in middle school, about 14 years old. Six years have passed, and I'm assuming Scott underwent ample training from the elves. Why weren't all the clauses, including such an important one as the Mrs. clause, included? Is it because they are all written in tiny font on that business card? Why can't they rewrite it as a legible business contract on letter-sized paper? Wouldn't it make sense to have a couple of eagle-eyed legal elves (that one that's in love with the rules anyway, the glasses one, Curtis) get on the magnifying glasses to read the entire thing and make sure there are no surprises? Six years would have been plenty of time to find a wife. 28 days is ridiculous, and the movie makes it seem like a week.
• Why is the grace period for being an unmarried Santa 6 years? Why not 5 or 10 or 1 or 100? What's the hurry, if Santa is immortal (or is he, see above)?
• The first scene shows the North Pole at Elfcon 4-1, because they are afraid of being detected by a passing plane. I was given to understand that Santa's workshop at the North Pole is magical and therefore undetectable by human eyes, at least unbelieving adult ones. What is the truth?
• Wouldn't the pilots, hearing the noise/music, assumed it was from Arctic researchers or Arctic peoples and their equipment/radios?
• I'm just going to say it: Scott should have married the first lady he went on a date with, the Christmas-obsessed singer-songwriter played by Molly Shannon. Literally everything about her shows she would have been the best choice for Mrs. Claus. Yeah, it was pretty weird for her to break into song and dance right there in the restaurant when they were on their date, singing a Christmas-themed version of "Man! I Feel Like a Woman", but come on! That shows both her love of Christmas and her creativity. Both are important for the role of Mrs. Claus.
• Could Scott have liked her and been able to live with her? I don't know. Maybe after he got over the embarrassment of her singing and dancing in the restaurant, possibly. I feel like it's not really a huge deal when women go over the top on the first date, as they're very unlikely to turn out to be serial killers. You can recover from embarrassment. Who is there to embarrass at the North Pole? The elves would all enthusiastically join along. She would have loved it.
• Carol, Charlie's middle school principal, has a great name for Mrs. Claus and clearly loved Christmas as a child, plus she works with children every day. However, she's very strict and it seems that although she probably went into teaching because she liked it and liked kids, she's clearly become embittered and dictatorial. Anyone who is able to intimidate teenagers to such a degree that looking into their cold dark eyes causes them to go straight to third period geography is wrong for the role of Mrs. Claus.
• The movie made it sound that Carol was going to quit her job as principal, I guess because she'd be living at the North Pole with Scott. Does being Mrs. Claus mean you have to give up your own career and dreams? That's messed up. How very 1950s and prior of you, Santa Claus contract.
• There was a vague mention of Carol teaching in or heading the elf school, if there even was such a thing. What need is there for a school? Aren't all the elves only children on the outside? Are elves born and do they die?
• Scott's proposal to Carol was based on the sentiment that although they didn't know each other very well, Carol's known Santa Claus her whole life. YIKES, creepy much? It wasn't even Scott, though; he only became Santa 6 years ago. I guess because he's Santa that makes him trustworthy and kind, is the argument?
• So Carol just had to give up her entire life to be Scott's Mrs. Claus? Did she not have any family? It sounded like she was an only child. Could she bring her stuff from her house with her to the North Pole? What would happen to her house and stuff? Why did she, an unmarried public school principal, have a big house like that? Maybe her parents left it to her?
• Would she really have to spend the whole rest of her life in the North Pole? I don't really see any reason why she couldn't continue being a principal at her school. All schools are off for winter break, anyway, and it's not like Santa has a whole lot to do during the year and Mrs. Claus probably even less. idk.
• How great was the little girl who played Charlie's half sister? Such an adorable little girl, and a great little actress. She looked like a little ginger Olson. I think it's really sweet how she called Scott "Uncle Scott" and how close Scott was with his ex-wife and her new family.
• I'm not even going to go into the whole decoy toy Santa thing, except to say they are clearly tapping into the "sentient computers won't have compassion and will end up harming humans" thing. I think they tried doing too much in this movie.
• A couple of storylines that were started and mostly dropped: Charlie getting on the naughty list (did he get back on the nice list? Wouldn't his mom and stepdad just get him presents anyway?), the reason for Charlie getting on the naughty list in the first place, Charlie's crush on his female friend. Like the first Santa Clause movie, it starts off with Charlie as the main focus and firmly turns into the Scott Movie.
• I leave you with this. Neil Gaiman knows how to do horrifying interpretations.

Things I had to learn in school that I thought I wouldn't need to know in the real world but surprisingly turned out to be useful

• Typing on the numeric keypad (the numbers keys on the rightmost side of a full keyboard) for data entry
• Typing without looking at my hands (not surprised at this, but I was so annoyed at our teacher for making us do this)
• the Pythagorean theorem, for calculating the size of/amount of space needed for furniture
• "To increase the surface area", the blanket answer given to us by my high school biology teacher for what we should put for the answer to any quiz/exam question we didn't know, since that is the answer to just about anything

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

*spoilers*

I love Jane Eyre, so I expected to love Villette too. I think I do? It's just that it was more depressing, without a clearly happy ending, and somehow an even more slow-moving plot. I took a break in the middle of it and kind of forgot things that happened, because the narrator will just casually mention things that turn out to be important later, but by the time that happens you'll have forgotten it. Also, p. much all the French parts are untranslated, which is supremely unhelpful if you don't read/speak French. Thank God for the Google Translate app, which has the real-time text-translator. In the app, you just point your camera to the page and it will translate a block of text for you. I was able to get the gist of what was being said thanks to that, the few dozen words I know of French, and my knowledge of Italian and Spanish. I really wish the edition I'd bought simply because of Mallory Ortberg's introduction had footnotes with what they were saying in English, or even endnotes. It's like that in Jane Eyre, but there's wayyyyy more French in Villette due to its setting. I really do not get the reasoning behind not having translations for the French parts. It drives me nuts.

Bronte's heroines are simultaneously unnecessarily dramatic and irritatingly passive, and are in a way rather identifiable if you're a shy emotionally stunted bookish introvert like me. Lucy is forever looking for private places to read letters or walk by herself, yet she almost goes insane because everyone left the school over break and she was almost entirely alone. She contemplates converting to Catholicism because she's so desperate for kindness and companionship, but she also hides away her feelings from everyone, including the reader. Lucy is surprisingly assertive in some things (sailing to France by herself without knowing a soul there in the hopes she'll find employment, taking charge of her first class by shoving the most troublesome student in the coal closet and locking her in, playing a male rake character in the school play) yet annoyingly passive in others (quietly taking M. Emanuel's criticism and bullying when they're just coworkers and he doesn't have any right to be treating her that way, being like "lol classic Mme. Beck" whenever her boss spies on her and not-so-secretly rifles through her stuff). Perhaps Lucy doesn't mind Mme. Beck spying on her because she's so used to being invisible and overlooked that she likes being paid attention to. That might also explain why she lets M. Emanuel harangue her like he does.

The author's love for brooding hunx rears its head in the final love interest. When it comes to M. Emanuel (also called M. Paul, which really confused me until almost at the end his entire name is given, Paul Something Something Emanuel), the first two-thirds of the book are spent showing us what a petty tyrant he is towards everyone, especially Lucy, then the last third of the book is spent telling us what a great guy he is and how desperate he is for Lucy's friendship and affection just as she's desperate for affection from the world at large. It's rather bipolar. If a man treats you like that, bossing you around and constantly berating you then turning around to act all remorseful and nice, you should not be in a relationship with him. That's abusive behavior.

Another typical aspect of the Bronte heroine, always dressing as plain, boring and gloomy as possible, is mostly continued, as Lucy is godmother-pressured into wearing a pink (!) dress with black lace. Jealous because Lucy was with her guy friend from childhood, M. Paul starts raging at her about how shallow, frivolous and worldly she is with her scarlet dress. ??? Like have you even met her? It does turn into bantering kinda at the end, with both of them like tsundere teasing each other, but I still don't buy it. I need to read Charlotte Bronte's other books, but it's interesting to me that both her plain heroines have two love interests: an age-appropriate handsome boring guy who's good on paper, and an older not handsome dark brooding/raging weirdo, and the latter is the one she always chooses (by default in Lucy's case, but still).

tl;dr I did like this book. Wikipedia says it's really more about Lucy's psychological state than about the plot, which is accurate. It's definitely worth reading if you like Jane Eyre, although don't expect it to be the exact same. It's slower, more depressing, and less Gothic (although there is a bit there). 4/5