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Part 2: The Truth About Santa Claus
Pdad accepts the fact that I teach our children the truth about Santa because he thinks it doesn’t ultimately make much of a difference. He doesn’t believe it’s a problem to teach children to believe in Santa but he also doesn’t think that they miss out on much when they are taught not to believe in Santa. I disagree on both points. Telling our children the truth about Santa maintains our ability to teach and testify about truly important things. That is the upside. Unfortunately, there is also a downside . . .
Unlike Pdad, I do think that our children are less excited about Christmas than they would be if they believed in Santa. They have missed out on something that was a significant and fun part of my childhood. I regret the loss.
Consider:
My children do not believe
- that reindeer will be on our roof
- that a jolly plump old elf will be improbably sliding down our chimney.
- that any magic will be taking place at our house on Christmas Eve
Children love magic and they love animals. They love anticipation. While my children still anticipate seeing their presents Christmas morning, they don’t anticipate a miracle taking place. They don’t anticipate magic occurring in their very own home. There is no mystery. The children have no breathless wonder as to how it all works.
They don’t believe
- that someone at the North Pole is waiting to receive their letters and
- thinking about them individually in planning out which toys to make or get them.
- that a stranger is bringing a sleigh full of gifts for them just because he is incredibly nice or
- that their behavior will be evaluated and they will be rewarded accordingly
I don’t have the same reputation with my children that Santa would have. I am not larger than life. I am subject to financial constraints. My children know that Mama says “no” to a lot of toys. Under other circumstances, they might have hoped or believed that maybe Santa would say yes.
Amelia, our oldest, was the first child to undergo my anti-Santa regime. I was at my most vehement then. I insisted, as soon as she could talk, that Santa was not real. Amelia took me by surprise. Her reaction was not something I had foreseen. She was desperately in love with the idea of Santa. She wanted to sit on Santa’s lap at the mall. This was despite the fact that approaching the long line of parents and eager children I would remind her that this was a fake Santa and there was no such thing as a true Santa. So we waited in line for a long time so that she could talk to a Santa she didn’t believe in. She craved all the emblems of Santa I tried to banish from the house. She wanted to talk about Santa as if he were real. This was upsetting to my militant self.
Amelia at 2 1/2
Looking back, I wonder how I became so misguided. I let a good idea get so extreme that it became bad. In a household that otherwise embraced the imagination, where games of pretend were welcomed, enjoyed and encouraged, I wouldn’t let my Santa-loving girl pretend about Santa. I was afraid. Like a Muslim raising children in a Christian country or like a Christian raising children in an Islamic country, I wanted to indoctrinate my child in my own way. It was harder than I would have supposed.
There is a conspiracy among adults to encourage children to believe in Santa. It is similar to the conspiracy through which adults encourage children to become good big brothers or big sisters when they welcome a new baby into the home. You take your children to church. Spying your expanding belly and your small child, the well-meaning folk ask, “Oh, are you going to be a big brother soon? How wonderful! I bet you will do such a good job of taking care of your new sister!” You go to the grocery store and the person at the bakery, a random shopper in produce, and the cashier all say the same. The big brother/big sister conspiracy is a wonderfully helpful one. Amelia would not have been the good big sister she was without it. But the Santa conspiracy is even more powerful. At church, at school, at the grocery store, at the mall, at family parties, all the adults in the young child’s world work together to inculcate belief in Santa.
What is a mama who doesn’t think Santa faith healthy to do? I will give you a hint learned from experience–the right answer is not banishing images of Santa from the house nor repeating over and over that Santa isn’t real when little ones want to pretend that he is.
Things have been different for Duncan. At the same time that my position softened, and I began to realize that it would be okay to pretend about Santa–even fun–if we knew that we were pretending, a different child of mine became old enough to hear about Santa. Duncan is not Amelia. He knows the truth about Santa and thinks that sitting on Santa’s lap is for people who don’t know any better. How silly! While Amelia loved it when people would tell her stories about Santa, Duncan is bemused and puzzled. Why do all these grownups keep talking as if Santa were real?
As always, there is no one size fits all approach to raising children. Pretending with Duncan about Santa would be pointless; it would have been a lot of fun with Amelia. I’m curious as to what will be right for Kate–and will I figure it out in time?
What have you done about Santa in your house? Do you feel good about it? Why?
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8 Responses to “Where Santa Theory and Practice Collide”
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This is an interesting series of posts. We make it a point not to lie to our kids about Santa but we have never gone out of our way to make sure they know he isn’t real. Maybe my children aren’t normal, but it was clear from an early age that they knew Santa wasn’t real but chose to believe in him because they thought it was fun. Fortunately, our Santa-neutral stance hasn’t hurt our ability to teach them about more important things.
Although I understand your points about credibility (and I have concerns about where the “Santa myth” displaces the real meaning of Christmas), I think in the end I come down on the side of Santa, at least until the age of six or seven… it is one of the only chances children get to experience “magic” in a wide environment.
All other make-believe tends to be squashed by anyone outside the immediate family of the child involved (even if unintentionally). Santa is the one magical idea in childhood that children receive encouragement and support on from adults all around them, even ones they (and/or their parents) don’t know. The Santa myth lets make-believe stretch just a bit further (and to slightly older children) precisely because of the unwritten cultural rules that adults have agreed to. In that way, I think it is good for adults and community as well… it puts so many adults on the same “team.” Is it an important team? Is it an important thing that we’ve all agreed to, the idea of a magical fat man with gifts? no, not really. But the size of the team!! The number of people who have tacitly agreed to the “Santa rules”! That is something worthwhile…
“I won’t take this magical moment of childhood away from your children. I’ll help you keep the magic alive, even if I don’t know you. We might not agree about how to raise our kids. My kids might not believe in Santa. I might not be Christian. But I know that many children around me believe in this magic, and though I don’t know you, when I see you in a store I will do my part to help you keep the magic alive.”
I think that is part of the “Christmas spirit.” If someone tried to make a rule about this, it would never work, but voluntarily and without anything to gain from it, the vast majority of adults are willing to encourage (or at least not willfully discourage) the Santa myth in the children around them. I honestly think the feeling of being part of the same “team” with people you’ve never met before is a positive force in the adult world during the holidays.
……………
This actually brings me to a question that I’ve had for ages…
What is the effect of “non-believing” children on the “Santa-believing” children around them?
There is that “conspiracy” among adults to keep the belief alive and well in children, regardless of whose children they are… but what about the children?
Adults in America make a concerted effort to keep the myth alive ostensibly because they don’t want to ruin anything for a child… but I’m sure Duncan is too young to share that point of view. Do you say anything to your children about keeping their opinions to themselves? do they feel free to tell their friends or cousins what they believe? do you worry about that at all? is it the case that kids believe what the want (as Amelia did) regardless of who tells them otherwise, so it doesn’t really matter? (having no children myself, I have no way of knowing…)
Rachel–Why is it important for children to believe in (not just pretend about) magic? It is definitely fun, but is there some reason in addition to the fun? What is the specific utility of the society-wide pretend?
I think the more non-believing children there are, the greater chances there are that believing children will find out (that is how I myself found out). That said, because many people are so strongly attached to the Santa game, I don’t feel comfortable legislating what other parents do with their children. Therefore I have worked hard to teach my children that they must allow other children to believe as their parents have taught them. Santa is not something we talk about with our friends. I think this has worked, but it has made Duncan feel awkward. People start talking to him about Santa and he is not allowed to say that he thinks it’s hooey, but he doesn’t want to act like he believes it either. He gets very quiet, very smiley, and very fidgety.
Christian–I am curious as to why/how your children figured out fairly young the truth about Santa Claus. Are they less gullible, more scientifically minded, or did they have friends who told them? Or maybe your neutral standpoint had a lot to do with this? As my position softens, it seems like a neutral standpoint has a lot to recommend it. However, as I consider it, I can’t work out how this would go in practice. How does a neutral standpoint play out Christmas Eve and Christmas morning? And before that? Do you help them to hang stockings? Do you help them to set out a treat for Santa? Do you deliver some gifts to them differently than others? Do you talk about Santa? Help them to write letters? What about Santa at the mall? What do you say and do?
I don’t know how to answer your question about why my children figured it out because I don’t think our children are that different from most. I think that most children (certainly not all) intuitively understand that Santa is fun to believe in but not real by about the first grade. Ben figured it out before that. Sam and Maggie did too but Sam and Maggie both chose to believe in Santa for a couple years after that because it was fun for them. Ben doesn’t believe it at all — probably because he wants to fit in with Sam and Maggie.
You asked how we practice this and I’m having trouble answering that too because we don’t have an established Santa policy. We mostly play it by ear based on the personality of the child we are talking to at the time. Our children receive gifts from Santa (even though they don’t believe in him) and we have taken them to visit Santa but because they are scared to death of strangers this has never gone well. If any of them asks us if Santa is real, we usually answer it with the question, “What do you think?” and when they say, “I don’t believe in him” we say, “I think you’re right”. It goes something like that, but it’s never the same and our responses do vary depending on who we are talking to and how old they are.
Maybe my position isn’t exactly neutral because while I have never answered a direct question about Santa dishonestly, I do think there is value in make believe if for no other reason than just because it is fun. We play make believe all the time with our kids. When one of them dresses up I don’t stop them and say, “I hope you know that you aren’t really a ballerina.” To keep them entertained on a Sunday, I made up a story about how our first four children were eaten by a snake that lives in the attic. My kids love that story and ask to hear it all the time. They even asked my dad about it and he was smart enough to play along. Sometimes my kids pretend to believe the story and they love it. Kacy told our kids that she is a selkie and that I have her selkie skin hidden from her. The kids love that story too and a couple times a year Maggie will come to me and say, “Is Mom really a selkie?” just to get me to play along. I tell her that Mom’s skin is in the attic (probably keeping the snake warm) and “please, please don’t tell Mom or she’ll go get it.”
None of this has ever hurt my credibility when it comes to talking about more important things. No child has ever come to me and asked, “Is Jesus Christ real?” I think that to them that would be a strange question. So while we make it a point not to lie to our children, we also feel comfortable playing make believe because it has proven to be both fun and it has never gotten in the way of teaching the Gospel. Maybe that’s not a neutral position, but since we’ve never answered a direct question about Santa dishonestly, I described it as neutral.
You won’t be surprised to discover that I am more on the side of Pdad and Christian. I don’t know that children need to make believe, but they certainly enjoy it. And I think that they seldom have any real difficulty telling the difference between make-believe and the truth.
Besides, I have never met someone who ceased believing in Christ because they had been fooled about Santa. My parents went out of their way to convince me that Santa was real when I ceased to believe in him at the age of about 7. As a result, against all of my friends’ testimony, I continued to believe until I was about 11. When I realized that my friends were right, I was embarrassed, but I it never occurred to me that there was some kind of parallel between belief in Santa and belief in Jesus.
OK, here is your first comment from someone is decidedly pro-Santa. I have to preface the stating of my opinion by saying that I was raised by a mother who took every little fantasy and imaginary creature very seriously. The easter bunny left meticulous flour or jelly bean trails from the door to our baskets, and even took several nibbles out of the celery and carrots we left out for him. Santa was meticulously promoted, as was the existence of fairies, leprechauns, and baby angels whose antics controlled the weather (”When it’s raining, it means the baby angels are playing in the bathtub and splashing water everywhere.”) Why did my mother choose to teach us those things? Simple. I think she thought it was fun. She had fun making believe, and we had fun making believe as well. Even when we got old enough that we really knew better, we chose to suspend our disbelief because it was more fun to play along with the game.
In the end, I think that’s what it really ends up being–a game. Just like kids play with their imaginary friends, or imagine they’re pirates or astronauts or flying unicorns, they play at living in a world that breaks the rules of our normal world, that includes a little bit of mystery, of magic. While they might take these make believe games more seriously when they’re younger, as they grow older they figure out that’s not how the world really works. But it’s still fun to pretend.
While I don’t go to the extent my mother did to build these imaginary world for us, I have been known to leave “evidence” of fairies living in our trees, and have nibbled on quite a few carrots and Christmas cookies. I don’t think I’ll ever be the one to outright tell my kids the truth about Santa–they’ll find out some other way, I’m sure. Until then, nobody was ever hurt by playing this game. I have just as much fun playing it now as my kids do, I think.