There are many things to dislike about Christmas: the bloated newspaper ads, the second-rate music repeated endlessly in shopping malls, the inane evangelical bleating that " "Jesus is the reason for the season"", and the pressure to conform lest you be labeled a Scrooge, or, even worse, a Grinch.
Of course, there are things to like about Christmas, too. Everybody enjoys giving presents, and some even like receiving them. A break from work is always appreciated -- even if, like me, you just use it to catch up on work left undone -- and a house that smells of roast turkey is one worth coming home to.
But there's one Christmas tradition that my wife and I have never shared: deceiving our kids about the real nature of Santa.
You know -- Santa Claus, Jolly St. Nick -- the man in the red suit who delivers the presents, as immortalized in the classic poem by Clement Clark Moore. (Shhh - don't tell the kids that Moore, a dour, humourless man who owned slaves and opposed abolition, probably stole the poem and its authorship from Henry Livingston.)
Ever year, Christmas offers adults the opportunity to participate in an absurd fraud against your own children: to pretend that Santa Claus is real, that he spookily monitors their behavior, that Santa won't bring them presents if they misbehave, and that he somehow manages to invade a billion houses in one night, aided by eight (or is it nine?) aviating ungulates.
I can already hear the howls of outrage. "It's a harmless fantasy," some will say. But it's not that harmless. Someday your Santa lie will be discovered. If you lied to them about Santa Claus, kids will wonder, what else did you lie to them about?
"It's only a little lie," others will say. But it's not so little. Once you lie about Santa's existence, you have to lie another time when your kids see Santa in two different stores. You have to lie once again when the kids leave Santa cookies before going to bed, and in the morning they're gone. It starts small, but it soon becomes an elaborate deception. We refused to play along.
I have nothing against fantasy stories. As a child, I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read it over and over again. But it's important to know the difference between reality and fantasy. I never believed that Tolkien's Middle Earth was real, and my parents didn't lie to me that it was.
My wife and I never lied to our kids about Santa Claus. We treated him as a mythical figure, just like the the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin.
Our kids don't seem to have been permanently harmed by our choice. Both like reading and telling stories, and they enjoy fantasy and role-playing games. The Narnia books are some of their favorites. They've even been known to wear Santa hats and play Christmas carols on their violins.
"You deprived them of a magical experience," some will say. I don't think so. Our kids know there is magic in the world, because they've looked through a microscope at a cell, and they've looked through a telescope at the rings of Saturn. They know that the tilt of the Earth's axis is the real reason for the season, but they also know the magic of their parents' love.
So no, Virginia -- Santa Claus isn't real. But there's nothing phony about human imagination, fantasy, the telling of tales, the complexity of our universe, the desire for a better world to live in, and our ability to achieve that world if we work hard enough and care about others. We told our kids the truth about those things, too.
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