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.

Belief

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." ~Samantha Black Crow, American Gods by Neil Gaiman

End of Gaiman kick

After American Gods and Anansi Boys I read Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, which turned out to be a collection of short stories (which I expected) and some poems (which I did not). Gaiman's poems are lovely and creepy, like his fiction. Some pieces were interesting (like the one about an author trying to negotiate with Hollywood people wanting to make his book into a movie and the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired pieces about the coming of Cthulhu and a werewolf) and some were too disturbing or confusing for me. I'd give it an average of 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Next I read Neverwhere, which was just great. I wish I'd read it first of all the other Gaiman books; the other books seemed to be competing with it in my mind...? idk. It's a very familiar story: the hapless ordinary guy who get sucked into a fantasy alternate world he didn't even know existed because of a girl he helps (or wants to bang. Luckily it's the former in this book) and then finds out What He's Made Of and proves himself a hero or whatever. Neil Gaiman made it original and wonderful, though. The tone was slightly closer to Anansi Boys'. I believe I mentioned the style reminded me of Terry Pratchett? I think I meant Douglas Adams (A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books), but whatever, I love all of them. Great stuff. I'd give it 4/5.

Here are the Gaiman books I read (I bought them for $1 each at a yard sale benefiting the school where I went to kindergarten. Did I mention that?), in the order of first to least favorite:

1. American Gods (I can't help it; it's so haunting and just stays with you. It pushed too many of my buttons. Shame about the explicit stuff)
2. Neverwhere (yay alternate London! and history! and stuff)
3. Anansi Boys (more funny than anything else. Slightly less awe but still great)
4. Smoke and Mirrors (I cannot write or read or even think of the title without getting this song stuck in my head)

With the addition of the other Gaiman books I've read (most to least favorite, again):

1. American Gods
2. The Graveyard Book (slightly more original than Neverwhere's premise. Also, the only book to date that has made me feel sorry for a vampire. And in the whole book the word vampire is never used! Gaiman respects our intelligence and knows we can figure it out on our own! I love him.)
3. Neverwhere
4. Instructions (Gaiman reads it here in the book trailer)
5. Anansi Boys, Stardust (It's been a while since I've read Stardust. I may like it slightly more or less than AB; I'm not sure)
6. Blueberry Girl (sweet book trailer here)
7. Smoke and Mirrors

Basically I need to read everything else by him. Coraline looks too creepy for me, though.

I finished American Gods and it was so good. Horrifying and sad and violent and amazing. The title is a bit misleading because it's actually about all the gods brought over to America from the old countries, as well as (glancingly) the ones created here (the Internet god, the Railroad god, etc. We hardly hear about/from them but then I suppose we don't need to because we deal with them on a daily basis. Sort of). There was a lot going on in this book, tons of different plotlines that would have faltered in a less capable writer's hands, but Gaiman is golden. 4/5 stars
I followed it up with Anansi Boys. It's not a sequel but I would recommend you read American Gods before you read this one, just to get a good feel on Anansi. Its title is also slightly inaccurate. I wouldn't call Fat Charlie and Spider boys; they're grown men. This book was not as shocking or horrifying, more of a caper, and it actually reminded me more than once of a Terry Prachett book. It unsettled me less, but I'm not sure whether that's a good thing. For the most part it was, but there was less of that feeling one gets in the presence of things divine/not human. Still, there's 100% less god, uh, relations. 4/5 stars

So holidayish, my reading. I guess 2011 is the year I didn't read any of my traditional seasonal reads (The Penderwicks in the summer, Christmas with Anne [she of the Green Gables] Treasury, not even A Christmas Carol). I just didn't feel like it. Oh well.