I know I said I’m on blogging break, but I still want to do my monthly repost thing. This is a classic I wrote in 2011.
‘Tis the season for anecdotes…
I didn’t ever take Santa very seriously when I was younger. Or at least, not as far as I can recall. And I thought that no one else took Santa seriously either.
I mean, kids believing in Santa, that’s just something that happens in the movies, right? There are countless movies depicting little kids who believe in Santa Claus. They’ll write letters to Santa. They’ll wait excitedly at the stairs for Santa to come, deliver presents, and eat the cookies and milk. Kids believe in all these elaborate legends and rituals, sometimes even in the face of disbelief from their parents or older kids.
Of course, in these movies, Santa also happens to be real. But Santa isn’t real. So why should I think that belief in Santa be real? For me, belief in Santa was all part of the mythos, along with the elves, reindeer, and red suit.
But some time ago, my dad told me that he and my mother made a conscious decision not to emphasize Santa Claus. (They also made a decision not to emphasize heaven and hell, but that’s another story.) The reason? Apparently, one of my uncles had a very negative experience with Santa. One year, he found out Santa wasn’t real, and he broke down crying. He had a huge tantrum, and IIRC, also questioned the existence of God.
And then the next year, he forgot that Santa wasn’t real. And then he found out again and had another tantrum.
So it turns out that my childhood experience was not identical to other people’s childhood experiences. And plenty of kids really do believe in Santa, as well as the Tooth Fairy. In a study I found, about 70% of 3-year-olds believe in Santa, as opposed to 78% who believe in the garbage man. 83% of 5-year-olds believe in Santa, and a third of 9-year-olds believe in Santa.
This just boggles my mind. Next you’ll tell me that kids actually write letters to Santa (what does the post office even do with them?), actually leave out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve (don’t they go bad?), and parents actually dress up as Santa to fool their children. This entails a much greater societal investment into the legend than I previously thought.
And what a bizarre legend it is. Often, it’s about the conflict between the believing children and disbelieving adults. And as the narrative goes, it’s the children who are in the right for believing. Why?? Why is belief for its own sake a value? It’s one thing to claim that it has some value for child psychological development, but I hardly think that the legend has caught the public imagination because of psychological research.
I used to believe we lived in a world where children only believed in Santa in the stories. That world made much more sense, but now I know that is not the world we live in. I guess I learned a valuable lesson in critical thinking.
At least in Canada, volunteers in the Post Office answer all the ones with return addresses.
BTW: Canadian postal codes are all 3 letters alternating with 3 numbers and Santa’s is, of course, H0H0H0.
Um…
I think the parents are supposed to eat them.
I hadn’t heard about that.
You say that in a country saturated by religion? Christianity couldn’t survive if it wasn’t able to convince people that believing it in spite of the evidence was somehow inherently virtuous.
I’ve always thought it was a means by which parents can unconsciously plot to drive children to atheism.
After all, if they wanted their children to believe in God, why would they admit the nonexistence of an old bearded man with superpowers?
What does “unconsciously plot” even mean? Intention without intention?
BTW I knew kids write letters to Santa. “Next you’ll tell me” is a construction I use to highlight the absurdity of reality. i.e. “You’re saying [absurd fact]? Next you’ll tell me [another absurd and true fact]!”
We came to the US from a non-Santa country (Israel) when my kid was 2. In the early years we didn’t do Santa, but my kid picked up on it in preschool and kindergarten. When he was 5 he was sad because Santa was not going to come to our house. My husband decided our kid ‘deserved to be a child’ and did the Santa thing with a surprise gift. And not long after the kid opened his present a fire truck came down our street with a guy in a Santa suit. You can imagine belief was confirmed for a while. I have no idea when my kid stopped believing, but I remember there was a year he believed the presents were from us, but only because Santa was in need of our help (the weather was particularly bad that year), and a year when he was laying ambush for Santa in the living room.
My daughter (10 years old) still mourns the fact that her older cousins told her that Santa did not exist. It all came to a head last year when she asked if Santa was real. I told her that Santa must be real with all the kids getting gifts from him, but that I thought that that was not her real question.
She sheepishly asked me if I was Santa. I answered yes, that I and mommy and most of the parents in America are Santa. She was crushed. I explained that it was so wonderful to see how excited she got, and how I got to give her gifts that she wanted without her knowing. I told her that one day she would be Santa too, and get to see her children’s excitement (if she chose to have children).
This year she asked if Santa would come, and I said yes. I will always be her Santa… The cookies are just too good.