I was in Grade Two, just nicely seven that fall, when I heard the news that Santa wasn’t real. A boy in my class, L, leaned forward eagerly to inform me, eyes shining. L wasn’t someone who had just found out himself; he was someone whose family didn’t ‘do Santa’ and he seemed happy to bear the truth. His mother was volunteering in our class that day and was sitting beside him on the other side of the table from me. As I looked to her for assurance that he was wrong, she simply nodded in agreement with him, also smiling and seemingly pleased to be educating me on the matter. It’s funny that I don’t remember where in the school we were because I have quite a distinct memory for places, but I really can only see the set up of the two of them on one side of the table and me by myself on the other while they waited and watched me digest the news. Or so it felt.
There are a couple of other things about that day that are clear to me. I was eager to get home and process it by myself. I also remember my mother being deeply irritated with L for telling me (I hadn’t asked) and it was that day that I learned the rules of engagement – now that I knew this information, I was NOT to pass it on and ruin any other child’s sense of wonder. It was a serious matter to be the bearer of such news and children had a right to come to it in their own time. I now knew that there were two groups: kids who knew and kids who didn’t. I was now in the first group and not to be one of the boundary-less, insensitive ones like L. 🙂
So was I traumatized by this revelation about Santa Claus? I wasn’t, but it’s interesting that I remember the moment and the feeling of embarrassment that I’d been gullible and was just now being given information that he (and others, I now realized) had always had.
But did it impact me and if so, was that impact worth the five years or so of previous magic? I ask this because I think those are two parts of the conversation that cause much of the concern and disagreement: Are kids impacted when they find out Santa isn’t real and do they feel they’ve been lied to BUT ALSO is that early sense of wonder and the magic of Santa important and almost a rite of passage?
So as usual, there’s the potential for some guilt for parents, with the messaging sometimes being one of two things: You are lying to your children or at least allowing them to believe something untrue OR yes, you’re being upfront but then you’re denying them the magic of Christmas.
Of course, as with many topics, there’s far more nuance than the polarities of opinion make room for.
Here’s how I think it played out for me …
Was I impacted by learning the information? I was, although again, more by the glee in the way it was given to me unasked for than the information itself. It was a little bit about the loss of magic, but more about the feeling of being silly for not having known something that now seemed so obvious.
Was I angry that this had been withheld from me and did I feel lied to? Not that I remember and I still don’t have any resentment around it. For some kids, however, I get that they do feel these things. I know someone who was devastated to find out and another who was angry, so I believe this all comes down so much to situation and personality. I knew there was never any intention to lie, but more to preserve a possibility, to sort of create an enchanting experience and so from that perspective I guess I am glad to have had that magical sort of time.
My image of Santa Claus was that of a benevolent, generous, abundant figure. I don’t really remember anything about “naughty or nice” except in the song and never took that literally. There was no sense that I had to earn favour with Santa. He was someone who enjoyed the giving as much as children looked forward to the receiving. This is very reflective of the type of faith I have and I think for this reason I haven’t felt conflict between the spirit of Santa and my faith. Some people have concerns about Santa taking the place of the spiritual meaning of Christmas. I’ve certainly seen that happen to some degree with people – a lot of mainstream society, for example, and that’s fair enough if the spiritual aspect isn’t relevant to them – but it doesn’t need to. It can compliment Christmas as I think it did in my childhood. Our cultural concept of Santa is more complex than that of a figure developed from Saint Nicholas. Much of the detail we think about in the modern understanding of Santa Claus has its origins in Norse culture and many of the traditions of this time of year – yule logs, mistletoe, time of year – are related to ancient pagan traditions rather than Christmas itself, but for me they’ve been interesting rather than problematic and so, I guess, too was Santa.
But back to the matter of actual belief in Santa …
My questions seemed to be answered in logical ways. No worry that our old stone chimney was closed off and there was no fireplace to come through – Santa would do what he needed to do, which in our case was to magically come through the locked front door. It wasn’t a problem that there was a Santa in the parade and a different Santa at the mall. Those were stand-ins to represent Santa and the real Santa was just fine with that. In thinking about it now, I guess it was an interesting mix of practicality and fantasy. Interestingly, I don’t remember writing a letter to Santa or seeing him as someone who would deliver a wishlist to me but I may have at some point.
We had fun with it. My grandma would recite The Night Before Christmas by memory on Christmas Eve. We would leave cookies and eggnog out on the table for Santa and peanuts for the reindeer and we would write him a solid note to make sure he knew the snacks were for the taking (in case he didn’t realize), to please help himself and feel free to be generous with the reindeer. In the morning we would wake up to an empty plate and eggnog glass. There would be a letter back in the same place on the kitchen table, always in rhyming couplets, in very similar handwriting to our dad (hindsight is 20/20), thanking us for the snacks and highlighting the energy they’d given Santa and the reindeer for their continued journey. I remember one Christmas Eve before bed, my grandfather taking me out on the porch, saying he was sure he’d heard bells and seen some kind of a light in the sky. He pointed with wonder and we both looked and looked and of course, there was nothing there, but there was such a sense of anticipation and possibility.
This was a magical period of time between about 10:00 at night after we returned from the Christmas Eve service at church – the preparing of snacks, letter-writing and hanging of stockings – and 11:00 or so Christmas morning. From my perspective, it felt as if it was presented and maintained from a place of fun and joy and mystery. It in no way took away from observing and celebrating the religious or spiritual aspect of Advent and Christmas.
The weeks leading up were a deep, beautiful anticipating of the birth of Christ, awe-some and gentle with candles and simple words of hope, peace, joy and love. They were weeks of both festive music and much-loved carols and hymns; there was no conflict between the two for me because they were simply different energies/vibes/ways of preparing for the same joy and sense of mystery. They were also weeks of multi-generational community gatherings in the church hall full of food and music.
Christmas shopping never felt “commercial,” but instead exciting, choosing things to gift people with and the anticipation of manoeuvring them into the house and keeping them hidden. And we ran the gamut of homemade gifts, store-bought and donations in people’s names. None of it felt contrary to the others – just different.
The day and supper time of Christmas Eve evolved over the years and expanded to include family friends, but for the sake of my Santa-believing era to begin with, my younger years included any extra wrapping, positioning and repositioning of presents under the tree, eye-balling the ones with my name on them (it was only the stockings that were Santa’s domain; anything under the tree was to and from each other) and maybe doing a bit of gentle shaking. 😉 It often included a final recipe of sugar cookies to be added to the dessert plate, but mostly it was the peace of a warm casserole dinner, the Christmas Eve service at church, some carols with a couple of older neighbours before bed and then the final Santa prep.
Christmas morning was the anticipation of the stockings hanging on the banister of the stairs. (The temptation to look around the corner and down at them during a mid-night trip to the bathroom was great). We would check to see who was awake and then all open the stockings together. Next came very casual breakfast in the living room with the tree lights on while we waited for grandparents to arrive to open presents. And then the common things – dinner with one side of the family one day and another on Boxing Day. Christmas has always felt good to me, even during really hard years. Losing both my grandmothers one year, one of them just before Christmas, several extended family fights where people stormed out – oh yes, it wasn’t all ‘Pollyanna’ – I don’t know, there was always both a sense of peace that made it all okay.
So all of this is to say that Santa was not the main event. I think that’s another concern from both ‘sides’ – that by ‘doing Santa,’ you take away from the deep (and people of Christian faith would also say true) meaning of Christmas and on the other hand, from a more festive, “Santa IS Christmas” perspective, that once kids find out Santa isn’t real in actual form, then the magic and joy of Christmas are gone too. That can happen not just with the idea of Santa, but of presents in general being the main focus.
For example, I remember being at a family’s house not too many years ago and the father was unsure about what was happening with his job. The mother relayed what happened when they told the kids that gifts might be fewer that year. Both kids cried and the one said, “You mean there might not BE a Christmas this year?” The mother simply said this with sadness, but it took me aback. At no time would I or my kids equate a lack of or fewer gifts with there not BEING a Christmas. It would be a (big) adjustment but it would be fine and still joyful.
It may sound as if I have the whole Santa thing figured out and that having had quite a balanced experience, would have found a way to continue the belief and magical experience with my own kids, but that isn’t what happened.
I married someone who not only didn’t have the same experience of Santa but for whom Santa wasn’t a consideration as part of Christmas in his family. When he asked about Santa as a kid, having heard of him at school and on shows, etc, he was told very pragmatically that no, Santa wasn’t real. It was a lie that white people told their kids to make them behave. Whoah! Imagine that to my benevolent Santa-loving ears! Except in thinking more about it – the songs, the movies, the questions people ask kids about whether they’ve been good enough for Santa – I got it. I had really never thought about it that way, but yes, I got it.
So, a bit of unpacking began to decide how we would move forward with our own kids. It actually didn’t take too long. We opted not to ‘do Santa.’ Although it had been an integral part of my childhood Christmases, it definitely didn’t define the meaning or season and it felt as if ‘doing Santa’ would be a bigger stretch for my husband than not doing it would be for me. We agreed it wasn’t a case of being anti-Santa. There was a range of music playing in the house, both religious and festive including ones about Santa. We went to the Santa Claus parades, we still watch Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer each year and the biggest piece that I hoped to retain from my childhood was hanging stockings because long after I believed in Santa, I loved the anticipation of stockings and my children have too. And yes, I passed on the childhood advice to them that I received, not to spoil the belief for those who believed. I said I wouldn’t ask them to lie if asked outright, but to not go out of their way to mention it to kids for whom it was an important tradition.
Have they missed out? Maybe a bit, although they will all clearly say they haven’t. Perhaps it’s hard to miss what you haven’t had. Something that’s interesting to me is how many other things we’ve done that I didn’t as a child. Loads of Christmas and holiday stories, books about other traditions around the world and from holidays from other religions, crafting, serving others at events or delivering things to people not able to get out, being on a float in the Santa Claus parade … none of these were things I did as a child so it just showed me there were so many ways to celebrate. We certainly have lots of other fun customs and my kids feel a strong sense of meaning and joy although there are some who have found that hard to believe.
We came across one mother in particular who was upset that we hadn’t done Santa properly with our children. She mentioned it often and told me she’d send my husband the history of St. Nicholas so he could better understand. We received three consecutive voicemails with her reading the history and the positive messaging and importance of Santa Claus. This intense focus further made my husband’s point that this belief in Santa could take over the meaning of Christmas and did nothing to shift his mind about getting on board. So here we are – a stocking-hanging, parade-going, but non-Santa believing family. We believe in the spirit, beauty and fun story of Santa, but for us it has ended there.
Like so many things though, there are a myriad of ways these choices can play out depending on belief system, traditions and even our children’s personalities and preferences. I think we would have had to work really hard to convince our oldest of the existence of Santa beyond a story and it would have felt like lying, but part of me imagines one of our other kids might really have enjoyed the fun and mystery of it, so it’s hard to know, isn’t it?
I’ve asked a few people what their memories are either from their own childhood or with their own children and the answers have varied from quite mild and matter of fact to quite strong in one direction or the other.
Thoughts?
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