I see your point.
There was no religion, Santa or other myth belief in our household so I can’t speak to this as a parent. She did decide she was an atheist at the age of 15 after attending some church functions with her friends and that hasn’t changed.
Based on my experience, that is what I think. Yours is obviously different.
When I was a kid, my parents never did the Santa thing. We knew where our presents came from, and I don’t feel slighted at all.
My wife’s family on the other hand made Santa Claus a huge deal. They would even bring her outside and have someone ring bells in the backyard so she would think he was almost there.
With our kids, we haven’t made an issue of it, really. My oldest daughter asked us if this Santa guy she kept hearing about was real, so we told her the truth.
My son who is 5 somehow picked up the Santa thing, and he believes Santa is real. He’s more gullible than his sister, I guess. We all think it’s cute, so we’re not gonna burst his little bubble.
Depends on your POV.
I can personally credit Santa Claus to endowing me with skepticism and critical thinking. After hearing rumors at school that there was no Santa, I asked my parents. After telling me he wasn’t real, literally the next thing I asked was “Okay, well, is God real?” I think the realization that anyone can lie to you is a good thing (and parents DO lie to their children - Santa Claus or not - anyone that says otherwise is lying to themselves).
If you think blindly believing improbable things and not questioning authority is a good thing, then Santa Claus is bad, because he is a relatively innocuous concrete example of why you* shouldn’t do that.*. Otherwise, he’s a pretty good thing, I think.
There is no reason it has to be uniformly good or bad.
If one kid loves playing elf on the shelf, gets a big smile when he thinks about Santa working all the way up in the north pole and makes a pledge with his sister to stop teasing each other through the months of November through December then it I think its a good thing.
If on the other hand a poor kid who assumes that the reason he only gets a set of pencils from Santa while others in his class got a VR Ironman helmet, is that he was too naughty, well then maybe he should be told the truth…
I have no memory of believing in Santa Claus, so I can’t remember finding out he wasn’t real other. Sometimes we’d get gifts saying they were “from Santa,” but we always knew it was from our parents.
I was raised Catholic, so the Santa thing was treated as more of a continuation of the St. Nicholas story than anything else. I don’t remember ever really believing in god, either. I liked some of the saint stories, but they were always the same thing to me as fairy tales. Fun stories. Sometimes a little didactic, but on the mostly just for entertainment.
Santa a myth? :dubious:
Where’s my coal…? :mad:
People lie. They lie all the time, even your parents. The sooner kids find out about that the better. That’s the value of the Santa Claus myth, children figure out that nobody can be trusted all the time.
From my experience, Santa is good. At worst he’s harmless fun. The awe and wonderment of Santa’s magic was a fun holiday feeling. When I found out the truth, I just kind of thought yeah, that makes sense. Oh well. And I kept up the ruse for my younger siblings.
I’d be interested in hearing from those whose parents did the Santa thing and who were sufficiently traumatized that they decided–based on that–not to tell their children to believe in Santa. I’m sincere about this.
My parents did the Santa thing. When I figured out that Santa was my parents, I was disappointed but not terribly upset. Really, it was my first lesson in people giving without getting credit for it. My ex and I did the Santa thing, too. When my kids asked if Santa was real, I asked “What do you think?” If they said yes, that was the end of it. Later, when they expressed doubt I told them, “Well, I believe in Santa. I believe in giving to others anonymously, and it’s fun to use Santa as the means to do it.” There are still gifts under the tree “from Santa,” but now some of them are from my kids to me.
That’s the value of the Santa Claus myth: children figure out that people will lie to you in order to do nice things for you and give you stuff without getting credit for it themselves?
Does a person have to be traumatized by it in order to decide that it’s not a good thing? Is deciding you do not wish to perpetrate an elaborate, years-long hoax upon your child not enough of a reason?
I found an old thread on much the same subject, in case you want to see what the Dopers of Christmas Past had to say. I found myself liking what I said back then:
Add me to the “not traumatized” camp. My parents did Santa. I remember when the next door neighbor (who was two years older than I was) told me that Santa was my parents. I didn’t believe her, but she convinced me to search the house. We found the stash of not-yet-wrapped Christmas presents.
No, I wasn’t traumatized. I dunno, as lies go, Santa seems pretty harmless. I’m not even sure I’d call it a lie. I suppose the lesson wasn’t “Santa doesn’t exist”, it was “Santa is really your parents”. Which is true, for most of us. I didn’t feel lied to at the time, anyway. I still liked getting presents. And that’s when I actively participated in the Santa myth, and left milk and cookies out for him. I think that even at age 5 I could understand that there are social things we do because they are nice traditions.
Anyway, we did Santa with our kids. My kids have all sorts of complaints about how we were terrible parents, but “Santa” never came up.
My take on it is “it’s fine, but not important”.
My family ‘did’ Santa, but somehow it was in a way that the question ‘yeah, but is he really real?’ never actually came up. I consumed a shit-ton of fantasy and sci fi as a kid, and I can never recall it not being plainly obvious that Santa was in that kind of category of things - and not really the most interesting one. What’s ‘dropping a bunch of presents at your house’ compared to being granted the magical ability to fly, or finding yourself in a world full of talking animals? I got presents on my birthday too - big deal.
I can’t tell you how many hours I spent as a kid working out in excruciating detail just exactly what was going to happen when the TARDIS finally came down and whisked me off to some exciting alien planet - the fact that at the same time I knew perfectly well that all the Doctor Who stories were written and acted by the ordinary humans whose names came up on screen after each episode bothered me not at all. ‘Is it real?’ just wasn’t a thing, although I could have perfectly well given the correct answer to that question if asked. Same thing with Santa.
As a parent, we haven’t done Santa particularly, because we’re a churchgoing family, and Santa is kind of Jesus-for-Pagans. It always amuses me when people seem to think it’s the other way around.
So essentially I think Santa is fine for kids … but it’s a little disturbing how invested some adults are in it. It seems like people think of imagination as a delicate fragile thing that can be snuffed out in an instant with a breath of reality. My imagination is pretty robust, and so’s that of my kids.
“Jesus for pagans”. I like that. And of course, we left out most of the unpleasant parts of the Jesus myth. No risk of hell, we weren’t even worried Santa wouldn’t come.
My kids grew up without religion also, but when they were old enough we went through the beginning of Genesis and I showed them the absurdities and contradictions. They both went to religious functions with their friends, and thought their friends were nuts. But I think the experience of figuring out Santa was quite useful.
One hopes that after the myth is revealed parents will continue to do nice stuff for the kid, and do it out of love.
I wonder if any kids think “Santa brought me all these presents, my parents got me bupkis.”
In my own experience, the revelation wasn’t that painful, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t painful for others. I’d like to learn more about people who decide not to tell their own kids because they don’t want to inflict the painful disillusionment they felt on their own kids. That doesn’t mean other reasons aren’t valid, and I didn’t say it does in my earlier post.
Hope that clears this up.
Jewish dad here with Jewish kids and neither I nor they ever did Santa (although they knew better to dispute Santa with Christian friends), so mostly I just lurk in these sorts of discussions, but really?
My kids knew that I’d try to get them to believe tall tales all the time and see how far I could keep them believing all kinds of harmless absurdities. They also knew I would always tell the truth about something that mattered and my word was gold.
The former was play and despite the fact that they were in a very literal sense lies had no impact on the trust they had (and as adults and one still a teen) have in the latter.
Santa is not play that I participated in as a child or as a parent but clearly it is play. The well of trust is not spoiled by play.
That sort of play is good. It doesn’t have to be a Santa story but being so serious with our kids that they never get joshed with is, I think, not a good thing.