I'm currently close to finishing the background on a needle point of a blue Santa with wild animals. All the stories about Santa being based on Catholic Saints is entirely a load of crap. The entire midwinter holiday is about a yearly event that my grandfather established after he left the China region, when the Persians or pre persians developed a method for sickening the people who had gathered around him too fast so that only diagnosticians were able to correctly use the herbs that my grandfather had showed them, and the ever changing recipes required so much time and effort that the price of them continued to rise and rose concerns and rumors that my Grandfather was profiteering. He hadn't ever really bonded with the people in the China region, he looked different and they were no help in resolving how he felt about that feeling the same way. So there was some pendulum activity when he started to live among people who didn't have that problem with his appearance, and as often happens when highly educated and developed people live among people who experience a sudden jump in quality of life that they did not discover step by step for themselves, they had no salience of the difference between him and a god and so God had to weaken him and when it became clear to the people around him that he needed their help to maintain the advances he had brought with him, they threw the baby out with the bathwater as has happened with all of us, and also saw that they could aspire to higher degrees of power than he'd ever thought they as individuals would benefit people with, as also has happened to all of us in some iteration or another.
But he'd worked all that out before he came here. He wondered if the people already here would thinking him that white god that they sometimes wanted to call different pirates that had washed up here at relatively regular intervals, but it was clear that there was something in being utterly morally bankrupt that was necessary in that. So he killed all their men off and put a powerful curse on them within a dream in the middle of the night at some point that forever bound him to this region. He knew that the Huns were trying to get here, and that others were on their way, and that if people were unprepared they'd unleash a powerful medicine on the entire world that would set us back so far in any kind of advancement that we might not overcome it in the life expectancy of the planet. So he weakened the people here. They had already weakened when corn beans and squash arrived, but they'd overcome that weakening. They stopped eating so many mushrooms and didn't know of ganoderma, or the mushroom family that had made the Chinese the first of the widely intellectually advanced people to arise from evolution, except as a form of tinder. But they also didn't have parasite issues. They'd have likely hit a wall real fast if they'd gotten out of here, but we learn these things from experience when experience paints a different picture, its hard to see the turns sometimes.
