Do the little ones in your life believe in Santa?
I’m not a big fan of Santa. It may be fun but it’s still lying to your kids – just like people lie to their kids about Jesus. They’re both imaginary entities with empty promises.
I recently saw a meme on Facebook that said: Why doesn’t Santa bring the needy kids toys? For the same reason Jesus doesn’t feed them.
Bam!
I didn’t want to tell my daughter about Santa, but my husband was really into it. She’s five and I can see the wheels turning. She’s asking questions like, “How does Santa get into our house? We don’t have a chimney.” I don’t think she’ll believe for much longer.
I was her age when I stopped believing. My older sister showed me presents under the tree already labeled “from Santa” and it was several days before Christmas.
I was actually really mad that adults were lying to children. A little later on in elementary school I wrote an essay about how I felt and apparently my dad got a call from the school. I’m not sure whatever came of it.
Friends of my parents back home didn’t tell their kids about Santa because they didn’t want them to question Jesus when they found out Santa wasn’t real.
I think it says a lot when you can compare Jesus to Santa. There are definitely some parallels.
Do you think Santa vs. Jesus is a far comparison?
How do you feel about the whole Santa charade? Did you do it with kids in your family? Did you believe in Santa when you were little? How did you feel when you found out he wasn’t real?
In NL we celebrated St. Nicholas on Dec 5th, not Santa Claus on the 25th, but it’s the same idea… I also wasn’t raised religious, although my father did give me a children’s bible at some point, which I read as any other work of children’s fiction at the time. So my experience may not be exactly comparable…
As a kid we celebrated St. Nich’s with a group of friends of my parents from their college days. They all had kids roughly my age, except for the gay couple who dressed up as St. Nicholas and his helper Pete. Story goes (I was too young to remember it myself) that one year St. Nicholas and Pete switched roles and I realised “ohhhhhhh!!!!!”
Afterwards it became a bit of game to keep my little brother “out of the loop”, similarly in my elementary school there was a bit of a distinction in my year between the kids “who knew”, the kids “who believed”, and the kids “who knew, but still believed when the month was December” which probably is a nice metaphor for atheists, believers and agnostics. Even a few years afterwards we still did a sort of “Secret santa” and pretended all our presents came from St. Nich, even though we all knew the presents came from our (unknown) classmates.
I don’t think (and can’t imagine) I was ever mad about it… it’s just one of those silly games adults play with kids. If you play peek-a-boo with a baby are you lying because you are pretending to not be there?
I believed in Santa until I was 6 or 7, but when I had my own family, Santa was just a game we played, and everyone knew it was a game.
When I was a kid, my parents did the Santa Claus thing and I remember the christmas when I realized it was them. I don’t remember being mad or disappointed. Later when my kids were born I didn’t want to do it, but my wife insisted. So we agreed that we will do the Santa stuff but that she would have to deal with the questions. I figure that this year o maybe next will be the last one as they are asking a lot of questions lately. I’ll try to make it a teachable moment about believing stuff.
I told my kids Santa Claus was a game we played. It allowed them to believe or disbelieve as much as they were wont to.
Oh, gosh, I remember agonising about what to do about this with my children! (I can’t remember ever believing myself, which in a way made it harder to figure out what to do as I had no ‘what, Santa isn’t real?’ memories to draw on.) I’ve just written a post on my own blog in reply.
Sorry, meant to include link: https://freethoughtblogs.com/geekyhumanist/2021/12/13/the-santa-dilemma/
Just came across this link to Terry Pratchett’s argument for teaching children to believe things that aren’t true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBnENlXt-H4