(Chamale)
@ Ronni Bom: Are you sure "Babouschka" is Russian for Santa? I know that "6a6ywka"(damn English keyboard), pronounced like "Babouschka", means "Old Lady" or something along those lines.
I've always understood the word pronounced "babouschka" to refer to a sort of scarf that, coincidentally, I'd see worn on the head by old ladies. Being that I'm no expert in languages other than English, though, feel free to take that with a grain of salt if it seems wrong to you.
@ Rat of Steel: I became an atheist around 8 or 9, when I realized Santa was not real and extrapolated that to God's existence.
Believe it or not, it took slightly longer for Santa to trigger my bullshit detector than God took. For one thing, there's only one version of Santa (I'm talking purely about North America here, since I've resided in the USA for all my life thus far), but about five kazillion versions of God. Certainly, if God were real, there'd be only one version of Him/Her/It? What really did it for me, though, was the realization that God seemed to want all the same things that the various people with authority want, and seemed to hate all the same things they hated (for example, alcohol and naked women may have always existed, but comic books and rock music couldn't have been mentioned in the Bible, so how did the preachers know God hated them?). I was all too familiar in my younger years with the warning "wait until your dad gets home", and that's just what all the preaching sounded like: a threat issued by those with power to those without power to keep the latter in line.
Santa's message was always consistent, though (be good for goodness' sake), so it was easier to believe.