The Santa Claus Thing

         In this memory I am three years old.  I am on the piano stool, on my stomach, turning it around slowly and my older sister is telling me to hurry and go to bed as otherwise Santa will not come.

         And something clicks in my brain.  I am thinking, how can this be true?  How can one person get to so many houses in one night, all at just about the same time?

         And that’s when I figured out the Santa Claus thing. 

         Years later as the parent with a little daughter, I must decide.  What am I going to tell her about Santa Claus?  Am I going to try to make her think the myth is real?  Am I going to lie to her?  She is bright and I know she will figure it out in no time, and then wonder why we lied.  So I decided to tell her the truth from the start.  She knows about pretend.  All bright children pretend. 

         So that is what we told her.  Santa Claus is a pretend.  It is fun to pretend we believe and talk about him as if he’s real but we still know he’s a pretend.

         She was all right with that.  It didn’t take the fun out of Christmas to know that the doll and the bear and the books were bought by Mommy and Daddy and Grandma. 

         I didn’t want to send her the message that not everything we tell her is necessarily true.  I didn’t want her to get the idea that believing is for babies.  I didn’t want her to figure it out in her own mind and then wonder why we tried to fool her with a fairy tale.  I could see that this was a way to leave her all the fun of pretending to believe without counting down to the day when she would realize she had been fooled.  Fooled by the two people she most needed to trust and believe.

         You can’t raise a child in America without having to explain Santa Claus sooner or later.  From Halloween on, Santa Claus is everywhere, in his red suit and his white beard and all the rest of the traditional picture.  So if the child has the basics straight, that Santa is a pretend we can all have fun with, she is free to enjoy the fantasy. 

         I still think so.  Of course there were complications.  She discovered that some children’s parents wanted them to believe as if it was real.  She discovered these parents were not too pleased with me when she told their kids what she knew.  And she also discovered that the children had it figured out and were humoring their elders. 

         There is the notion that some parents of little ones have.  They think if the child wants presents and thinks some supernatural being in a red suit is watching his behavior, he might be good.  But this myth falls apart when he can see for himself that some kid who is not very good gets a lot of stuff. 

         If all the toys are brought by a benevolent old man who knows who is good and who is naughty, then why does one child get more and another less, and without regard for goodness or naughtiness?  Kids are thinking all the time and soon find the gaping holes in the Santa story.

         I don’t think any child really believes much past four.  A child who still acts like a believer until he is at school is probably going along with it to please his parents who, after all, are going to buy -- or not buy -- the toys.

         Children are practical.

         As the years went by and we had four more children we shared with them the truth about things. I still maintain that we did not ‘ruin Christmas’ for the children by being honest with them.  We respected their intelligence and let them in on what all the grownups know that Santa is a pretend.

         I was told by people that I had taken all the fun out of the holiday, I had been a Scrooge.  People are allowed to disagree with you if they want to.

         There are facts about Christmas.  There is the ’real meaning’ of the day we celebrate.  There are things which must be taken by faith.  When we read the Story to them and tell them about the baby Jesus we want them to believe.  Not just that there was a Baby born in a stable centuries ago but we want them to know and believe Who this baby was and what He grew up to do.  The whole course of their lives will depend on what they believe about that Baby.  So it makes sense to be honest with them about everything so they know what to believe.