The Santa Clause
It's the most morally ambiguous ti-i-i-ime of the year.
At least, that's how I feel sometimes. I know a lot of people don't agree with me on this, but something about the whole Santa Claus palaver makes me wiggy. (Sorry, I've been watching a lot of old-school Buffy lately. Look out for late-90s Joss Wheedon phraseology.) There's the magic of Christmas, the wonder in their wee sparkling eyes, yada yada; but it's also mass deception of children by adults. Ratified, sponsored, and encouraged whole-heartedly by the media, egged on by the economy, which of course has no particular stake in this.*
Originally, we thought we might get away without doing Santa at all. B was more in favour of this than I was - I had practical misgivings about being the parent whose child had ruined the holiday season for his entire class with a well-timed sceptical comment to a sensitive fellow five-year-old. As time went on I realised that TV, the mall, and even such innocent and educational props as the seasonal table in the library make it impossible to ignore Santa and all his trappings. Sure enough, by the time he was three, Monkey had figured it out for himself, with little or no input from us. We never sat down to tell him that a man in a red suit would bring him presents on Christmas Eve; then again, so far we haven't sat him down to tell him that it's all a fabrication of the Coca-Cola Company either.
Our vague and fairly ad-hoc tactic is this: to underplay the Santa element as much as possible, and worry about answering concrete questions when they come up. So we don't visit Santa at the mall, we don't write a letter to Santa (at least, not so far), and we haven't talked about him very much at all yet this year. We do stockings, and they are nominally from Santa, who came down the chimney, but any serious investigation into the physics of this would fall at the first hurdle since my parents (at whose house we have Christmas) have a closed fireplace.
I know some people (in real life, even) who tell their kids that Santa is a game parents play with their children. I wholeheartedly admire this approach, but until faced with a point-blank question, I'm not going to bring it up myself.
Jessica at Balancing Everything (who used to be VeryMom), had a lovely post about this subject. You should read it, but the gist is that her five-year-old knew Santa wasn't real, but she could see that he really wanted to believe, so she helped him recover a little of the magic for a couple of years; but not without some misgivings. I know Monkey would want to believe too, the way he wants to believe in superheroes, the way I always wanted to believe in a little bit of magic; that maybe, just maybe, there had been an extra present at the end of my bed that was a surprise even to my parents the next morning.
We had a close call a few weeks ago when Monkey asked from the back of the car whether the tooth fairy was real, but luckily he didn't wait for an answer. Possibly he knows that some questions are better left unasked.
*And don't get me started about the Elf on the Shelf (as described here, because I never miss a chance to link to my favourite bloggers). I know some people swear by these magical critters for getting their kids to be all kinds of beautifully behaved coming up to Christmas, but I just think it's all wrong. (No offence if you have one and love it. My blog; my opinion.)
I read about someone (in the comments on that post of Linda's, actually) whose teacher got one for the class: that presses all the wrong buttons for me - how can you insist that schools have non-denominational "winter celebrations", and then think it's okay to tell the kids that this here elf will report back nightly to Santa on your behaviour until Christmas, so you'd better watch out. If that happened in my kid's class, I'd be pretty peeved.
posted by Maud @ 7:05 PM
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We don't push the whole Santa thing with pictures, etc., but the boys still believe. The older two I think know somewhere it's a crock.
You've become such an American! Demanding the separation of church and state! :) When I dared to quietly mention to some other Mums that maybe just maybe it was a wee bit odd that our children were doing a Nativity!!!! play at their public secular British school, when some of them, such as mine, are absolutely not Christian, they looked at me like a lunatic. They just could not comprehend that perhaps the Muslim children (which there are a number of) might object. Not to mention us poor atheists. I'd take an elf over Mary and Jesus anyday. But I do agree it seems an odd thing to have in a classroom.
We don't really talk much about Santa. But we don't point-blank say he doesn't exist either. Seems the easiest path at the moment.
Monkey's class was singing S-A-N-T-A to the tune of B-I-N-G-O when I arrived to pick up W. today.
I'm one of those game people. I stopped believing in Santa when I was six. Some world-weary 7-year-old said "You know Santa is just your mom, right." And poof, Santa was just my mom. It was so fast I think I must have known already but hadn't thought of it. My sister and I still got presents "from Santa" well into my college years, because my mother enjoyed the game.
"The Night Before Christmas" was one of my favorite books when I was little. We have a lovely copy for the boys. W. knows the difference between being "real in real-life" and "being real in the story." (You know how I feel about stories.)
I'm also opposed to the Elf on the Shelf, for any number of reasons. Small children need immediate consequences, for one thing, not something that won't happen for a couple of weeks. And I'm not willing to pull the trigger and cancel Christmas over whatever profoundly annoying thing my kids have cooked up. (I'm also not a fan of asking people to behave so they don't go to Hell, and I'm one of them crazy church-going types.) I think there are better reasons for good behavior and we ought to help our kids internalize them as quickly as they can.
Honestly, Miranda, I think I'd prefer a Nativity play to the Elf, so long as they were clear about what it was. It's not so much separation of church and state that I want as separation of fact from fiction. As well as what JeCaThRe says about it being a bad way to get good behaviour.
Hmmm, shall we not mention the fiction that is the virgin birth? Ooops, sorry. I let my ex-Catholic get out again.
I do agree that the elf on the shelf is a very poor way to discipline children and the whole Santa thing is kind of bizarre. But to be honest, the fictions of the church have caused genocide and child rape for millenia and I'd rather my child not be taught them at his public secular school. If I wanted that stuff, I could have sent him to a Catholic or Church of Wales school. Santa Clause seems pretty minor to me in comparison.
Yes, yes, yes. I know. I suppose my feeling, informed as it is by my upbringing, is that the nativity falls at least in the realm of general knowledge and is a reasonable story to teach (all included fictions aside), whereas the elf is just base deception. (I realise others may feel that any teaching about God is base deception too, but I'm willing to let that go in the Maybe column for now, seeing as how I don't know either.)
Big subject, itty bitty blog post.
Of course. Of course. I mostly needed to get my frustations out as even my born and bred atheist husband didn't object to the nativity play. Apparently, in New Zealand, though they tend to be mostly atheists, they still do the whole nativity thing at Christmas - it has become as much a part of their secular Christmas as Santa is a part of the US secular Chistmas tradition. So I wonder if all of our various objections are really just culturally-based. To me Santa is general knowledge. Jesus and God are a whole other can of worms.
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