Letters to the Editor
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I have problems with the whole Santa Claus thing
None of my friends really pushed a belief in Santa on their kids, though my sister did with hers. Sometimes I wonder if instilling a belief in Santa is a mistake, but it's a hard issue for me to come to a conclusion about.
Yes, I remember the magic of Chistmas as a kid, and it is different when Santa leaves the picture. But there's just something innately wrong about instilling in your child an idea that is a complete fabrication, knowing that at some point they are going to find out. For some reason it was no real blow for me to find out the whole thing was imaginary. I wasn't upset or traumatized. My my oldest niece, who just found out last year (she had just turned 13), never seemed bugged, but quickly adopted an "I can't believe she thinks this is real" attitude towards her little sister. I wondered if her eye-rolling was a way to cover up feeling sad that she no longer believes herself.
I may be way overanalyzing this, but it seems to me you're setting a kid up to wonder if everything really wonderful and special is untrue, just an elaborate ruse. It strikes me that a whole lot more can be effected by discovering the truth about Santa than just Santa. As an adult, I've never been sure this tradition is sound.
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the "set up"
Yes, Godmonkey, it's a lot of work for nothing. Six or so years ago, I was bribing my older kid (8 going on 18) to not ruin it for the younger ones. It's all just stupid. We raise our kids to know that they are safe at night and the doors are locked & all, yet somehow some fat guy from the mall can sneak in(!)
My BFF has a kid whom she has raised to know that: on Christmas morning gifts "appear". She explains it as "the magic of the season". Santa?: "Some people think he's the magic, others think that it is bigger than that".
I wish I had met her when my kids were little!
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39 and still believe
My son, at age 3, told me point-blank that Santa doesn't exist because "We don't have a chimney and reindeer don't fly." He was right, of course, but he missed the point completely and I have spend the subsequent eight years trying to make it. Presents from Mom tend to be on the dull, dorky side, while the good stuff, the stuff I have to save for, comes from Santa. I've even managed to pull off a few miracles, including getting a live bird in a 3' cage into the house at midnight on Christmas Eve without waking my kid.
Now, at age 11, he's asking hard, logistical questions. He has the same rational, literal mind that he did as a toddler, and told me that the evidence against is much greater than the evidence in favor. He has even set up a few tests that I'm not sure I can pass. I might be able to pull it off this year, but I'm not so sure. This could be the year I get busted.
So what? That means that this is the year he finds out that that bird wasn't just the same kind of bird as the one he fell in love with at the pet store. It is indeed that very bird. Other things, too, will be revealed as coming from Mom, that I'm not the holiday idiot I seem to be. The end of this game is looking to be just as much fun as that Christmas eight years ago when it began.
This could very well be the year when he finds out the truth. Yes, there is a transition from childhood to adulthood involved here, but it's not about telling the difference between fantasy and fact. It's about the difference between receiving and giving. Yes, it's nice to have big boxes to unwrap on Christmas morning, but how much better is it to see someone's eyes light up? That's what Santa Claus is about. It's about moving from the selfishness of childhood into (what should be) the generosity of adulthood. Disillusionment shouldn't have anything to do with it.
Or have we lost all sense that metaphors can contain truth or point to truth without being literally true?
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In Soviet Russia...
...Santa Claus was instead called "Grandfather Frost", wore a big fur boyar cap, and was married to "Snow Hag". (That in itself may say a lot about our 'national character') But most importantly, he wasn't a myth. He was very much a real guy who you would go to see at some place or who would come to your house in the daytime and hand you your presents directly instead of being this creepy guy who sneaks down your chimney and whom you never actually see. Sure, maybe you believed he was really magical when you were like 3, but soon you realized that your parents were taking you to a different place each time, or saw them casually chatting with him before paying him and saying thank you. Nobody made as big a deal of it as they do here. It was very much like the question of God. People often think that the USSR was a country of atheists, but the truth was that people really just didn't think about it much one way or the other, because they weren't bombarded with it from early childhood. Same with this - it was a pretty low-key tradition, not a ubiquitously commercialized one. So if you asked a Russian kid whether he believed in Grandfather Frost, he would most likely be confused by the very question itself. Bottom line - we didn't have to deal with this kind of crap, and I think we were better off for it.
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Secular Christmas
I'm an agnostic, raised in a liberal Christian household. I don't want anyone to take what I'm about to say as an attack, because I don't mean it that way.... I'm just musing in public. :)
In all this talk about the magic of Christmas, I've seen no mention of the magic coming from the religious story and its larger meaning. When I was a kid, it was clear to me that my parents viewed the magic of the season to stem from the story of Jesus' birth and its meaning for humankind. They made no big show to convince us that Santa was real. I knew from the time I could read (5 years old?) that he wasn't, because his handwriting was the same as my mom's! Realizing this wasn't traumatic and didn't diminish the magic of the holiday for me.
I don't have kids so obviously it isn't an issue I've had to grapple with, but I'm not sure if I am comfortable with the idea of celebrating Christmas if I have removed myself from the rest of the religion. But I also loved Christmas as a kid, with the lights and the tree which smelled so good and the food and relatives and gifts and everything else. I wonder, would it possible to explain the magic of the season as having to do with a myth about a child who was born a long time ago who loved others so much that he gave his own life for them? (or whatever else you might want to take out of the Jesus story, which has some good stuff in it, aside from the religion that got built up around it.) This would side-step telling them that a fat man is literally coming into everyone's house in one night to deliver presents, something which is obviously not true....but would it be injecting too much religiosity into an otherwise secular (for good reason) household?
Maybe the only concrete thing I can offer is, LW, if your household is religious, perhaps you offer your daughter religious reasons why the season is magical, so that learning that Santa doesn't exist won't take the magic away? And if not, maybe it's possible for us secularists to find meaning in the myth of Jesus' life that doesn't have to be religious, per se, but can still be magical?