Letters to the Editor
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She knows
Of course she knows, she's 13 years old and living in this world? She just wants to believe and there's nothing wrong with that, as other posters have said. However, at age 13, it's time for the parents to stop talking about "Santa's coming" or "that is from Santa" or anything else that suggests Santa is real. It's time for a lot of noncommital "what do you think?" responses when she asks how he's getting in the house.
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WAYYY too long....
Yeah, sorry, but you have waited wayyy too long to tell it straight to this kid. If she's THIRTEEN, she is probably menstuating (the average age now is 11 and a half!), and I can't see waiting around for Santa to come down the chimney and eat his cookies and milk, all the while she's wearing TAMPAX. Sorry, that does not compute.
If you are old enough to know the straight story about where babies come from, and heck, today old enough to be innoculated against HPV, then I say you are old enough to know this is a fairy tale, a very nice one, but a fairy tale nonetheless. Anything else is cruel. School children can be very cruel to the guileless and naive among themselves.
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i had a friend like this
A girl I knew in high school told me she believed in Santa Claus until she was 13 years old. Friends, teachers, and even her parents and younger brothers (!) tried to convince her that Santa wasn't real and she just figured they lacked sufficient faith. I don't remember what finally turned her, but I'd bet this kid has already heard about Santa and has chosen to ignore the doubters.
The year I saw Santa was the year I was really starting to have questions. I was six and already most of my friends were expressing pretty deep skepticism. To this day I'm not sure if it was one of my parents I saw as I got up to go to the bathroom, or just a hallucination brought on by how desperately I still wanted to believe, but I'll never forget the image of him standing at my fireplace, laying a finger aside of his nose.
I don't think you have anything to worry about. People will believe in Santa for as long as they need him - but given our culture, no longer.
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With all due respect
Pi does not repeat any digits because it is irrational (transcedental, even!) and it has been proven to be so by several different means.
You'd have an easier time arguing that the earth doesn't revolve around the sun, because at least there's some physical wiggle-room for a misunderstanding. But you could not make a valid argument that "π might repeat digits or terminate at some point" without stepping outside conventional definitions of those terms. It's just not possible.
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Palpable Nonsense or Moral Bankruptcy?
Put this in the (possibly) better late than never, but I have to get this off my overburdened bosom. When one becomes morally confused, directionless, perhaps too tolerant/permissive unable to make a stand in a relativistic worldview, one is left with turning pablum into "beauty." I am ashamed of Cary. His statements ring with hypocrisy and half-felt or completely unfelt bromides. Belief in the gift-bestrewing fat man is not innocent. Get a moral bearing, people.
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the religious complication
I'm glad people brought it up. I'm from an atheist/agnostic family, and I believed in Santa until 10 or so for the simple reason that I believed in Santa as long as I did Jesus. This caused me no end of confusion as a growing child - how did people who told me Santa was real not believe in God? And - especially - vice versa? The omniscient old guy who gives all life does not seem very different from the omniscient old guy who "sees you when you're sleeping" and gives all shiny things.
People trying to disabuse their kids of the santa idea should remember that that's the stepping stone to: "What about the Easter Bunny?" and, if he/she is smart, "What about God?"
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Childhood holds many "lies"
I'm always amused when I hear adults getting outraged about parents "lying" to their kids about Santa. These adults must not know kids very well. Kids' heads are naturally full of fantasy. Do these outraged adults think parents should sit down after every book-reading and specifically tell the kid not to believe what they just heard? I noticed when my oldest was little that Santa was as real to him as Zeus and Scrooge and Big Bird. I remember him asking questions like, What's bigger, elves or gnomes? I did not serve as the reality police.
That said, the presents being signed by "Santa" and the leaving cookies out for Santa -- that does encourage kids to believe in Santa even after they just naturally stop thinking of gnomes and mythical characters as real. At some age, you do have to actively "lie" to keep them in their fantasy, and I avoid that.
If I were LW, when her stepdaughter expresses skepticism about, say, Santa getting down a chimney, I'd say something like, "Hmmm, that's a really good point." Encourage the skepticism. She will accept the truth (I'm sure she knows it on some level) when she is ready.
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She's humoring you.
If your step-daughter is even half as intelligent as you say, she's humoring you.
Or, if you want to be cynical, she's scamming you to stay on the Santa gravy train.
But as an only child who did the same thing until I was well into my teens: the first one is my story, and I'm sticking to it.
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Santa Claus
It kind of makes me wonder what you people are really doing when you rush to the malls, buying all these things and wrapping them up for your trees. I mean, are you doing it because you fear the guilt stemming from a perception of yourself as empty-handed, stingy, or poor? is it a need to conform to some ritual that would otherwise be meaningless without the external pressures? or are you doing it because you believe in some sort of magic that arises from the pretty paper you use to wrap those gifts? It seems to me that many of us are so obsessed with social appearances that we forget how important it is to really have some sort of meaning to our rituals beyond the cover story, beyond the spin. Some of you are far too intolerant to life's quirks to ask the above questions because that would force you to look beneath the surface. I think we, as Americans with our hi-tech toys and our obsession with buying things during the holidays, are far too eager to transform our teenagers into sullen, bitter young adults who are just as simplistic and shallow as the rest of the bunch--and what better way than to kill the creative spark?
As a pagan academic who was raised christian, I tend to think of the Santa Claus story as one that is pliable, a myth that can and should be altered to fit the times and the needs. If I can believe in gods/goddesses, fairies and witches, and if christians can believe in angels and demons and a god who created the planet in 7 days, well, then, what's wrong with encouraging a teenager to imagine Santa Claus as female, as suggested by one letter writer (Geneva), or as some sort of energy, as another letter writer mentioned? I would hate to think that we are so angry with life that we would want to kill hope and optimism in a child just to maintain the appearance of conformity to American cynicism.