Hello everyone. Welcome to Conspiruality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.

I'm Matthew Remski. We are on Instagram and threads at Conspiruality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free,

plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.

Today's bonus is called the Blessed Neo-KFabe of Santa Claus.

So you might have heard me describe this,

but I'll just repeat briefly that when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s,

I was a student at St. Michael's Choir School,

which was founded in the 1930s to provide choral music for St. Michael's Cathedral,

which is the flagship church of the Archdiocese of Toronto.

There were two really busy times of year.

One was Easter, but of course the other one was Christmas, starting in Advent and preparing for carol services

and the big Christmas concert that the school put on at Massey Hall, and then a

flurry of high masses at the regular Sunday times, but then also late into the evening with

the peak solemnities taking place at midnight on Christmas Eve and also New Year's Eve.

That was my reality.

That was the world to me.

My sense of time and daily routine revolved around the ritual year.

And every year told a mythic but also human story

that went from a humble birth on the darkest night of the year to a bloody

and lonely but somehow redemptive and life-giving sacrifice in the spring. Summer and fall were the

off-season, I guess, the empty time, time to pause and prepare for the next whirlwind cycle.

Baseball was in the summer, and that, unlike the liturgical drama, seemed timeless

...