This is a repost of a short article I wrote in 2012. Yes, at one time I wrote short articles. Enjoy.
Last year, I talked about how lots of kids actually believe in Santa. This was surprising to me, because I previously thought Santa-belief was a just as much a myth as Santa.
In particular, I remember lots of Santa-related movies, where the kids believe in Santa but the adults do not, and it’s the kids who are right. This is mostly a general impression, but to name a specific example, I watched The Santa Clause (starring Tim Allen) several times when I was young. These movies did not strike me as strange at the time, but they strike me as strange now.
The moral of those movies was essentially, “Santa is real, and you kiddies should believe in him.” It just seems like a rather wacky moral to me. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing which is appropriate to kids.
On kids shows when I was growing up, the morals were usually much more straightforward and incontrovertible. “Don’t give in to peer pressure.” “Don’t be greedy. Share.” “Be self-confident.” “Eating too much candy is bad for you.” “Looting and polluting is not the way.” “One day you’ll like girls. Like like.” That kind of stuff. The only things with questionable morals were the breakfast cereal commercials.
And then Santa. Geez. The moral is, “You should believe, because it’s adorable when kids do that. You should also believe because Santa happens to be real even though the parents believe otherwise. Your parents are wrong.”
I… I just don’t understand the appeal of this narrative. Why do parents promote this to kids? I assume there’s some religious appeal, but it doesn’t make sense even within my mental model of a religious person.
(I believe the relevant TVTropes article would be Values Dissonance.)
Sorry, but that sounds as silly to me as “the moral of Babe is that farm animals can talk to each other”. They’re fables.
When I was a kid, my favourite TV show was Popeye. But I never took seriously the “message” or “moral” that eating spinach would allow me to beat up people much bigger than me, or that violence settles conflicts.
I suspect many people vastly overrate the utility of films, or any art form, in morally instructing people of any age. That way lies Zhdanovism.
Umm… I just looked up the definition of “fable”: “a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral.”
Speaking as an English teacher — yes, we can certainly disagree over what moral a particular work seeks to convey. If you want to take issue with the OP and say that the moral of The Santa Clause and its ilk is that adults should not give up their sense of child-like wonder, rather than a literal belief in Saint Nick at the North Pole, then we might be able to get somewhere. Zhdanov is wrong because you can’t have a one-size-fits all, absolutist interpretation of any work — it will always mean many things to different people at different times. But
It is an observable fact that, as they grow, childrens’ morals do not always end up as carbon copies of their parents and teachers. If their morals aren’t influenced by the media they consume, then where do they come from?
I’m going to go to the other extreme, and agree with Percy Shelley that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind” and Neil Gaiman that ““Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
The moral is that kids grow up to be idiots, because they stop believing in Santa but never wonder where the presents come from.
@Rob Grigjanis,
Although sometimes fiction is just fiction, I think there must be a reason why “kid who correctly believes in santa” is such a common and popular plot element. Maybe it’s not a moral, more of a theme, but it’s not nothing.
In 2012 I was puzzled. Today, I would say that belief in Santa is a stand-in for the innocence of childhood. It’s kind of an anti-bildungsroman, I suppose. It could appeal to adults who long for a time when they knew were less aware of the evil and complications in the world. Or parents who want their kids to stay innocent at least for a while.
brucegee1962 @2:
Where morals come from is a complicated interaction between many factors. I would venture to say that the single most important factor is parents (though that works in a much more complicated way than “copying”). And another huge factor is interacting with one’s peers. Media is far down my list.
Vehemently disagree. Artists primarily describe society/culture/the human condition.
Nit: Gaiman was paraphrasing Chesterton.
It strikes me that the appeal of this narrative is that it allows children to have a feeling that they have something over the adults in their lives. For once they are right about the situation and their parents are wrong. I don’t think it’s the idea of Santa Claus in particular that’s important (that’s just seasonally appropriate trimming), it’s the whole kids vs. adults conflict in which the kids come out on top. For a lot of children who chafe somewhat at the boundaries and sense of being patronised that the adult world presents them with, it seems a fairly understandable fantasy of escape and empowerment.
Taking this idea further, there is also something appealing to children, and many adults, that the grey, humdrum, tedium of the adult world is not a necessary and inevitable fate. That the magic doesn’t have to die, and everything doesn’t have to collapse into the joyless purgatory that the adult condition represents.
cartomancer @7:
And on that cheery note, here’s my favourite Christmas card ever; Season’s Greetings from Eniwetok Atoll.
Siggy @4: I didn’t see your response last time I checked.
I don’t think effective fiction is ever “just” fiction. Why are superhero movies so successful? Because people crave saviours?
Rob Grigjanis @9,
You snuck in that qualifier, “effective”, and I agree. Sometimes fiction is just fiction. Effective fiction is not just fiction. Sometimes fiction is not effective fiction. And even effective fiction has elements that don’t contribute to its effectiveness.
Gee, I don’t know why superheroe movies are successful. I don’t like superheroes or movies. I’d guess that it’s because people like epic action that centers around individuals (as opposed to large groups such as armies).
Good point. There is a vast amount of non-Christmas related children’s literature that I grew up with (mostly British, eg. CS Lewis, E. Nesbit, AA Milne, Lewis Carroll, P.L. Travers, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Rackham a bit, plus an odd American or two like Edward Eager, Norton Juster, and L Frank Baum) whose premise is that magic is accessible to children but closed off to adults. The effect of this literature on me as a child was to make me deeply fearful and angry about growing up.
I think that what all these authors had in common was a sneaking suspicion that children are better humans than we are. As a grown-up myself, now, I wouldn’t necessarily say they are wrong.
@6 Ah, Chesterton. We’re all walking in his shadow, aren’t we?
I was looking for a Gaiman quote I recalled about “Stories make the world,” but that was the closest quote I could come up with.
@5 Rob Grigjanis
It’s an interesting, though probably unresolvable, debate. I find it hard to explain the rapid one-generation change in society’s acceptance of homosexuals, for instance, without the substantial leadership of artists.
“Hey, everyone knows there ain’t no Sanity Claus.”
Chico Marx to Groucho Marx during negotiations over a contract that included a “sanity clause.”
I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over myself.
The whole Santa Claus thing is puzzling. I like to look at it as though it is an oral tradition that has evolved through the decades. The story telling began as a parent-to-child experience. There are are plenty of story elements to play with. Mrs. Claus, the elves, the reindeer, the list of who’s naughty and who’s nice.
The story and its elements are shaped by the preferences of the parent and the child. Like fairy tales.Then the movies picked up on it, then television. And lately as a sub genre of the seasonal movie business.
I regard the Santa Claus story as a kind of mind control mechanism to make children reluctant give up their belief in god. Giving up belief in Santa Clause can be painfully traumatic for a child, especially if the child is one of the last of his or her peers to give it up. Later the experience may be remembered when the child grows into adolescence.
I think some may be over analyzing Santa. We did/do Santa for our kids because we have fond memories as kids. When I started to question Santa my parents actually encouraged this, asked me why I had doubts and my parents told us it was not true and why they did it. We did the same for our kids and there were no tears or psychological ramifications. I don’t know anyone that has any real issues stemming from having believed in Santa. My older kids 14 & 17 still love to pretend Santa comes, its a fun tradition that we all share in our family. If am not advocating for it. Just do what you think is right for your family.
@Martin Zeichner,
It’s always been difficult for me to believe that Santa is a deliberate mechanism to reinforce belief in god. Where is the evidence? In any case, most kids stop believing in Santa before age 5 (citation in OP), and most people who enjoy Santa stories are doing so after age 5, so that doesn’t really explain the popularity of the stories.
@Vincent Thomas,
Well, in my family we were never taught to believe Santa was real precisely because it did cause issues. Story goes that a certain uncle got very upset about it when he was young–twice. But I should not offer anything resembling child-rearing advice. I don’t intend to have kids.