I just don’t see the point of telling kids fancy stories that you don’t yourself believe to kids in order to get them to believe them. I have no hostility to Santa, but I have no emotional attachment to it, either. I grew up “believing” in Santa, but at the same time, I don’t have any “special” attachment to that phase in my life as a “magical time.” I think lots of parents do and like seeing their kids get excited about it. But I lack whatever “tall tale telling” gene that some people have (some people love to tell exagerrated stories and enjoy watching people believe them. I just don’t connect with that).

I suspect that for my kids, Santa for them will be what the Easter Bunny was for me—something that we knew existed as a cartoon-like “symbol” of the holiday, but never something anyone thought was actually real.

I don’t have kids, either, so the question is moot. However, my cousins with kids as well as my breeder friends have all told their children to never, ever ask Matt T. about the Santa thing because, and I quote one of my cousins on this, “He’ll tell you there’s no Santa and that’s just not true.” I always thought that was funny.

My brother and I once got into a rather heated argument on the drive home (we were somewhere outside Jasper, Alabama) about whether or not I was “allowed” to tell his hypothetical, yet-to-be-born children about Santa. He seriously got bent out of shape because I refused to tell his as yet non-existent kids that there really was a Santa.

That all being said, I wouldn’t go out of my way to tell someone’s kids that their parents are bullshitting them about the whole Santa thing. America was built on bullshit, and like the whole atheist thing, best I can figure is people would rather you not clear any of it away. As far as Big Lies goes, Santa’s pretty harmless.

What do you need Christmas for when there’s a perfectly reasonable midwinter celebration called Yule.

The bid for the age of Santa-overcoming is now five years.  Do I hear four?

Every God needs a Satan; that’s why I was heartened that the Venture Brothers Christmas Special taught me about the Krampus, an Alpine demonic cohort to Saint Nick who apparently birches and kidnaps naughty children.

I was the Santa-debunker in my elementary school, having been raised so Jewish (in Iowa!) that I didn’t even realize that Christians were in the majority until entering school.  At that point, of course, I was supposed to sing carols I never heard before and teach my kindergarten teacher about Jewish holidays.  It was a radicalizing experience for a shy 5-year-old, for sure.  It was more fun once I figured out that getting Christian kids to believe my made-up stories about Hanukkah Harry was so-o-o-o-o easy - easier than telling them that there is no Santa.

I’ve seen a great Jack Chick tract on how belief in Santa turns kids to godless depravity because of the disappointment of learning it was a lie.

Oddly enough, I’d be okay with telling my kid there’s no Santa, but it would certainly upset other parents in our social circle if my lad spread the ‘no santa’ meme around. So there’s a sort of gentle pressure to play along.

I’m far more upset at my lad’s participation in the pre-school nativity. That did bug me. I’m wrestling over how I should bring him up an atheist. Do I expose him to religion in order to demolish it later? Or reject it now?

There is another religious objection to Santa in that far too many people view a transcendent god as kind of super-Santa. Knows all, gives good shit (culminating in the ultimate Club Med vacation package) to the good children, hands out coal (pre-burning) to the bad children. All of which is not only insanely simplistic, but also incompatible with divine grace and forgiveness, that is the belief that God is prepared to overlook bad things despite the fact that you suck big time.

How apropos to share Santa’s family tree from Cryptomundo:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/santas-family-tree/

We’re not treating Santa as anything except as a game lots of parents and kids play; our 3 year old reads lots about Santa (hard not to), and talks about him, but we never do the “be good or else Santa won’t bring you anything” thing and we’re not going to pretend that the presents are from Santa under the tree.  They’re from us—like Smith, we don’t understand why mythical elves/saints should get all the credit.

I actually don’t mind kids/other parents/teachers talking about Santa as I do the strain of Xmas movies that treats faith in Santa as some sort of good character trait, and nonbelievers as small-hearted stingy types. I’m looking at you, Miracle on 34th Street.

Heh, when I found out there was no Santa at age 8, I promptly told my cousin who was 5.  Boy, did I hear it for that.  But I do think it can serve another purpose - not just in messing with kids, but also how to accept that your cherished belief is not real and how to deal with that.  Santa’s small compared to the beliefs that people hold that are flat-out wrong.  Maybe the parents aren’t right that all black women are welfare queens or that all gay men stuff gerbils up their ass.  Yeah, there are other ways of teaching children this, but they usually involve less imagination and messing with kids.

I dunno how old I was when I stopped believing in Santa, if I ever did. I know my gifts are under the tree at my parents house and marked still as being from Santa, but there never was (in my memory) any particular pretense that there really was a Santa Clause.

As for my daughter, there has been no particular mention of Santa to her yet. She’s only two, and not really talking a whole lot yet, though we know she understands quite a bit more than she can say. My wife and I haven’t really even discussed the issue yet, but I’ll probably follow my parents’ lead unless my wife wants to do something diferent. Talk about Santa, but make no attempt to convince her he’s real. Let her think of him as a character of the season if she likes, or believe he really exists if she likes.

As for telling her other tall tales, well, I’m right on board with that… of course, sometimes it gets me in trouble. Last night, for instance, when we watched the first two episodes of season six of Buffy, wherein Willow sacrifices a fawn. Fawn makes its appearance and I say, “Oh, look! It’s Bambi!” My wife was not pleased.

My three and a half year old doesn’t understand why he cannot be on one of his favorite shows.  ‘Dad, I want to crawl into the TV.”  I read him stories about trains that can talk.  Given that, Santa can’t hurt much.  It is fun to tell him stories and build up anticipation.  My FIL is going to don the red suit and deliver a load of presents in the morning.  I can’t wait to see their faces. 

When he gets to the point where he actively needs to distinguish reality from fantasy and asks if Santa if real, we’ll tell him, but encourage him to keep it a secret a little longer for his little sister and cousins.

Regarding ‘Santa is for parents’, I recall there was a line from Scrubs about the best part of being a parent is screwing up your kid’s lives.

I’m reminded of Philip Larkin:

=====

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Although I believed in Santa, as a child I was very much a skeptic otherwise.  When I was 4 years old, Professor Avenger noticed a 3-legged dog in the street when we were driving around, and he was finally able to convince me to look, because I thought it was just another little test of my credulity.

It didn’t help matters any when we came home and I told Mother Avenger about the dog, she looks at Dad who then says, “What dog?”

I figured out the Santa thing pretty early when my parents had some BS response to my question of why “Santa” had my mother’s handwriting and why “Santa” was able to sit and see kids at every store and ring the bells on the street corners, etc all at the same time.  Even as a kid, the explanation of “he’s magic” never sat well with me.  I guess I was a skeptic early on, because I remember driving my Sunday school teacher nuts with my questions about how the dinosaurs fit in with the creation story and how Cain was able to go find a wife when his parents were the first people on Earth.

Still, the excitement of going to bed one night and then tearing into presents the next morning was an emotional high as a kid.  That’s all there has to be to it, even if they don’t technically believe in him.

There is so a Santa.

signed,
Virginia

I think the whole Santa thing, as well as other lies told to children by adults, might serve another purpose. Since these children will eventually learn that there is no Santa Claus, that cheese is not made from ground up dirty socks, etc. etc., telling harmless lies to children might actually be an important part of their education. When they discover that their belief in Santa, or cheese or whatever is not true, they will be a little shaken up, and a little more willing to be skeptical about their other beliefs. It seems to me that besides mild sadistic enjoyment for the adults, traditions like these can give children the beginnings of a skeptical sense, and a tendency to not immediately believe what they are told. For this reason, I think they are good traditions.

I always found it odd that as children we were taught to avoid strangers- especially strange men, and here with Santa, not only does he supposedly break and enter your house, but you are supposed to feed him, and the kicker- sit on his lap and give him personal information about yourself.
Needless to say- Santa terrified me as a child.

I agree with Amanda that belief (and eventual discovery of the truth) in Santa can be a doorway to atheism. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. My 5-year-old has 4 Catholic grandparents who are generally non-meddling, but they do occasionally talk about a “god” who created everything, etc. I always figured that when we’ve outgrown Santa we can use that experience to debunk god stories, too.

As a consequence, my daughter knows nothing about the nativity story. We were at a store selling decorations, and she looked at a huge nativity display with excitement: “Look, Dad! Animals!!” Didn’t even notice/care about the kid in the hay. It made me very optimistic…

My parents were completely normal, Christian, Republican Midwesterners who never did an unconventional thing in their lives and yet they never once encouraged us to believe even slightly in Santa Claus.  The procedure was well understood: We made our lists of shit we wanted and gave them to Mom, who would go out and buy the presents and hide them under the bed until a few days before Xmas at which point she would begin wrapping them and putting them under the tree with cards on them that said “From Mom and Dad.”  And we would wait until Xmas morning to open them.  It still sort of freaks me out: of all things be utterly rational and anti-magical-thinking about, how did they happen to choose this one?

Probably the only thing my father would ever have in common with Kevin Smith is that later on, he too would say he didn’t see why he & Mom shouldn’t get the credit, but I used to think that was just self-deprecating humor.  Maybe it really was as simple as that.

I can safely say that I think Santa is for adults, and specifically for making universal the pleasure of lying to children because they’ll believe anything you say.

But it’s not necessarily “parental sadism,” even in the mild sense in which you use the word. Having a credulous audience gives you the opportunity to perform.  Calling it sadism suggests you’re getting some cruel glee from getting the little suckers to bite, but I see the pleasure as coming from knowing you’ve put on a good show.

Playing a convincing Santa is kind of like making a great haunted house for the trick-or-treaters to walk through. Even though one of the payoffs is to get the kids to freak out and run away screaming, you’re not really doing it to make fools of them—their reaction is simply proof that you did it right.

Nearly everyone sees Santa images everywhere, and learns the standard mythology.  And even those who believe in Santa stop believing in Santa at some point.  So the only question is, do you as a parent let the kids figure it out for themselves, or do you tell them the answer before they’ve had a chance to do it?

You don’t need to tell students/children everything you know.  In fact, I think it’s a lot better for them to figure things out as much as possible for themselves.  Believing in Santa isn’t dangerous (as is, say, believing that you can jumping off the roof holding a sheet that’ll float you to the ground like a parachute), so I think it’s a good idea to let kids come to the truth on their own.

Also, kids like telling each other stories (even made-up ones) and listening to their parents’ stories—my kids like trying to tell when I’m telling them the truth about something, and when I’m telling them a Calvin’s-dad type lie.  I will, of course, fuck my kids up as Larkin predicts (in fact, I’m sure I’ve already started), but it won’t be because of the Santa thing.

Wow, I guess I’m in the minority.  My parents never tried to get me to believe in Santa, but did explain why others did and about the history of St. Nicholas, etc.  I’m told (I have no memory of the event) that after this, when I was around 3 or so, a random elderly woman asked me what Santa was bringing me, and I (recalling the stories of St. Nicholas and how he’s been dead for a long time) looked at her in confusion and said “Santa isn’t bringing me anything, he’s dead.”

As for other children, I don’t think I ever met a child who really believed.  Dunno if my peer group was weird or what, but I can’t recall any of them speculating about his reality, or believing that he was real.  I have absolutely no memories of ever telling someone that he wasn’t real because no one I spoke with thought that.

I do recall a few of my friends talking about how they were exploiting the fact that their parents thought they believed in Santa.

I’m reminded of a cartoon by Charles Addams, picturing the two young children (of what would later be known as the “Addams Family”) on Christmas eve in front of the fireplace feeding wood into an enormous roaring fire. Their mother and father, hidden behind a doorway, whisper happily about how the kids still believe in Santa Claus.

I never really believed in Santa. In my house, Santa was presented as a fun kind of a game, but when we questioned it, my parents readily admitted that he wasn’t real. They also told me that other kids might be upset by that, so I shouldn’t tell everyone at school.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with teaching really young kids about Santa, but if you keep trying to convince kids he’s real when they’re old enough to know better then I think you’re being a bit of a dick. My best friend in elementary school feigned that she believed in Santa until she was ten, because she was afraid if her parents knew she didn’t, they wouldn’t celebrate Christmas anymore. I think a lot of kids pretend to believe because they see what a kick their parents get out of it, which can be problematic after a while. Pretending to have poor reasoning skills so as not to ruin your parents’ fun? That’s kind of heavy for a six-year-old.

I don’t have much attachment to the Santa story.  Since I don’t remember my parents saying much about it or remember believing in Santa myself, I don’t have any excitement in regards to telling the story to my kids.

Well, it’s rather hard to avoid telling your kids about Santa since he’s everywhere.  Just like Elvis.

Man, Elvis would make a better Spirit of Christmas than Santa. The music would be better and we could leave out fried peanut-butter-and-bannana sandwiches instead of cookies. Besides, Elvis was actually real, and that should count for something. Hey, the King’s birthday is Jan. 8, so it wouldn’t be too much of an adjustment.

oh! and you know what’s really terrible? Is that one kid in the fifth or god, sixth grade, who still believes and gets ridiculed by everyone else. That is just sad. The whole point of the Santa thing is to have fun, and when people, especially children, start getting harmed by it, it’s time to pull the plug.

Confessions to my children:

- I did not disappear when I covered my face with my hands
- You do not have quarters in your ears
- None of the things in the books I read to you actually happened
- Barney is not a real T. Rex
- Elmo is a puppet
- The people in the plays we saw were pretending
- The movies we saw lied to you about the ability of animals to talk
- Santa Claus is not real

Santa doesn’t bother me, but the endless parade of movies and TV Christmas specials all aimed at insisting that Santa is REAL! REAL! REAL! are pretty annoying. No good reason, though I have to wonder what the desperation is about. At least, if you’re going to feature Santa in a production, it would be way less annoying to have everyone know that he’s real from the start. The idea that there are adults who don’t believe in Santa Claus in a world where they don’t need to do the Christmas shopping because he’s making gifts appear under trees all across the nation is a bit hard to take. There’s a pretty good reason that adults know Santa doesn’t exist in the real world - we have to buy the damn presents ourselves.

But Santa himself is pretty harmless if the whole thing doesn’t go overboard. I believed in Santa then, and I don’t believe in God or the Easter Bunny now, so I don’t think it’s a big deal. Little kids are naturally credulous. Teaching them critical thinking is important, but a little white lie like Santa won’t do any harm at four years old. It’s the rare kid who has developed enough, psychologically, to apply those skills at that age. And being late or early to develop them also doesn’t necessarily imply much about the future credulity or intelligence of that child if they’re still within a normal range.

Eh, Santa’s fun. I remember fully believing that I heard reindeer on the roof and that my babysitter was an elf.  I felt smart and grown up when I found out that Santa was actually my parents, but it was fun while it lasted.  You don’t get to believe in magic all that long, and there’s really been nothing else in my life quite like the magic of waking up to a be-Santa’ed Christmas tree.

I’m reminded of something my brother posted recently:

When you think about it, though, parents don’t really have to work that hard at it anyway. I mean, I never needed any help believing a drooling maniac waited in my closet every night after the lights went out, even though my parents did everything they could to convince me that wasn’t the case. If I could believe in something my parents were working like heck to convince me wasn’t real, it didn’t take much of a suggestion that something, or someone, did exist to make me embrace it entirely. I wanted to believe, and therefore I did.

When we explained to my kid brother that monsters weren’t real, he was enormously relieved. Hilariously, he took this to mean that bears, sharks, snakes, and other potentially dangerous animals weren’t real either.

First, that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon is one of my all-time favourites. “Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane” always gets a laugh from me (but maybe that’s because I’m a master bullsh—I mean, storyteller for kids). Thanks for posting it.

Santa? I don’t really think he’s a religious figure in his current form (i.e. the one created by the Coca Cola corporation). And by age 8 or so most kids learn on their own or from peers that he’s not real and still live happily with the fact. What’s missing is the follow-up: that the other Invisible Bearded Sky Man™ is also not real, and live happily with the fact.

Magical thinking and make-believe is a wonderful part of dealing with childhood issues, but not so much when one is a grown-up dealing with adult issue.

Every God needs a Satan; that’s why I was heartened that the Venture Brothers Christmas Special taught me about the Krampus, an Alpine demonic cohort to Saint Nick who apparently birches and kidnaps naughty children.

“Krampus.” What an awesome name—much better than Black Peter (which is how I know him) or Nackles (esp. the Harlan Ellison version).

I’m wrestling over how I should bring him up an atheist. Do I expose him to religion in order to demolish it later? Or reject it now?

Depends on how you reject it.  My best friend’s husband was raised a happy atheist because his parents’ attitude towards religion was that it was something other people did that was kind of silly if you really looked at it.  You know, that critical thinking thing that everyone is talking about.

I don’t remember believing in Santa, but I probably did.  That stopped pretty early on when I would wake up to find my mother wrapping new presents on Christmas eve to replace the ones that were stolen out of our trailer (every year!) by our neighbor.  Funny how our neighbor’s girl ended up with the Barbie horse I asked for one year.

I like the idea of presents turning into underwear if you open them before it’s time.

Oddly enough, Santa is up there with gender roles and schooling in my list of “things that are really important to me with regards to raising a child of mine”.  I am so pleased to be dating someone who is on the same page as me with Santa:

The boyfriend: I take the long view - if I want them to be honest with me, I have to start by being honest with them.  So I’ll tell them the stories of Santa Claus, but I’m not going to lie to them.
Me: *all starry-eyed*

I won’t disabuse others’ children about the notion, not my place, but I have no interest in lying to my child in that fashion.

I definitely fall on the side of the Santa story being potentially instructional for future skeptics.  There’s a reason many of the most fanatical Christianists (like Worldwide Church of God) reject both Santa and Christmas—finding out that the Santa story isn’t true does lead quite a few people to start wondering about that God fellow, who they’re told has many of the same powers that Santa does. 

Plus, as other people have mentioned, in some ways it becomes a game of chicken between parents and children, with parents faking the kids out and kids feigning belief for longer than they actually have it until someone finally has to admit it’s all been a game.

In the spirit of the thread, here is David Sedaris’ “Six to Eight Black Men.”

There is no harm in indulging your child’s fantasy up to a certain point. There is great harm in stunting a child’s imagination. Critical thinking is a skill best developed a bit later. Children below, say, seven, are not ready for it and if you force it, you’re cutting off a key part of their intellectual growth. I don’t care if you raise your children with Santa or not, but it is the height of immaturity (Matt T, this is directed at you, buddy) to desire to smugly screw with someone else’s kid’s. It doesn’t say good things about you.

As for Kevin Smith’s problem: in my house, Santa brings only one small gift per child. The rest are from Mom, Dad, and the cats (the kids help us wrap the non-Santa presents for each other, so they understand the cat pretense).

But if you really want to stamp out ol’ secular Santa, why not form an alliance with the religious right? Sarah Palin is your natural ally on this one, Matt T.

I think it’s important, if you raise your kids atheist, to not demonize religion too much. If you’re constantly harping about how stupid religious people are, then you play right into the hands of the people who try to portray atheists as meanie buttheads, and your kids will be prosletyzing youth group dorks tryin’ to drag your ass to the nearest Assembly of God all the time. Trust, I’ve seen it.

Mnemosyne, I just googled “Sedaris + christmas + holland”, re-read Sedaris’ piece at that same URL, then came back here and found your link to it!  It’s a Festivus miracle!!

If you’re constantly harping about how stupid religious people are, then you play right into the hands of the people who try to portray atheists as meanie buttheads

Not only that, but when your children begin encountering intelligent, thoughtful, religious people, they’ll have reason to think that your disbelief is itself irrational.

I’ve seen a great Jack Chick tract on how belief in Santa turns kids to godless depravity because of the disappointment of learning it was a lie.

That’s why I think the Santa story is great, and why I’m also inclined to think that bringing kids up with religion is a kind of inoculation. Though I prefer the more outlandish versions you get across Europe—I see that Mnemosyne beat me to the text, but Sedaris requires audio. Being in Amsterdam for Sinterklaas, nearly a decade ago, is a memory that sticks.

My brother and I once got into a rather heated argument on the drive home (we were somewhere outside Jasper, Alabama) about whether or not I was “allowed” to tell his hypothetical, yet-to-be-born children about Santa. He seriously got bent out of shape because I refused to tell his as yet non-existent kids that there really was a Santa.

There’s a simple and fun “Calvin’s Dad” way for your brother to handle this situation with his hypothetical child. “Now you don’t want to ask Uncle Matt about Santa, and here’s why. Years ago, Uncle Matt and Santa were friends, but then they got into a huge fight. Now not only does Uncle Matt refuse to talk to Santa, but he’ll tell anyone who asks that he doesn’t exist!”

Reality and wonder can (and should) co-exist for young children—it’s all in the presentation.

My mom told me when I was two (I don’t remember this, obviously) that Santa Claus wasn’t real, because she decided she wasn’t going to lie to her kids.  I refused to believe her, told her she was obviously wrong, and went on my merry way.  My mom figured she’d given the whole “truth” thing a fair shot, and proceeded to throw herself into the Santa myth making (separate wrapping paper, hiding cookies, etc.).  She still does it all, even though I’m 27 and my sister’s 24.

My wife and I didn’t want to do Santa.  Along the lines of Kevin Smith, my attitude is that those presents cost real money, and why should Santa get all the credit for the best stuff?  And why shouldn’t a holiday where we give gifts to each other be enough?  Why does it require this extra dimension of a mythical guy with flying reindeer to make it special?

But, alas, you put them in preschool and they come home talking about Santa, and it’s a lost cause.  Next thing you know, you’re at a mall asking the kids if they want to take a picture with him, and you’re writing letters and baking cookies. 

We have true believers this year - a 4 year old and a 6 year old - and it is kind of fun.

Santa may not be great for kids, but it’s great for parents, and that’s reason enough in my eyes.  Just so long as the parents admit it.  Not everything in this world has to be for the children….

Well, you’re certainly owning your position. Can’t no one accuse you of angrybullshitsentimenalgrasping!

In related news, there’s a Calvin & Hobbes strip that would absolutely belong in this post, if the comics syndicate weren’t so particular about preventing folks from posting it all around. Some Googling reveals that it’s the strip published December 21, 1987:

Calvin: This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn’t make sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery? If the guy exists, why doesn’t he ever show himself and prove it? And if he doesn’t exist, what’s the meaning of all this Christmas stuff?

Hobbes: I dunno… Isn’t it a religious holiday?

Calvin: Yeah, but actually, I’ve got the same questions about God.

Directly on point, no?

I had the parents who tried to get us to believe in Santa, but I think they did such a half assed job they just didn’t care whether or not we did. Typically for Christmas our parents would leave us at my mother’s parents house and we kids would sleep in the living room. Once we were all asleep my mom would sneak the car into the driveway (at like, 2am) and then my grandmother would meet her at the back and let her in. Then, as quietly as possible my mom would sneak into the living room and put out the presents, thinking we were all asleep.

Anyone who knows kids knows we were not asleep. And as soon as my mother left, and my grandmother was back in bed sleeping my brother broke out his little pen light and we’d go through the gifts, seeing how many each of us had.

Then, in the morning, my parents would hop over and feign surprise at what “Santa” brought us and wonder just how the hell we knew where all our presents were without having to go through them.

I think that lasted all of a few years and then my sister was old enough to call out the nonsense and they stopped. And there was also the incident where I took the JC Penny Christmas catalog (the one with all the toys) and pointed out to my mom what I’d like. Cause of course I knew she and dad were buying them for us.

I still know parents who have their kids believe in Santa and I’m wondering how much effort they really have to put into it in this day and age where information, even for kids, is only a key stroke away.

And ditto on the Calvin and Hobbes love. What I truly admired was how Calvin’s parents would readily admit they would never have anymore kids and they were officially done. I think Bill Waterson was taken to task for this but I don’t remember where I read it.

My all time favorite Calvin and Hobbes, which I have a copy of in view right now.
As for Santa, my wife and I decided we didn’t want to start off by lying to our son.  We explained that Santa was a story that other people told each other and that they profess is true.  For a while, our son told us that he thought Santa was real, but that’s not the case anymore.
We have a similar method for teaching about religion.  Religions are stories that people tell and believe in, but my wife and I don’t believe.  And we teach him about various religions, but in a casual way.  He tells me he might be a christian, but when I ask him if he thinks someone could come back from the dead he says no, so I’m not worried.  It’s the same as with Santa and he feels the societal pressure to conform (in this case be christian).
IMO, the best way to raise an atheist is to teach about comparative religion in a casual, non-mocking way.

I figured it out when I was 6. I remember my parents asked me my reasons and nodded approvingly as I brought up all the logical problems. Then (after I told my other brother what I’d figured out) we had a family meeting to decide how to handle Christmas fun; we agreed on stockings with the proviso it was now time for us kids to shop for a little something for other people’s stockings, too. It was a wonderful; we loved feeling like we could “be Santa” too.

If I could believe in something my parents were working like heck to convince me wasn’t real, it didn’t take much of a suggestion that something, or someone, did exist to make me embrace it entirely. I wanted to believe, and therefore I did.

I think that’s the rub for me as well.

I was a fantastical child. I lived in my head. Everything from vampires to zombies to witches to ghosts to faeries…I entertained the ideas and believed in them. To varying degrees, I’m sure.

I gradually came to the understanding that he was not, in fact, a physical manifestation. I probably reached that understanding at a fairly young age but there was a part of me that enjoyed the play, so I kept up appearances.

There was something undeniably magical about waking up in the morning and finding all these unwrapped gifts under the tree, a half eaten cookie and an empty milk glass, and boot prints on the snow on the balcony. 

I think, as long as you can find a good balance between fantasy and reality you’re alright. When I asked my mom directly: Is Santa real? The answer was: No. Not the way you and I are real.  And I remember that descending into a conversation on the history (St. Nick and whatnot) as well as a semi-metaphysical and philosophical discussion that was age appropriate.

That conversation was probably the roots for my spiritual path (something of a pantheistic flavored semi-agnostic polytheist…).

And the entirety of the myth and the belief certainly helped spur my creativity and interest in writing fantasy stories.

I enjoyed the belief then. I enjoy the story now.

I figure Santa’s for kids still young enough to actually believe it.  The first time they really doubt it’s true, they’re probably old enough to drop it, lest they wind up like my mother: still vaguely bitter about realizing that there was no Santa through deep disappointment at an age where the memory stayed clear.

As long as we’re pushing David Sedaris, how about the Santaland Diaries?

If nothing else, you will now understand the in-joke in Elf when Zooey Deschanel’s character says, “Did Crumpet put you up to this?”

I grew up in a secular Xmas family—tree, no star.  I don’t think we ever were encouraged to take Santa Claus seriously, and we definitely never had elaborate CSI-style exercises deducing from key trace evidence that someone special must have been to our house. 

But what _was_ key was the idea of surprise:  we may have asked for certain things, but we didn’t really know what we would get.  I think my parents wanted our reactions to be less “It’s just what I asked for!” and more “I had no idea, and I like it!”

And it seems to me that that’s still key to the way I think of Xmas when it’s just my wife and I, who don’t have kids:  I want her to be surprised at what I found for her; I don’t want it to just be an order-fulfillment service where we say what we want and then get it.  We have the whole rest of the year for practicality and cost-benefit analysis.  We obviously don’t clutter up the whole thing with “Santa Claus,” but that element of surprise is maybe a grown-up’s (OK, immature grown-up’s) version of what Santa brings to the table for kids.

Second the atheist. The point of lying to your children about Santa Claus is to disabuse them of perfect credulity in figures of authority.

There is so a Santa.

signed,
Virginia

You know, if you said the same thing about God that Francis Church wrote about Santa in that famous editorial, you’d be accused of being a killjoy militant atheist who was bigoted against religion. Oh, how moderate religionists hew and cry when you compare belief in God to belief in fairies. Or to Santa Claus, for that matter, even they’re the exact same thing.

This is a fascinating line of thought, because you could argue any position, from any religious pecadillo, from just about any side and be right. Santa was a real person, after all (bishop of Turkey—we saw the place he was allegedly buried! ... um, sorry kids). So if you’re a Christian, Santa was just as real as Jesus, and while both are no longer “here on earth with us,” you could make the argument that they belong in that realm of faith in the past that makes things real. And of course, once you know Santa doesn’t exist, it doesn’t negate Christmas, but that in and of itself can argue from either side of Christianity/Atheism.

And from the position of Santa as early indoctrination into feeding children bullshit and having them accept it, again, this could be argued from either side. On the one hand, the perpetuation of the Santa myth is very much “just make shit up because the kids will believe you,” but on the other hand, it’s understood that most kids between 5-7 years old will figure out that Santa isn’t real, so doesn’t that actually give kids an early start at being able to question bullshit? I’m definitely all for fostering skepticism in children, particularly as a means of preventing “just trust the adults, all the time, always” mentality that can be exploited all the way down the line. Which side of this does Santa fall on, ultimately?

Also, Amanda, I was eating something with Parmesan cheese on it when I read your post.

Thanks a lot, asshole.

Snark Boy,
I take it you just now recently found out there was no Santa? Hope no one tells this guy there’s no Tooth Fairy, either. Like I said, it ain’t my place to screw with anyone’s kids, I just ain’t gonna lie to ‘em for anyone. Hope that’s okay with you. Is it, buddy?

Oh, yeah, the Sarah Palin crack? Quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve read today, and I’ve already pursued Sadly, No’s entry about Gay Conservatives Bloggress Diva thing and the Canadian racist they’re pushing. Let’s see if I can play along: for saying things with absolutely no basis in reality or even logical sense, Snark Boy, Jonah Goldberg is your natural ally.

Have a nice holiday season, buddy-roe!

Well, Amanda, I can’t speak for everyone, but the true joy of parenting IS fucking with your kids heads. My father was a BRILLIANT bullshit artist, could weave a tale like nobody’s business. I hope that my son continues the family tradition of humor and bullshit a long line of Jesters before him have woven.

Would you secular LIEbrals just stop your war on my FESTIVUS???

In my opinion, I figure that Santa-belief is so prevalent that the kid would pick this up at school anyhow, which would be a great time to foster skepticism and such.  I would prefer to set an example that lying isn’t okay, even if it’s “for fun”.  I’m fine with them being skeptical of what I say because critical thinking is good, but I don’t want them being skeptical of what I say because I’m apparently prone to lying to them because it’s fun for me.

(I note that I am thinking about this because I want a child, and I don’t have one right now, so I could be full of shit on this.)

My father was a BRILLIANT bullshit artist, could weave a tale like nobody’s business. I hope that my son continues the family tradition of humor and bullshit a long line of Jesters before him have woven.

This does shed some insight on some parents’ obsession with Santa: in many (predominantly male) social circles, there’s always that guy who competes for alpha status by being that guy whom you’re never sure is telling the truth or screwing with your head. It’s a form of attracting attention to oneself (eg, the class clown) or exerting social dominance. In a family, being able to do that with your kid, especially with Santa, allows you to be “that guy” within your household.

Great post, Amanda. Not having to wrestle with dilemmas like this is one of the many reasons I’m glad I never had kids of my own.

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with an eight-year-old neighbor one Christmas. She had just figured out that the presents Santa brought were wrapped in exactly the same kind of paper they had around the house. When she pointed this out to her aunt (she lived with her aunt and uncle), the aunt said Santa brought the gifts unwrapped. But the little girl knew better by this point.

“Your auntie’s a smart lady,” I told her. “But you’ll probably have to go along with the gag for a few years for Jackie’s [her three-year-old cousin] sake.”

“I know,” she said, so solemnly that it was just adorable.

I guess that’s another advantage of Santa: finding out the truth provides kids with a relatively painless rite of passage.

There is great harm in stunting a child’s imagination.

You act like critical thinking and imagination are somehow two different things. Spoken like someone who’s never done any critical thinking, I guess. The imagination is the most critical tool in debunking. The only people who don’t know that are the people who have never debunked anything.

My three year old son declared today that that Santa rides across the world on a Tyrannosaurus Rex, distributing presents to children.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer his mythology to the canonical version.

I consider my finest moment as a parent to be the time I convinced my older boy to fish for land trout.
If he doesn’t bear a grudge for that, Santa should hardly leave a mark.

Dear Pandagonians:

I exist.

Ho ho ho!

S. Claus

Godless Heathen, your mom was an enabler.  My mom was primarily a pacifist, but damnit if she wouldn’t have got her gun down and pretended to leave the trailer so she could have shot that jerk!

Funny you should mention that, because the older son of that family did break into our trailer a few years later and took the shotgun (and our little b&w;tv set).  If we’d have been home at the time, he’d have killed us.  We could never prove it was them, and it wasn’t like the cops actually cared about us trailer trash folk.

Dear Lee Brimmicombe-Wood:

I only use the T-Rex when the reindeer anger me.  Feed the T-Rex, give the new, more pliable reindeer the same names.  Repeat as necessary.

Yours truly,
S. Claus

I’ve always thought a reasonable compromise is to tell your kids that Santa is just a fictional character but that it’s traditional to pretend that he exists. Basically, it’d be a game of pretend. Kids love to pretend and imagine and I don’t think they’d derive any less enjoyment just because they knew the Santa Claus thing is a game. So you get the best of both worlds in that you’re not lying to your kids but you still get all the fun of leaving out milk and cookies and following Santa’s flight on the NORAD website tracker.

This is just a theory as I don’t have kids, but if I ever did have them I’d want them to enjoy the idea of Santa without setting them up for eventual disillusionment.

In many (predominantly male) social circles, there’s always that guy who competes for alpha status by being that guy whom you’re never sure is telling the truth or screwing with your head. It’s a form of attracting attention to oneself (eg, the class clown) or exerting social dominance.

It’s also a means for a serious adult to excercise his outlandish imagination in front of an audience that’s really more interested in a good story and a little dialogue than a detailed and accurate lecture. My take on the “Ask Calvin’s Dad” strips was that Watterson was showing us where Calvin got his own wonderfully twisted imagination—from the man Calvin once called “The World’s Most Boring Dad.”

By the way, one portrayal of Santa that always gets me is the one in Miracle on 34th St. If you don’t get a little misty every time during that scene with the Dutch refugee girl, well ... ok, you’re not a sap like me. But still…

It’s also a means for a serious adult to excercise his outlandish imagination in front of an audience that’s really more interested in a good story and a little dialogue than a detailed and accurate lecture.

I think kevin Drum had an story about how he had friends who would frequently want to speculate on some factual matter, and Kevin’s response would be, “let me look it up,” at which point his friends suddenly became uninterested in pursuing the issue further. What he couldn’t understand is that his friends were not interested in the facts of the matter but rather were looking for an opportunity to perform in front of an audience and engage in some exercise of attention seeking (his commenters explained this to him).

Which, I suppose, is fine as far as it goes, and some people like using their kids as an audience for such things, but, as Amanda says, it’s more for keeping the adults entertained and preserving an outlet for the class clowns who’ve grown up into adults. All the stuff about “preserving the magic for the children” is a bit of dress-up.

That said, yeah, Gracchus, I get a little misty-eyed with Miracle on 34th St., too. Though the one thing I like about that movie is that no one’s trying to “save” Christmas. Why does Christmas always need to be “saved” in these annual specials?

I like to represent Santa as an iconic rather than real figure.  Much like everyone is Sparticus.

...Although I’m not sure anyone else thinks of that story as a Christmas story.

I teach my kids that Santa is like Batman and Spiderman and Dora the Explorer. He’s a fun story.

Really, the whole thing about real/not real is wildly overblown when we’re talking about *children*. Children are perfectly capable of holding in their head the concept that Santa isn’t real and *still* having a lengthy discussion of his reindeer and what sort of presents he’s going to bring, just like they can discuss whether or not Batman could beat Kirby from Nintendo.

Of course, my husband, who agrees with me on Santa, had to teach the kids that the great fire of Baltimore was caused by an undersea kraken and that he went to the moon with his grandmother when he was 7, so I guess the need to bullshit kids really *is* pretty strong in some people. Whereas I am a writer; I bullshit adults, and they eat it up and come back for more even *knowing* it’s bullshit, and I think honestly that’s much more fun.

We played up the Santa mythos until the youngest busted me wrapping presents in the laundry room when he was six.  “I KNEW it!”, he said.  “YOU’RE Santa!”

I allowed as how yes, I was playing Santa all this time, and he thought it was pretty funny.  We talked about the idea of Santa, about how good it feels to give, to make other people happy, and how much fun it is to pretend that Santa is real.  He decided that that was fine, and now, at 12, he still plays along, until Christmas morning, when he dons a Santa hat and proclaims “OK, now I’m Santa!”

This year, in our annual faux squabble over who will get to “play Santa” on Christmas morning, he declared himself “Santa Dammit”.  I stole his hat last night and wrote “SANTA DAMMIT” on it in green glitter glue.

Matt T., fuckers like you are the reason i hate adult siblings.

i squeeze the little bastards out, and YOU’RE the one who can’t be fucked to not
disabuse (very) little kids of one relatively harmless belief?!? dickwad, when you
wipe the butts, you can make the decisions.

There’s a guy in my milita who tells his kids that Santa is actually a reptillian Grey who lives in a military base 5 miles underground.  Then again, he makes his kids salute a Nazi flag every morning, so ...

redwards,
Fair enough. Bring your kids around and I’ll tell ‘em any lie you want me to. No skin off my nose. If you’d bother to read, you’d note that I said I don’t go out of my way to tell little kids there’s no Santa and, amazingly enough, I haven’t done anything like that since, well, I was a kid myself. Like 13 or so. Also told another cousin that the 10-point his daddy killed on Christmas Eve was one of Santa’s reindeer, and I do feel sorta bad about that. For what it’s worth, I try to avoid kids as much as possible, mainly because one never knows what’s gonna set their parents off into a spittle-flecked frenzy. I had no idea so many of y’all had so much invested in the whole Santa thing.

By the way, do your adult siblings know how much you hate them? Also, do your kids know you think they’re “little bastards”?

I teach my kids that Santa is like Batman and Spiderman and Dora the Explorer. He’s a fun story.

I had lots of Batman and Spiderman stuff growing up. No one worried about how my knowledge that this was fiction had somehow “ruined the magic of childhood.” Parents seem to invest a lot of cultural baggage into how much belief in Santa represents everything related to imagination, magic, etc. that children experience. Maybe when I have kids I’ll “get it,” but for now, my feelings on the matter echo Alara’s.

Jeez (sic), I wonder if all you anti-Santa folks are the same people who yell out how the magicians do their tricks.  A lot of comments in a day on this.

I like Maggie’s approach @5:05

I also liked this paragraph of hers:

This year, in our annual faux squabble over who will get to “play Santa” on Christmas morning, he declared himself “Santa Dammit”.  I stole his hat last night and wrote “SANTA DAMMIT” on it in green glitter glue.

Reminds me of the old Eddie Murphy character on SNL:  “Merry Christmas Dammit!”

We did the Santa thing, but when they asked to be told the truth we did.  When our oldest (now 25) learned the truth, she was careful not to let her little brother (by 3 1/2 years) find out until he was ready.  Neither of them seem to be damaged by it.  She’s an atheist, he’s not (yet).

Gracchus:

“Krampus.” What an awesome name—much better than Black Peter (which is how I know him) or Nackles (esp. the Harlan Ellison version).

You like the Donald Westlake Nackles better? Interesting.  And on Prairie Home Companion, the dude in question was “Peter Schwarz” (GK:  “Peter Schwarz?  Wait a minute—you’re—you’re SHWARZPETER!).

I knew a family who kept their youngest believing in Santa until she was in high school.  It was incredible.  They insisted he was real, and even when she caught them with presents in the car, they told her that they bought most of the gifts and just pretended, but that Santa really did bring one gift every year.

They made her older brother keep quiet and I think they even talked to her friends.

We didn’t know what to say to her.  What do you say to a 12-13 y/o who thinks Santa is real?  It seemed like child abuse, but disabusing her of the notion really seemed like overstepping.  It was going to be humiliating, and we didn’t want to cause the humiliation or be associated with it at all.

That was fucked up.  We only saw them once a year, and otherwise they were a fun family.

Perhaps you might like this strip-

Jesusandmo

I just don’t like the idea of lying to my kids. I mean, my kids would be the people that I’d like the *most* to be able to trust me. I’m not going to lie to them about a bearded guy living on te north pole to make them happy; I’ll just tell them that the presents are from me and their mother and we bought the presents because we love our children beyond everthing else and want to make them happy.

Matt. T, it’s a lack of respect, pure and simple. a pattern i’ve seen over and over, in many other families(not just my own), wherein a child-free sibling feels perfectly comfortable disrespecting the boundaries a parent has set. cock-ups, the lot of you.

as to the rest : whatever dude. are you really going to try and argue that children AREN’T half-wild, grubby little monkeys? psshhh.

I thought I posted this before, but I guess it failed.  Anyway…

Let’s just consolidate all the weird Germanic tales of supernatural creatures interacting with children and regulating their behavior.  Be good, or Santa-stiltskin will come down your chimney, strap burning iron shoes onto your feet, and throw your parents into the oven, unless you can catch his wolf and make it say his name three times before sun-up!

redwards,
Up yours, frankly. As I said, I don’t go out of my way to despoil the whole Santa thing with the kiddies just ‘cause I get my kicks watching ‘em cry. What I do like doing, however, is screwing with adults who think the boundaries they set for their chilluns’ are niversal rules for any and all and are beyond reproach, especially when it’s something as friggin’ stupid as Santa Claus. And I wouldn’t call your children little shits just ‘cause you’re obviously a controlling, obnoxious asshole. I actually know some decent, well-behaved kids, and I don’t even like the damn things as a general rule. Maybe it’s your problem. Asshole.

...we loved the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes”, and I said I liked it when Calvin’s dad would fuck with him…

Spot on, Amanda.  Continuing a long tradition of parents fucking with their children, when my now 23-year old daughter started kindegarten, I convinced her that her real name was “Bobo Eleanor,” and not “____ Eleanor” as she had always thought.  I put this down to being really tired after her delivery and not being able to think of a name.  She told all her teachers about true name, insisting they change all of her records.  This went on for a few weeks, until her teacher called me to find out what was going on.  Said teacher was not of the type to find amusement in this, but I laughed until I nearly fainted.

Ahhhhh, I miss those days.

My mom took the same strategy that Maggie did - I figured out that Santa didn’t exist when I was about 8 and found the box for the bright red flyer wagon my brother got from Santa sitting in the spare bedroom in the house. “Hmm,” thought I, “Why exactly would a fat man in a biiiig sleigh need to leave the BOX in our house?”

I played along for another year or two, for my younger brother and simply out of not knowing how to tactfully come out and tell them the game was up. Mom finally asked me a year or two later, and I assured her that no, I’d figured it out some time ago. She thanked me for playing along for my brother’s sake, and we had a long chat about Santa being the “Spirit” of Christmas, and how much fun it is to give and make someone else happy. She still makes a big deal over Christmas and birthdays both, even though we’re both grown and out of the house. Last 7-8 years or so, my brother and I have taken turns filling stockings for our parents - one year, I even sneaked across town in the middle of the night to leave their stockings hanging on the door.

I don’t have kids, and my cats don’t much care about opening presents anyways, so it’s a moot point. I do feel that believing in or pretending to believe in Santa makes the holiday more fun, but I’m not about to tell anyone they’re right or wrong.

“I think kevin Drum had an story about how he had friends who would frequently want to speculate on some factual matter, and Kevin’s response would be, “let me look it up,” at which point his friends suddenly became uninterested in pursuing the issue further. What he couldn’t understand is that his friends were not interested in the facts of the matter but rather were looking for an opportunity to perform in front of an audience and engage in some exercise of attention seeking (his commenters explained this to him).”

It’s not necessarily a performance so much as a collaboration in a lot of cases, though.  We reason things out for ourselves all the time, but the opportunity to do it as a group, for fun, is not as common.  I imagine it shares a lot of the appeal of mystery novels, where half the point is trying to figure out whodunnit before the big reveal.  Just looking something up is like skipping to the last page in those cases.

oh, yeah, Matt, you’re the one who likes fucking over a reasonable parental request, concerning children that AREN’T YOURS, JUST BECAUSE, and i’m the asshole? Right.

ya know… my parents went WAAAAAAAAAAY overboard on the who santa thing, but i had NEVER heard of Black Peter (the anti-clause!) until this year. and i will be 32 in a month. how does one grow up surrounded by santa stuff and MISS half the freaking myth!?!?

i feel deprived.

I never said that, you friggin’ moron. Go read it again. What I said was, and I’ll repeat it using small words for you, is that my friends and family, riffing on my smart-ass nature, have told their children to not ask me about Jolly Ol’ St. Nick because they assume I’ll spill the beans. Get it, jackass, or are you too stupid to grasp that concept? No, I don’t like the idea of parents telling their children a “fun lie”, but fuck it, I don’t have kids, so I stay out of it. You’re assuming that since I don’t share your particular perception on that specific cultural phenomenon, I get off on spoiling kids’ Christmas. It’s been 20 years since I did anything close to that, and that was only after the rugrat in question’s granddaddy did exactly the same thing. Fucking learn some reading comprehension, and for Christ’s sakes, don’t homeschool your poor kids.

Again, up yours, motherfucker, and yes, you are a SCREAMING asshole.

Actually, I’m over the line with the “don’t homeschool your kids” crack and I apologize. You’re still a fucking asshole, though.

Redwards: Yes, you’re currently the asshole. More specifically you’re being an entitled parent. No biggie, it happens; try to get some holiday spirit, though, and get over it.

I’d agree with this. Two of my younger friends (brothers) believed in Santa Claus for a ridiculously long time. When the older one finally found out, he took a great deal more pleasure in deceiving the younger one than he had in believing himself. I try to be a good sport about the whole Santa thing, but it’s hard because I remember how insulting I found it as a child.

Thank you for writing this, Amanda.  I’ve been doing a lot of melacholy introspection about Santa and belief and social fictions these past weeks, thanks to one of the owners of my newspaper, who decided to dollop some War on Christmas-flavored dreck all over the pages of our publication.

I petitioned the other paper owner and got permission to write a response to his ramblings (he actually complained about “taking God out of the Pledge of Allegiance”!), but I had a hard time putting things in terms my readers wouldn’t balk at, so I talked about Santa Claus as a placeholder for a civic God.  It only works as a fairly serviceable metaphor because the idea of a God who’s so picky he’ll withdraw his blessings over the use of a few syllables is so incredibly childish.

If anyone is interested in getting a sneak peek at a column that comes out in a paper you’ll never read: http://www.umbrellahead.com/toenolla/?p=165

(Er, I know this SOUNDS like advertising - really I’m just hoping to show this to an audience who won’t inevitably write hate mail about it.)

I’m pretty sure the whole “magic of Santa” thing is a completely manufactured concept. The Coca Cola company created the Santa we know today in the US. Hmmmm, let me see, who would benefit if people regarded that creation as an inherent, indispensible and magical part of childhood, laden with nostalgia?

It’s similar to the concepts of “family”, “home” and “childhood” created in the Victorian era, which so many people today believe to be eternal and universal ideas. Sometimes concepts are created and given life in order to promote somebody’s ulterior motives, surprise surprise.

As for “Santa is the spirit of giving in all of us” I find this very like the people who say they’re “spiritual” because “God is the love we all have” or something similar. If there’s a spirit of giving that people share, that’s what it is—a spirit of giving. Just as you don’t need a God to celebrate sunsets and baby toes, you don’t need a commercial invention to celebrate giving.

Anyway. We’re not Christmasers, more of drawn-out-winter-festivities-peaking-with-the Solsticers, but we hang stockings on Christmas Eve because it was one tradition my partner and I didn’t want to give up. We say Weihnachtsmann fills them. (He’s sort of a German Santa or Saint Nick.) When my older kid was 4 he asked me flat whether Weihnachtsmann was a real man, and I told him the truth. My younger kid has grown up with her brother explaining to her every year that Weihnachtsmann is a story and we all fill each other’s stockings now.

Funnily enough, neither of them seem to miss out on any “magic” at all.

If you think kids need to really believe in Santa to experience the magic of Christmas, or to avoid “stunting” their imaginations, then you have a really low opinion of kids.

There’s a reason it’s called make-believe.

Honestly, I think adults don’t really grow out of this. Borrowing an example I can’t remember the source of—sorry for ripping someone off without citation—to really appreciate a play, you get into a state of mind where it’s not just your actor friends down there reciting memorized lines (that would be boring) and it’s not really a murder taking place on stage that you need to call 911 about (that would be crazy). That’s complicated, yet this state of mind comes to you very naturally.

Relatives who live in the Czech Republic sent my son a little stuffed Cert, who is the Czech version of Krampus. I’ve been reading a lot about the Tio de Nadal also. Forget Santa, I’d much rather have a Christmas celebrating demons and poop.

Meh. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with raising children with some vague belief that the universe wishes them well, call it Santa or Vague Mythological Jesus (or Unitarian Life Force). I consider it a childhood myth on par with Your Parents Will Always Be There When You Need Them. Learning that the general principle is untrue should be reserved for after drinking age.

Calvin is one of the OLD gods!

Which, I suppose, is fine as far as it goes, and some people like using their kids as an audience for such things, but, as Amanda says, it’s more for keeping the adults entertained and preserving an outlet for the class clowns who’ve grown up into adults. All the stuff about “preserving the magic for the children” is a bit of dress-up.

True. I save my best “Calvin’s Dad” BS performances for kids, who generally react with the desired mixture of amusement, mild horror, and wide-eyed credulity—they make a good audience for that sort of thing, which is a sort of magic in itself. Most adults, I’m afraid, usually get something more along the lines of Kevin Drum.

You like the Donald Westlake Nackles better?

The Westlake/Ellison* version appealed to me, yes. Not a story for real kids, of course (although it has something to say about mythology, as well as the sort of wretched adult who uses stories and make-believe to bully kids, and how it comes back to bite him in the arse).

But for grown-up kids? I think Calvin’s Dad, while he wouldn’t share it with his son, would enjoy its internal logic and consistency:

Who is Nackles? Nackles is to Santa Claus what Satan is to God, what Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda, what the North Wind is to the South Wind. Nackles is the new Evil.

I think Frank really enjoyed creating Nackles; he gave so much thought to the details of him. According to Frank, and as I remember it, this is Nackles: Very very tall and very very thin. Dressed all in black, with a gaunt gray face and deep black eyes. He travels through an intricate series of tunnels under the earth, in a black chariot on rails, pulled by an octet of dead-white goats.

And what does Nackles do? Nackles lives on the flesh of little boys and girls. (This is what Frank was telling his children; can you believe it?) Nackles roams back and forth under the earth, in his dark tunnels darker than subway tunnels, pulled by the eight dead-white goats, and he searches for little boys and girls to stuff into his big black sack and carry away and eat. But Santa Claus won’t let him have the good boys and girls. Santa Claus is stronger than Nackles, and keeps a protective shield around little children, so Nackles can’t get at them.

But when little children are bad, it hurts Santa Claus, and weakens the shield Santa Claus has placed around them, and if they keep on being bad pretty soon there’s no shield left at all, and on Christmas Eve instead of Santa Claus coming out of the sky with his bag of presents Nackles comes up out of the ground with his bag of emptiness, and stuffs the bad children in, and whisks them away to his dark tunnels and the eight dead-white goats.

“His bag of emptiness.” Just excellent.

Happy holidays to everyone (and a very Merry Xmas to our “oppressed” trolls).

* I give Ellison some credit for trying to bring the Westlake story to TV, and making Frank a racist as well as a abuser. Ellison being Ellison, and TV being TV, it never happened.

For those interested, I have a related post on Santa here:
http://philosophydad.blogspot.com/2008/11/santa-is-tool.html

I’d rather not tell my kid the preposterous, maudlin story that there is a Santa Claus, but I’m too much of a coward to stare down the massive guilt trip that would rain down on me mightily from every last corner of our culture. (Most fellow parents will recognize my candor.) So I half-heartedly go along with it. What the hell you gonna do? I’d be made to understand that I’m robbing my beloved i’l'un of some kind of Childhood Wonder, even though I recall finding the story distinctly suspect almost as soon as I was old enough to comprehend the narrative.

Sometimes you just sigh and say, Whatever. Not as easy as it sounds to buck convention in child-rearing. The pertinent question being, Is it a battle worth fighting? Because it would need to be pursued vigorously, exhaustingly, if it were. It’s not in this case.

” Not all of us are skilled bullshitters who can come up with cockamamie stories on the fly, like Calvin’s dad, or my dad, who told us that Parmesan cheese was made up from ground-up dirty sweat socks.”

My dad enjoyed doing that. He told me when I was six or so that the piece I have missing from my ear was because the doctors slipped when doing a cesaerean section on my mom. (Is it weird that I knew all about what a c-section was at a young age? My folks were veterinarians and talked about surgery at the dinner table, so they were quite happy to describe how I was born to me) I just assumed that it was true until I was 12 or so and mentioned it to someone, which my mom heard and corrected me that being born without a bit of ear ran in her family.

“Playing a convincing Santa is kind of like making a great haunted house for the trick-or-treaters to walk through.”

I had a lot of fun and felt very grown up pretending for my little sister.

I’m a Jew, and learned about the Santa thing thanks to too much TV early on (otherwise known as cultural osmosis).  IN Second grade, my Catholic best friend picked up a book about Santa intended for people much older than he was, called “The Truth About Santa.”  It gave him what I now think was a genuine crisis of faith.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081224/ap_on_re_us/tracking_santa

i mean… really NORAD “tracks” Santa?

My family emigrated to the US when I was 7; until then, we had lived in the former USSR. There is a Russian version of Santa (Grandfather Frost), but he’s widely understood to be fictional and I never suffered from any disillusionment or other problems from knowing this. I would personally never tell my children that Santa is real. I guess there’s probably not much harm in having some Santa-belief at a young age, but it’s not particularly requisite or anything.

i mean… really NORAD “tracks” Santa?

The late Michael O’Donahue wrote a hilarious, sick story for the National Lampoon about the Russians launching a successful nuclear attack by first attaching Santa Claus figurines to the missiles, causing mass confusion at NORAD. The last line of the story, IIRC, was “...Rudolph’s nose glowed brighter than it ever had before.”

Bitter Scribe;

that is wonderful!

Borrowing an example I can’t remember the source of—sorry for ripping someone off without citation—to really appreciate a play, you get into a state of mind where it’s not just your actor friends down there reciting memorized lines (that would be boring) and it’s not really a murder taking place on stage that you need to call 911 about (that would be crazy). That’s complicated, yet this state of mind comes to you very naturally.

To extend this idea a bit - IMO many atheists feel about religion and mythology the way non-911-callers feel about plays.  This explains the occasional ill-concealed feeling of vague superiority on one side (what kind of yokel would believe that was *actually happening*?) and the highly emotional fireworks on the other (how can you just sit there when there’s a murder going on?!  Something Must Be Done!!).  Religions sometimes raise the stakes even beyond murder, with lurid tales of eternal torture and the ultimate cause of all evil and such epic themes.

Sadly, the Santa/God analogies tend to be incomprehensible to people who have already assigned the two ideas to different categories (one shared story, one really real).

Personally, I think that if the child is old enough to ask the question, they’re old enough to deserve a straight answer, and inventing conspiracy-theory-like “explanations” to cover the flaws in the story is over the line.  (The story about Uncle Matt having a fight with Santa is cute, but if they realize that Uncle Matt’s version of events fits the facts better, you’re really not doing the kid any favors by encouraging them to reject it anyway and cling to an authority figure’s story.)  If they discover the truth on their own and you try to shove them back into the myth, that’s *way* over the line.

The wrapping-paper thing is a neat clue if the kid is aware enough to catch on to it, but ISTM that they’ll probably get you on the handwriting first, anyway, unless you happen to be a skilled forger with a convincing alternate “fist” for Santa.  But at the point that they can pick up on those things unprompted, it’s time to let them know that Santa is what we (including the kid) make of him.  You don’t need to believe in a real Santa to enjoy stories about Santa any more than you need to believe in a real Batman to enjoy stories about Batman.

If they discover the truth on their own and you try to shove them back into the myth, that’s *way* over the line.

That’s a great point. I agree that it’s fun to lie to kids because they’ll buy your bullshit and make you feel smarter than you are, but you shouldn’t get malicious about it.