I SAW MOMMY KISSING THE BISHOP OF MYRA: Posts supporting my anti-Santa-myth position from Zorak and Cacciaguida. Zorak also offers advice on how parents who have already told their kids that Santa is for reals might break the news without disillusioning them or making them think that Christianity is all a bunch of fluffy nonsense.

And here’s an email exchange in which I make my case:

KairosMan: Two objections to your Santa post. (Okay, comments, since you didn’t quite draw a conclusion–but it was close.)

The first is, admittedly, self-referential, but it is valid on purely pragmatic grounds, even if it fails a logic test. Do you want to be the parent who ruins an (apparently) harmless myth for all the children? If I told my son when he was two that there’s no such thing as Santa, the first thing he would have done is gone to all the kids in his day care (yeah, we did day care; that’s a different problem) and told them the Truth, in very solemn tones. All the warnings in the world would not have been enough. Soon enough, some angry weightlifting Dad would have waited for me in the parking lot to kick my ass. By inductive reasoning I declare the myth to be harmless. Further, to declare to a child that all the *other* parents are lying to their children might do more harm to that

child’s perception of truth than going along until the child begins to figure it out for himself.

The second is not self-referential. Is there a connection between your Objectivist stage and the willingness of parents to prevent you from experiencing a sense of wonder at Random Winter Day time? Does the training in accepting the less-than-rational that is Santa Claus hinder or harm that ability long-term? I suspect the answer varies from one person to another, but that for most a belief in Santa Claus allows parents to “dumb down” to a

child’s level faith in a miraculous giver of gifts, without having to dumb down Jesus quite so much. As a parent, I have often left sophisticated concepts about Christ alone, while able to make simpler versions of those concepts accessible when we talk about Santa. (And, no, I have never explicitly compared Jesus to Santa, and have downplayed the direct analogy when the Lad has done so.)

Neither of these is fully compelling, but we all, ultimately, make parenting choices inductively, because when we try to make them deductively, we invariably wind up with those piles of neuroses colloquially known as “children of therapists.”

Me: Well, I definitely agree re inductive vs. deductive parenting, and I see your point about telling all the other kids, but

a) I never had an Objectivist phase. All the Rand-stuff on the website is because my best friend is an ex-Objectivist, as are several of my other close friends. But I always thought Rand was wrong. This is interesting in Santa-context b/c actually I was a fairly superstitious child, for good (abiding belief that the world is imbued with

“meaning”/story/purpose) and ill (superstition is anti-Christian and magic-y [human will uber alles]), despite no Santa.

b) I also didn’t tell all the other kids about it. Now probably this is just because I didn’t know much about Santa–I’m honestly REALLY surprised at how big an issue this seems to be for parents. (I mean, I know it’s not a HUGE issue, but it was really not on my radar screen at all as a child.) So I frankly have no clue which of my classmates, if any, believed in the big red guy. But it does suggest that with at least some kids and some contexts, your problem won’t apply.

I dunno. At a gut level, I love all the Christmassyness, “and it shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly” and so on, but when kids start actually BELIEVING in Santa, and cry when he’s exposed as a fake (he’s not! he’s a SAINT! But can a kid adequately appreciate that a saint is cool enough when he’s just been disillusioned?)–anyway, when Santa becomes a Big Deal, I find it… creepy. Eerie. Stephen King-like. Like there’s this big grownup conspiracy not to tell kids the truth–for no reason. Now, I’m sure that if I’d actually been told about Santa I would see it as mostly-harmless, a basic rite of passage type thing, fun while it lasted, etc. But as it is, Santa creeps me out.

Wow, now I feel like the weird one! Ah well. We’ll see what happens when I have kids.

The KairosReply: I wondered about the Objectivist thing, but it would have been a great argument, so I stuck it in. Bummer. 🙂

I was speaking about my child only, in regards to spreading the word. He is a compulsive repeater of truth, and at age 3 regularly narced on himself when I picked him up from school. He would tell me about things that even the teacher hadn’t noticed. Needless to say, we have encouraged this tendency, and would have had to undermine it in order to keep the Santa secret.

Plus, purely for entertainment value, is the fact that the oldest sibling is allowed the privilege of telling the younger ones that THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SANTA. As I was the victim of my sister in this regard, I resent it extremely, of course, but all it did for me was confirm that she’s a big fat stinkhead, while preserving my parents as very, very cool for having bought all these “extra” presents all these years, in the name of teaching me about unconditional love and generosity. (Though maybe I’m retrospectively amending part of my perception.)