Update the myth.
Do not say that Santa leaves coal for bad boys & girls.
Tell them that Santa lives forever because he is Undead, & will suck the blood & the phlegm from bad little boys & girls.
That’ll teach the little B*****ds.
And occasionally the Easter Bunny turns up drunk and takes an eye instead[1].
[1] Not my line, forget where I heard it.
The easter bunny or the tooth fairy?
China bambina doesn’t really believe in Santa Claus. BUT we have fun every xmas preparing beer and cookies for Santa. And the look on her face on christmas morning when I rush in wake her up and tell here “santa was just here, can you hear the raindeer?” is just priceless.
She’s not really fooled as she notices the wrapping paper Santa used is the exact same as what was in the study the day before. But she’s got a sense of wonder, it’s fun and maybe she’s reserving a tiny bit of skepticism.
Not sure why a parent would want to stop having a fun time with Santa. Or the tooth fairy or the easter bunny. It’s all just kinda fun and part of being a kid. Knowing it’s 90% BS but not quite sure…that’s a good lesson for life.
Santa Claus is one of my favorite memories from childhood. I was a little upset when I found out he wasn’t real, but the years of magic were worth it to me.
When I found out Mom then inducted me into the Santa Brigade and told me that Santa really does live on in all of us, if we keep him alive. To this day I still make a large donation to Toys For Tots each year.
I won’t tell people they should or shouldn’t, but I will say I’m glad I had those few years of magic. That kind of magic is what makes being a child fun.
My Dad didn’t want to tell us Santa was real, but my mum talked him into it. I’m glad she did. It made Christmas more special. And I wasn’t upset when I realised the truth.
I’ll do the same with my own children.
What, talk your father into telling them? Shouldn’t you be the one to do that?
My sister decided not to do Santa with her littlest. There are stockings and things like that, but my niece knows that it’s all just playing pretend and she likes it. If I had children, I’d probably do the same thing.
She still gets the fun of Christmas and waking up with presents that weren’t there before, but she knows where they came from. This seems a lot better than what my sister and I went through when we were young. Our aunt was a bit of a scam artist and every year right before Christmas–often on Christmas Eve–would cry to our relatives about how her children had no toys. And so my other aunt and grandmother and various others would buy extra presents for my cousins or, if there wasn’t enough time, give my cousins the presents that had been meant for my sister and me.
But, my aunt had also done the same thing to just about every charitable organization that she could find. And so what resulted was my cousins having an apartment overflowing with presents, to the point that you couldn’t see the floor from wall to wall, while my sister and I had just a few things. Year after year, our cousins taunted us by saying that we had been bad and Santa loved them more.
Obviously, most kids don’t have this experience, but it left me more than a little bitter on the subject.
I am frankly amazed at the amount of anti-Santa-ness (not just here, but IRL, too.) I have an acquaintance who I think has lost her mind where Santa is concerned. She was devastated as a child when she found out Santa wasn’t real, and has decided that her parents deliberately set out to traumatize her by telling her LIES!
I don’t even get the mild anti-Santa vibe: “we know he’s pretend, but we play along.”
To me, childhood is all about Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, and it’s one of the perks of being a grown-up to get to put magic out there for little kids. I don’t think I understand what kind of thought process goes on with people who examine the Santa myth and decide that it’s detrimental to kids’ trust.
(Funniest thing I ever heard on this subject was a friend who was beng taken to task for “lying” to her kids. She said, “I lie to my kids all the time. I chased them around the house telling them I was the big tickle bunny, and at no point in time was I actually a rabbit.”)
The one I always quote (and I’m sure I’ve typed it here before) is from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where grandma tells her daughter, who just gave birth, that it’s very important for her child to “believe in the Kris Kringle until the age of 6.”
Ooh – found the quote in my copy, so here goes (grandma emigrated from Russia, so her English is a little stilted):
That is truly horrible that your Aunt pulled this stunt on her family and especially her nieces. I am glad you added the last line. In this case your Mom or Dad should have stepped in and ended the Santa story for you two. Your Aunt was a very bad Aunt however.
Jim {My Bolding in the quote}
Smart arse. 
And I should point out, my Dad’s objection wasn’t about lieing to his children. It was about getting the credit for the gifts.
We were told that they bought the presents and gave them to Santa to look after. Who then brought them back at Christmas with a few extra gifts. So while I believed in Santa, I knew it was my parents buying the presents. No letter to Santa for us. Just an Argos catalogue and a pen.
I perpetuate the Santa story for one reason: In our family, Santa doesn’t wrap his gifts. So I don’t have to figure out how to wrap a rocking horse, a train set, or other large, irregularly shaped objects.
Okay, okay, there’s also that whole, “teaching them about storytelling, and myth, and truth that isn’t literal, and even about disappointment and not always implicitly trusting authority” which I think are important, too.
But mostly it’s so I don’t have to wrap the rocking horse.
This just isn’t how it is for everyone.
My wife, as a child, truly and deeply believed in SC, TF, etc. She had no doubt in her mind they were real.
Not my wife, but a friend of ours, was also like this. She even went to great lengths to prove to the doubters that Santa was real, trying to gather evidence by asking Santa to leave his signature on a note and things like that. (You’re less than five years old, you don’t quite think about “evidence” too clearly…)
Kids like my wife and this friend of ours aren’t playing. They really believe it. So when my wife around 1st grade came home and complained to her mom about kids at school saying there was no Santa, and her mom asked “Well, what do you want to believe about it?” my wife, a smart kid I guess, detected this note of hedging, and demanded further clarification. Her mom’s response: “He’s real if you want him to be.”
At this my wife didn’t start thinking critically or chuckle at the mystery of it all. Rather, she burst into tears. Between sobs she cried “Next you’ll tell me the Easter Bunny’s not real either!” expecting reassurance. But when her mom began, “Well…,” as you can imagine, things went even further downhill.
Her mom and she now laugh in retelling the story (my wife’s not claiming there’s serious harm necessarily involved) but at the time there was nothing fun or thought-provoking about it. My wife now knew her mom had lied to her about something she (my wife) felt very strong emotions about. She was angry and felt betrayed, and that was the whole of it.
Similar story with this other friend of ours we mentioned.
So, you might argue that what was wrong here was something about the way their parents handled the Santa Claus story, emphasizing his being “real” far too much or something. That might be true (though notice that what my wife’s mom said when my wife “popped the question” was right in line with the kind of things some of you guys are advocating one ought to say). But then my wife can have no confidence she would know a “right” way to handle it, since she had no such model for herself as a kid. To be clear–she doesn’t think there is a right way to handle it since for her its just an act of deception and betrayal.
-FrL-
Some kids are just sensitive, you know?
Do we have any elementary-grade teachers in the audience? What do you tell your pupils if they ask you? I can see that you might upset some parents no matter what side you come down on. How do you handle that?
Sarcasm aside, this is kind of what I do. I don’t feel the need to shelter my child from the realities of life. On the contrary, part of my job is to educate her and equip her to deal with them. Now, just as I’m not trying to teach her calculus before she can even add 1+1, I’m not going to bring her to the morgue to show her dead bodies, but when questions come up that deal with death, “nature red in tooth and claw,” sex, etc., I just answer her as honestly as possible within her ability to understand.
My mother tried to shelter me from death to the point of frantically shielding my eyes from roadkill. When I was a teenager, I wound up going through a harrowing period of necrophobia which I think would have been absent if I’d learned about death more organically through my entire life.
As Douglas Adams wrote, “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” I think there’s plenty of magic and excitement around Christmas, and enough wonder and awe in the universe, to satisfy my child’s needs, without multiplying entities beyond necessity.
In any other circumstance, would it even seem sensible, never mind necessary, to create an elaborate hoax with which to deceive one’s children? It just doesn’t make sense to me to go out of your way to deceive your kids. There are more than enough opportunities for me to let her figure out some critical thinking skills. It’s important to me for her to see me as absolutely trustworthy.
Also, to address the idea that Santa engages and feeds a child’s imagination, it seems to me that only kids who know the truth and pretend Santa is real are using their imaginations. How is it imaginative to believe what your parents tell you?
All that said, hey, if you want to pretend Santa is real, knock yourself out. I don’t think it does so much harm that I need to control other people’s decisions on the matter.
Most parents lie to their children. Or children choose to believe the “hedges.” At no time did we tell our children Santa was real. At the same time, at no time have we ever told our children we have an active sex life. They figured out Santa was real with no betrayal. Eventaully, they will figure out their parents “do it.” That seems to be a bigger deal to most kids (and, at 40 I really still don’t want to think about my parent’s sex life - yech!) (Our kids have asked and we’ve told them that a person’s sex life is very private and not something to ask about).
We also haven’t let our kids know too much about our previous non-married sex life and boyfriends and girlfriends we had before we got together. About underage drinking (we talk to them honestly about how it isn’t a good idea…I haven’t told them about coming home tipsy on screwdrivers at sixteen - I did tell them about throwing up in the Iowa River as a Freshman and how sick I was the next day when I had to go to class.) About our own illicit drug use (ok, not mine, I’ve never taken drugs - the same cannot be said for my children’s father, whose pipe disappeared about the time our children appeared).
Last Spring I discovered that while he was dating my mother, the cops showed up at my mother’s parent’s door with an arrest warrent for my Dad! He was shooting the side of someone’s abandoned barn.
(And we play tickle monster. At no time have I been an actual monster).
Exactly. Well said.
My wife and I are atheists and Santa Claus still comes to our house every year. My daughter (6) believes. My son (9) is a willful state of disbelief … I’m pretty sure he knows what’s really going on but he’s careful to play along to keep the bubble of fantasy afloat.
As an atheist I also trace my early doubts about God to when I first learned the truth about Santa Claus. If one magical creature didn’t exist, why should any of them? It started me down a road of skepticism that I’m still on to this day.
Hooray for Santa, the big old fake!
Don’t forget, kids are pretty savy, they talk about these things at school and know to hedge their bets based on the common concept that “kids who still believe in Santa get extra gifts”.
This is not true in all households but it is a common kid theory.
From a conversation last November: It only became official this year at 9.
Jim
Our oldest son helped us make the decision. We didn’t really want to perpetuate the myth, but thought it might be fun. The first time we mentioned it, though, our little 4 year old said, “But Santa is just a man in a suit down at the mall.”
There was no fooling him from the beginning and he made sure the two siblings that came after him didn’t fall into the Santa trap either. We still keep a lot of the Christmas traditions, but in our own, non-Santa way.
Jammer