ExPhysGuy posted a picture at reddit of a man in Ireland who fills the role of Santa Claus at the local schools. Even when he’s off-duty, he takes his role seriously for the little kids who see him. There were several stories in the comments underneath that show appreciation for men like this who take time to be Santa Claus for kids, because they know that children will recognize them wherever they are, no matter what time of the year it is.  

We got a great story from this_wasamistake.

So, my uncle used to look a lot like Santa pretty much all the time. Pot belly, deep but kind voice, sweet grey beard, the works. Just like this guy here.

One year in the fall he drove home from the grocery store, and when he got inside, noticed a car drove up and parked right in front of his house. No one came out for awhile so he went to check it out, when some guy got out of the car and approached him. The dude had two kids in the car, who had seen my uncle at the store, and just cried and cried to their dad how he was "letting Santa get away!" so they made him drive after my uncle. The guy was real apologetic and asked if my uncle can just say hi to his kids, but my uncle being the amazing person he was, ran inside to get them cookies, and sure to talk to them awhile. The kids left happy as clams and I'm sure the dad got major dad points.

I just really miss my uncle. The idea of people thinking about him, even just for the duration of this post, makes me not miss him so badly.

From timforreal:

They've had the same Santa at my local mall for at least 12 years, and he is fantastic. He's got a real beard, has a personally owned awesome looking suit, is great with kids etc. I've seen him do the same thing when it's the "off season" and he's at the mall doing his shopping.

There were rumors that he was retiring 2 years ago, and I was very happy to see that he was still there last year. It will be difficult to replace someone as good as him.

Read this cute story from blissfully_happy.

I was in the back of my suburban, digging around one day, while my boyfriend was in the grocery store. A man walked passed our truck and saw my partner's 5-year-old sitting in the back seat. He said to him (through the open window), "Hi, there! You're being good, right?"

I popped my head up and said, "He is," thinking this dude must be a friend of his mom or dad's (we live in a small town).

He walked away, and I said, "Do you know that guy?"

Kid: "No, but I'm pretty sure Santa just told me to behave."

Thanks, random bearded stranger. Good work.

ChrisTR15 tell us about a co-worker.

There is a guy that works with me who looks like Santa. WHEN EVER a kid comes up to him, he reaches in his backpack and gives him a candy cane and a Christmas card. Saw it in mid July a few years ago. Was sweet.

Alpaca_Rancher had an uncle who looked like Santa.

My Great Uncle was a professional Mall Santa. He had a big white beard and wore red all year around. It really did look spot on. He loved kids always coming up to him and enjoyed it all year around. I seriously thought he was santa till I was like 10.

And mcketten summed up how it works.

There is a professional Santa in my hometown. All Christmas season he is in another state, playing Santa at a mall. However, all year he keeps his beard and hair trimmed, wears his glasses, and always wears clothing that involves red and green and suspenders at a minimum.

He never breaks character for any child. He also has some great stories, like when he was walking down the street and a kid came running up to him crying because he was lost but then saw Santa and knew he would be fine.

I've talked to him several times about it and he said, "Being Santa is one of the greatest responsibilities I have ever had. It is a way of life, not a job, and you have to treat it that way."

(YouTube link)

Jimmy Fallon continued his annual tradition of making the year’s biggest pop songs into holiday song parodies on The Tonight Show. Fallon got a hand from Rashida Jones in putting holiday cheer into songs you know or at least recognize from 2014. You want to sing along? Here are the lyrics:

“All About That Bass”
Yeah, my mama she cooked me a turkey with all the sides
Then she made me some cranberry sauce and then 12 pumpkin pies
Because you know I'm gonna gain some weight, gain some weight (need sweatpants)
I'm gonna gain some weight, gain some weight (need sweatpants)

“Stay With Me”
Oh won’t you, drink with me?
I hate my, family
They’re insane, it’s plain to see
So won’t you, drink with me?

“Turn Down For What”
Stuff a duck, inside a turkey’s butt…
Turducken for what?
Turducken for what?

“Wiggle”
You know what to do on this Hanukkah
Dreidel dreidel dreidel
Dreidel dreidel dreidel

“Anaconda”
My Secret Santa don't –
My Secret Santa don't –
My Secret Santa don't want none unless you got gifts, hon!

“Bang Bang”
I’ve got a special thing I like to drink, when I get thirsty and it’s Christmastime
Just take some nutmeg and some cinnamon, and then you mix it up it tastes so fine
Egg nog!
Into your mug (Just add some whiskey)
Egg nog!
Getting you drunk (I’m feelin’ tipsy)

“Let It Go”
Mistletoe, mistletoe
Just bought a bunch at the store
Mistletoe, mistletoe
Gonna hang it from my door
I don’t care who I kiss today
Let your tongue stick out
Cold sores never bothered me anyway

“Fireball”
Butterball
Christmas ball
He had a big red suit
With a sack full of loot
With eight reindeers and a sleigh
Had a big round belly like a bowl full of jelly
And he came around on Christmas day…
Santa Claus!

-via Warming Glow

Here’s one way to keep an eye on your cats during cold weather! Redditor ericscheel’s father has a farm and quite a few outdoor cats. He built a box around the outside of a window, complete with a shelf, small doorway, and a cat ramp. The cats cannot help but check it out, then discover it’s a nice warm place to be, and the people inside can see them all in one place. The converse is true as well: the cats get to observe what the people in the house are doing. See a larger version of the pictures here.

Fighting sports analyst Jack Slack takes a look at the TV series Star Trek: TOS and the many fights of Captain James T. Kirk. The Captain managed to punch someone or other around in just about every episode.  

Among all the qualities required to command a ship and its crew, undoubtedly the most important is an officer's ability in hand-to-hand combat. You don't know where you'll be, or what you'll be doing, when your phaser gets knocked out of your hand and goes skidding across the floor. Or when diplomatic discussions and love-making with an alien race will fall through, and you'll have to fist fight for your life.

No man understood this as well as Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Throughout the 2200s, Kirk captained his ship to countless unknown worlds and met a perhaps difficult-to-believe number of hostile civilizations. Often complex political dealings would boil down to a test of Kirk's fighting prowess and he was forced to battle in the knowledge that his failure could leave his crew in jeopardy. Or worse than that—dead.

And since Kirk got into fistfights so often, the producers had to change it up to keep the action sequences from getting too boring. Therefore, we see numerous methods and tricks for disabling the latest antagonist whether he be alien or human. Slack goes over the axe handle strikes, the head scissors, the grappling, and other fighting moves that work so much better on TV than they do in real life. Read about them all at Vice’s Fightland site.  -via Digg

French inventor Christian Poincheval makes pills that will perfume your farts into smelling like violets or roses. And now he has a new product for Christmas, a pill that will make flatulence smell like chocolate! Poincheval has been working on his earth-shattering invention for eight years now.

According to Poincheval's website, the idea for the pills apparently came from a dinner with friends during which nobody could stop farting.

"We were at table with friends and after a hearty meal, we almost suffocated as our farts were smelly," Poincheval writes. "The winds were not very pleasant for our fellow diners. I had to do something."

You can buy these pills for ten euros. There’s also a special powdered version for dog farts. -Thanks, Linda Shaw!

(YouTube link)

This turkey running on a treadmill is not the kind you’re liable to eat. He doesn’t have much breast meat, after all -and it would be hard to catch him! He’s actually a lucky turkey, living the good life at Brown University as a subject in Dr. Thomas Roberts’ studies of animal motion. Read more about the science behind a turkey on a treadmill at Digg.

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The Achao, Chile, volunteer fire department is always ready to respond to an emergency. But the firefighters also dance! In full gear! If you’re in a hurry, you can skip ahead. The dancing starts at about 1:45. The song is "Soy Tu Nene Malo" by Nene Malo. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

When you make lists about failed movies, you might focus on how bad they are, like The Room, or how few people went to see them, like Zyzzyx Road, but if you really want to define a box office bomb, you focus on how much money was lost. Most of the movies on the list of box office bombs at Buzzfeed are fairly recent, because no one spent a hundred million dollars to make a movie more than a couple of decades ago. Plus, a huge marketing and advertising budget will add to the cost that must be made up in ticket sales. Therefore, a movie you may have seen and liked can still be a bomb if it cost more than it earned. That said, you will see movies on the list that you’ve never heard of, despite advertising. They died out that quickly. Cowboys and Aliens, shown above, came in 25th.

There was a fashion craze on college campuses in the 1920s of wearing a full-length raccoon fur coat. Probably the only reference you’ll see to those raccoon coats these days is in vintage cartoons, where they were a device used to identify a character as a college student at a football game. The luxurious coats were visually stunning, but in reality, the fad was mostly confined to Ivy League schools.

I had stumbled upon a snapshot of a moment in fashion history when American Ivy league-ers and young college undergrads began sporting heavy, full-length raccoon coats, which set the trend in 1920s & 30s men’s fashion and sparked a voracious demand for the extravagant garment across the country. If a man could afford a fur coat, he had one; bankers, salesmen and students alike used the style to signify or improve their social status.

They were expensive- several hundred dollars, which was out of reach for most students. That in itself made the raccoon coat a status symbol to be flaunted. Messy Nessy Chic relates the rise and fall of the collegiate raccoon coat in an article with plenty of pictures. The images capture the spirit of the prosperous, carefree Roaring Twenties.

Bears don’t have to wear pants …unless they are in Poland.

Those of us who are able to work while not wearing pants know we have a lot to be thankful for. But sweatpants might be nice when the family comes to visit for Thanksgiving. Especially if they bring pie. This comic from Liz Climo should give you a smile to greet your guests with.  

(YouTube link)

You might be busy preparing your turkey and dressing as you watch this, and you might make the best pumpkin pie eve, but if you learn these fascinating facts about Thanksgiving food, you’ll have something more to say besides “Thank you,” when your dinner guests compliment your cooking. John Green uses this week’s mental_floss List Show to share some trivia about turkeys, dressing/stuffing/filling, potatoes, corn, cranberries, and other traditional Thanksgiving dishes. -via mental_floss

Long-time Neatorama readers might remember Dug, the lawn dinosaur in Redwood City, California. Dug gets dressed up for holidays, so right now he is sporting his turkey costume for Thanksgiving. And in case you didn’t see it, here’s a picture of him in this year’s Halloween costume. Redditor sarcasticonomist, who lives with Dug, says the chain is to keep him out of traffic. The human foot under his left leg was a gift. Happy Thanksgiving, Dug!

What's not to love about holidays? You get to take off work, everyone's in a great mood, and there's always plenty of delicious food lying around. Wouldn't it be great if we could sustain all that fun and excitement throughout the year? Well, you're in luck. So sit back, crack open a Good Book, and get ready to celebrate these 10 major religious holidays that still aren't on Hallmark's radar.

1. Sikhism: Guru Nanak's Day

(Image credit: Flickr user Rajesh Pamnani)

Although most Sikhs live in the religion's homeland of India, Sikh communities have become increasingly common in the West. (Those men in turbans you might think are Muslims are most likely Sikh.) But wherever they reside, you can bet Guru Nanak's Day will be celebrated in style.

For the first couple of centuries after Sikhism was founded, 10 gurus served in succession as the leaders of the religion. When the 10th guru died, however, no single leader emerged, and the tradition of having a sole guru was abandoned. Not surprisingly, many Sikh holidays hearken back to events in the lives of these great men. And one of the biggest, no doubt, is the festival honoring the birth of the first guru, Nanak.

Guru Nanak was born to a Hindu family in 1469, and around the time he turned 30, he had a mystical experience that became the basis for the religion. While bathing in a river, he plunged into the water and didn't resurface for three days. During that time, he later said, he was communing with God. Drawing on elements of both Hinduism and Islam, Nanak journeyed far and wide, preaching his new faith of Sikhism and compiling his teachings into a scripture known as the Guru Granth Sahib.

Today, Nanak's birthday, which falls in October or November (depending on the lunar calendar), marks a joyous three-day celebration for Sikhs around the world. As part of the festivities, some communities undertake a ritual known as the Akhand Path, a kind of marathon reading of Sikh scriptures, usually continuing nonstop for the entire 72-hour holiday and ending on Nanak's actual birthday. For the slightly less studious, there are grandiose processions that typically take place the day before Guru Nanak's birthday, during which devotees wave the Sikh flag, brass bands play, and martial-arts teams show off their swordsmanship.

2. Shinto: Shichigosan

(Image credit: Flickr user 夫悧努 財弟)

The name Shichigosan literally translates to "seven five three," but (despite our best guesses) this holiday isn't a celebration of football plays or ATM codes. Rather, the numbers reference the ages of the festival's guests of honor—children ages 7, 5, and 3. Shichigosan, which falls on the weekend closest to November 15, serves as a kind of rite of passage holiday for the Shinto faithful, and it's popular in Japan, where Shintoism—a belief system that values nature, ritual purity, and the worship of spirits called kami—is one of the dominant religions.

The TV marathon has become a holiday custom in America, whatever the holiday. For the four (or five) day Thanksgiving weekend, there are plenty, whether you want to binge on Law & Order: SVU episodes, Pawn Stars, Indiana Jones movies, or Thanksgiving episodes of Friends. That’s just the beginning: 13th Annual National Dog Show follows the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, as it always does. A TV guide at The Daily Beast lists Christmas movies and specials as well as marathons.

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Now that the trailer for the movie Jurassic World is out, let’s all find problems with the dinosaurs in it. It happened with the first Jurassic Park movies, I think there were three of them. Movies, that is, not problems. Since the first Jurassic Park movie came out, we found out that dinosaurs often had feathers and probably quite a bit of color. And scientists have already weighed in with their criticisms of Jurassic World.

But see, the filmmakers expected this, and did an end-run around such quibbles by giving us a “hybrid,” genetically-modified, improved dinosaur. That could be anything, not necessarily tied to any real dinosaurs that ever lived.  

In today’s xkcd comic, Randall Munroe references Jurassic World and its “improved” dinosaur, which looks strangely like the T.rex from Dinosaur Comics. Hey, it could be worse.