Santa toys for our 3-yr-old twins …$100
“Breakfast with Santa” photo-op at my Aunt’s church…$8
Food we left out for Santa and his reindeer … $1.52
Looks on my kids’ faces Christmas morning
when they saw that Santa’s reindeer had not only nibbled on the celery,
they’d bitten a big chunk out of the styrofoam plate (silly reindeer) … priceless
I’ve met a number of people who weren’t going to do the Santa thing with their kids - before they had kids.
Then they had kids. And somehow, Santa came to their house. And they’ve basically said what you said.
Little kids ‘catch’ the beleif in Santa - they catch it from TV or from their friends or from their schoolmates. You can tell them Santa doesn’t exist when they are two and three or let them figure it out for for themselves (or let their friends tell them) later.
This is a really good point. It’s not like the default is not telling them about Santa. You don’t sit them down one morning for “The Santa Talk”. They are going to hear, see, and be told about Santa from other sources: school, books, advertising, television specials, the mall, grandma, older siblings, etc. So the default is letting them believe. If you do nothing, most likely, they will believe.
So you have to make an active choice to break that belief, and that’s what I don’t see any need for. If it makes her happy, and it causes no harm, I’m willing to casually go along with it. I’m not going to go to great lengths to hide the truth from her, however.
When she asks me peripheral questions (“But we don’t have a chimney! How can Santa get in?”), I’ll ask her what she thinks and tell her it’s as good a guess as mine.
When she asks me if it’s “really real”, I’ll tell her the truth: Santa is what we call the Christmas Spirit, that mysterious feeling we all get around that time of year that makes us want to give presents and spend time with people we can’t stand 364 days of the year! (Okay, I might reword that a little bit…) Santa is Mom and Dad and she’s part of Santa, too.
That is, as long as she’s got a good little head on her shoulders. If she’s overly gullible or sensitive, than I’ll make different decisions based on who she is as an individual. But the above was how I handled it with my son, and it worked just fine. He wasn’t scarred, he had some great theories (Santa has a magic key that works in all the front doors of places that don’t have chimneys.) and he’s a willing participant in facilitating Santa for his little sister now.
My mother doesn’t talk to That Fat Foreigner. She’s negotiated with SiL and Middlebro to have gifts given either on Christmas Day only (brought by the Baby Jesus) or on the Epiphany only (brought by the Three Magician Kings ehrm excuse me the Three Wise Men).
When I was a kid I was in absolute awe at how good they were in Heaven with the whole logistics of gift-giving. The gifts day was Jan 6th, but since they at Heaven knew we weren’t going to be able to get stuff from my maternals on that day, the Baby Jesus did the Kings a favor and brought our Barcelona presents on his birthday, when we were there. This isn’t something I was told, I came up with it myself. Mom recounts it as one of those moments that made her go “wow, it’s amazing the imagination kids have.”
Becoming one of the Kings’ “helpers” was enormous fun. The year my brothers got the playmobil pirate ship, Dad went to assemble it and found me already putting the finishing touches on it 
And when my brothers in turn “graduated”, they both wanted to be Baltasar’s helpers (the black king, he’s the most popular one in Spain, simply because he’s easy to tell apart) but they couldn’t 'cos I already had that job and wasn’t sharing.
Good times in all, what’s wrong with that?
I didn’t. You infer what I did not imply.
Again, you are inferring pejorative. There was no ‘devaluation’.
Again, you infer this is perjorative. I understand that most of the world does use those sorts of words as insults. I hope that will change. I try to change it where I can.
To be perfectly clear, I see ‘brain damage’ not as something meaning a person is inferior, which is what you seem to assume. All it means is that some functions don’t work well. To me, it’s nothing other than a remark about what may or may not cause a person’s actions or beliefs. It’s about the ‘why’ of people is all.
And getting back to Santa, I think it’s not very nice to take away an experience that a kid ordinarily shares with peers. You want your kid to feel bad? Let him or her listen to all the fun that all the other kids are having while the rug’s been yanked out from under their own. Let your kid be the odd one out. Because that feels just grand, that does.
This is how it went down with my three-year-old niece: Christmas season was coming up and my sister just wasn’t talking about Santa, feeling that this would avoid the situation entirely. Obviously, it didn’t, because even if she’s not going to preschool or talking with many kids her own age, she watches TV. Santa is everywhere.
Now, this kid has a good imagination. She comes up with all sorts of fantastic stories out of nowhere, such as her description of her left hand as “the monkey hand” because she can’t use it as well as her right. When she watched the Rugrats Christmas special, in which Santa is shown as being a terrifying concept for Chuckie, she got scared. She said that she didn’t like Santa and he was a bad man. This created a bit of a problem, but I think my sister handled it well. My niece was told that it’s okay, Santa is just pretend and he’s a nice thing to pretend about.
So, when the topic comes up now, my sister is treating it like any other aspect of fantasy that a three-year-old might have. Santa gets the same respect as, say, Baby Bear in the Three Bears or Barbie, but Santa doesn’t get an elaborate conspiracy. At this point, she’s largely indifferent to Santa and doesn’t seem to care that he’s pretend, since she got presents anyway and her presents are associated with the people who gave them. It’ll likely change when she’s older and around more of her peers, but putting Santa in the same category as fairy tales doesn’t seem at all damaging or denying her some sort of pleasure.
I’m all for telling kids Santa exists. For one thing, it gives them a chance to develop an important skill: the ability to recognize when grownups are full of it.
For what it’s worth, my parents told me Santa was real. My dad also told me I had an older brother who had been eaten by the Bogey Man. Actually, I think he worked harder too persuade me of that one.
This reminds of things my granddad used to tell me. When I was a little kid he tried to convince me:
–That where I saw red he saw green and vice versa
–That the show “Different Strokes” is a sequel to a show called “Strokes”
–That the show “Hee Haw” used to be called “Strokes.” (So… you do the math…)
–That chocolate was frozen orange juice.
And all kinds of stuff like that.
Funny thing is, I have no objection to this, and many of the things you guys have been saying about critical thinking and imagination and so on I think actually apply to this kind of playful BSing.
I think the Santa thing is a bit different than the kind of playful BSing I’ve just described, (for example, I never really believed anything Pappy told me in such episodes, and I don’t think I was meant to,) but still, I can see the point you guys are making.
-FrL-
Just remembered my parents pulled this crap on me too 
They told me legal age of marriage without consent was 43, and that I was built rather than born. I never really believed the latter (though I wanted it to be true: it would be awesome to be a robot) but the former, I kind of thought might be true, and was too embarrassed to ask anyone else.
Man, I just totally thought of another reason why I couldn’t tell my kids about Santa Claus.
I can’t bluff to save my life!
If I enountered the situation you did here I would be like all nervous smiles and hysterical laughter and blushing and other odd behaviors that would give it clean away. Hopeless, I tell you. Not to mention I would be like, “Oh my god that is unbelievably CUTE!”
::snort:: It doesn’t take much to sell a tyke (we blew it several times & they never noticed).
Actually, you get a LOT of practice long before the first Santa Christmas comes along. I’ve been amazed at how much manipulating I need to do, just to get through the day – and it isn’t anywhere near as bad as it sounds, since the other option is brute force.
Oh, wait - there’s also shame, and punishment.
I’ll practice manipulation any day!
I have 4 children, all now grown up. I never told themn Santa was real or unreal, but just went along as if the myth were true. So each in turn worked out that Santa wasn’t real, but (by their own decision) played along, so that (1) theywouldn’t spoil it prematurely for the younger siblings, and (2) the presents wouldn’t stop coming from Santa.
I think they all learned some valuable lessons about truth and fiction. First, you need to critricially evaluate things for yourself, because (for various reasons) people around you aren’t always telling the unvarnished truth. And second, even if some myths aren’t literally true, there is still some value in the myths: the woprld is not clearly divided between truth and falsehood, with nothing in the middle.
(And, for what it’s worth, my wife is a Catholic and I’m an atheist, so they also learned that adults don’t all have identical beliefs on what is “true” anyway – and that’s not the end of the world, either.)
That’s the odd thing about the whole “but Santa is lying to your kids!”
OK, there are probably parents who don’t lie to their children. Or manipulate them. Lie by omission. Distract. Distort. Bribe. Trick and fool. I know people who puree broccoli and sneak it into spaghetti sauce so their kids eat a green vegetable. We just had a long thread about which books you kick under the bed so you won’t have to read them for the 12,846th time. “Oh, honey, Mommy doesn’t know where Mr. Brown Can Moo went” (excactly, thought I suspect its within six inches of being directly under your pillow).
I thought when I was a parent I’d be above that. My children would understand logic and consequences and follow directions. They would listen. They wouldn’t be unreasonable.
Ha.
Santa is harmless. Its better than “the dog went to a farm.”
bwahaha Dangerosa, Exactly!! Until you’ve lived through it, a person cannot begin to fathom the effort it takes to wrangle small children without tears and bloodshed! Before they can walk and talk, it’s easy to imagine what life will be like once they’re old enough to understand and cooperate.
Ha!
Of course, none of the ADULTS in my life do this, either :smack: .
Speaking of lies, some of my favorite are the ones that center around potty training.
You give your child Dora or Bob the Builder underwear so they can be like a “big kid” (how many big kids were Bob on their briefs?). Then you tell them they can’t have accidents because “Bob doesn’t like to be peed on.”
Yeah, the silkscreened imaginary character gives a damn if he is wet. But you do it.
Other lies I’ve told my children.
“Monsters are afraid of teddy bears.” They are also afraid of nightlights, as everyone knows. We started with the rational “there is no such thing as monsters” but that didn’t work - my kids KNEW there were monsters. Monsters are afraid of teddy bears worked.
“Don’t scratch your bug bite, you’ll get an infection.” You know, I’ve been scratching for years and I’ve never gotten an infection. Theorectically, I’m well aware that it COULD happen, but it sure isn’t the certainty my mother told me - and I’ve told my kids.
My kids are under the impression that if a police officer catches us and they don’t have their seat belts on, I’ll end up in jail - no passing go, no collecting $200 - with all the “bad guys.” Mommy will just get hauled off to jail - for years - and they will have to fend for themselves. I didn’t create this one (I did tell them it was against the law for them not to wear seatbelts and if the police caught them without seatbelts, I’d get in trouble). Explaining the idea of CPS and court and fines and tickets didn’t really seem like it was in my best interest.
OMG, Dangerosa, I just fell out of my chair over here! bwahaha
When I started the kids at nursery school, I had to take the teachers aside and explain that “Policee-man a take a Mommy a jail” hadn’t actually HAPPENED, it was the threat I used to keep them buckled in! Just spontaneously popped out of my mouth when I was doing 60 mph and realized they’d gotten loose in the backseat.
AND, did you know Dora’s pal Swiper is afraid of Halloween pumpkins? Those decorations on our front door were the only thing keeping the kids’ toys safe from his grasp (oh, maaaan!).
Now, I DID tell them that my Grandfather had died – we’re not twisting ALL reality over here, just mangling it for their comprehension.
But I also explained that it was OK because my Grandpa was very old, older than the trees outside the window.
And when my daughter declared that SHE wasn’t going to die, I didn’t argue.
it’s intresting to me how people get so invested in how other people raise their kids.
Santa doesn’t have to be an all or nothing enterprise. We don’t put any emphasis on Santa in our home. We don’t put out cookies and milk, we don’t sprinkle “raindeer food” out on the front lawn, we don’t go out of our way to take them to see Santa, we don’t do letters either. And yet somehow all our children believe. They have fun with it and yell “Santa came! Santa came!” every Christmas morning. I don’t mind a bit. It’s fun and enjoyable, but when they learn the truth, it’s not heartbreaking for them and I do believe that is partly because we don’t push them into the belief or go to great lengths to encourage it. My older children actually enjoy being the secret keepers for their younger siblings.
The first I heard of this new way of parental thinking was from my uncle who is a Child Psychiatrist and my cooperating nutjob aunt. Have you ever seen the children of a child psychiatrist :shudder:? My cousins had to have broken some records for getting kicked out of school and just general delinquency. The hard a decision to make on the Santa thing but I often questioned the focus on what they should have been thinking about.
We do the Santa thing (and all similar things) in my house and my daughter always liked it. However, we inject just a bit of skepticism into it so that she can work it out on her own and I don’t think she would say she was lied to.
“Daddy, how big is Santa’s sleigh?”
Me: “It is the weirdest thing. I have been all over the world and never even seen Santa. Those that they put in malls aren’t the real ones you know? The real Santa is supposed to be too busy for the.”
I think that different versions of those conversations for several things of that nature introduce some healthy skepticism.
Now about all these people who’s brains shorted out at the “lies”, what happens when you get exposed to lies in everyday life. They tend to be everywhere. What about pranks? I would hardly think this is one of the more egregious lies someone is going to get no matter what the age.
That’s actually pretty cool, I think.
Not to put too fine a point on it but… how many children of child psychiatrists have you seen?
How upset are you when someone you love, trust, and depend on intentionally and needlessly decieves you about something deeply important to you?
I’m not trying to overplay the significance of this kind of thing, but I’m sure you can see how it might be that some kids in some situations might plausibly interpret the “big reveal” in the way I’ve just described. And I’m also sure you can see that this doesn’t generalize to the kind of situation you allude to when you talk about “lies in every day life.”
-FrL-
They tend to be everywhere. What about pranks? I would hardly think this is one of the more egregious lies someone is going to get no matter what the age.
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We didn’t bring up our kids believing in Santa and it worked out fine.
You got presents on Christmas the same way you got them on your birthday, from relatives who bought them in stores. No secret there.
I had been a believer probably at 3 and 4 years old, two seasons. It did seem to be a betrayal when I found out it was an elaborate trick. Although parents had many other elaborate tricks they were all in on together, like claiming that green beans tasted good.
So it was one adult trick in a long line. But still not nice.