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So, here’s a little post-Christmas question for all you parents, grandparents or armchair parents (that is, people like myself who have no children but are still interested in questions concerning child rearing.) Should children be taught to believe in Santa Claus?
I realize it’s a little late to be discussing this, but I got interested in it due to a discussion on a Catholic friend’s blog, in which she related how she and her husband told their two-year-old quite frankly that the Santa Claus story (at least, insofar as it involves flying reindeer, elves in the North Pole, sliding down chimneys etc.) is just pretend. After which they proceeded to give their daughter all her Christmas gifts correctly labeled, with no interference from Santa Claus on Christmas morning.
Interested readers can go to her site and read the entire post, but to summarize, she explained that she and her husband “had decided against promoting the commercialized Santa Claus that you believe in for a few years and then find out isn’t real.” On the other hand, they did want to tell their children about St. Nicholas, who, like all the saints, is a real person who can intercede for us. When the problem arose, my friend’s husband, Jeff, dealt with it in the following fashion:
Jeff explained that St. Nicholas is like St. Mary or St. Anthony (of Padua) who are always with us and can pray for us and help us out. St. Nicholas is associated with Christmas gifts because he is known for his generosity. But some things are fantasy, he explained, like the idea of flying reindeer and coming down a chimney. “It’s like in the Hobbit,” he told her (yes, he’s reading the Hobbit to our two-year old), “there aren’t really dwarves and elves and hobbits, but they are fun to imagine about. It’s fun to imagine that St. Nicholas has reindeer and a sleigh, but the real St. Nicholas is even better. We give each other gifts on Christmas because we want to be generous like St. Nicholas, and, more importantly, we want to be generous like God, who loves us so much that he sends his only Son, born of Mary in Bethlehem.
She further explains his reasoning:
Jeff’s point was that it’s dangerous to teach your kids to believe in something that you plan on disillusioning them from later. If Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are imagination and we teach our kids to believe in them, what will they think of St. Nicholas, St. Mary, and even Jesus? Are they just imagination too? Jeff thinks somehow this is all tied to the Enlightenment and radical skepticism. The attitude is that sure, kids can believe in imaginary things, but when you grow up you become rational and realize that all of this is make-believe. It’s easy for “religion” to slide into this category of imagination. But we’d like our children to grow into adults that maintain their sense of the real supernatural; we’d like them to know that prayer is something active, something that actually does something, not just something to make us feel better. We’d like them to be aware of the communion of saints, the presence of angels, and the person of Jesus, among other things.
This is interesting to me, because on one level I’m sympathetic — extremely so, in fact — to Jeff’s line of thinking. Certainly I agree that the Enlightenment and its embrace of philosophical skepticism are at the heart of most modern errors. This fundamental mistake manifests itself in many trappings, but Jeff certainly has his finger on one: the desire to draw a hard and fast separation between the “real” world and the supernatural/fantasy world. Of course I wholeheartedly agree with him that children should be taught to accept the supernatural as real in the most robust sense, and indeed as a part of our everyday lives.
But does that necessarily mean giving up on Santa? It isn’t clear to me that that’s the best response. I admit that a certain amount of honing of the commercialized Christmas trappings is surely in order. For one thing, children need to understand from an early age that Christmas is first and foremost a celebration of Jesus’ birth, not just a chance to bring in a haul of toys. They ought to be told about the real St. Nicholas, not left with a purely secularized notion of Santa Claus. That all seems very wise and fitting. On the other hand, it seems to me that Jeff’s position actually yields ground to the moderns by conceding the need to draw a firm and bright line between fact and imagination. Of course, he would draw that line in a very different place from, say, Descartes or Bacon or Richard Dawkins. His “fact” pile presumably contains such things as the Virgin Birth and the intercession of saints, and graces poured out in the Sacraments. Nonetheless, he seems to insist, with as much seriousness as Dawkins would do, that it’s never too early to teach the young ones to separate fact from fiction, and to dismiss the latter as having no real importance. That seems to me a very characteristically modern way of understanding the world.
Would Tolkien approve? I rather think not, and it also seems to me that he’d dislike having his works described as merely “fun to imagine about.” After all, he helped convince Lewis to become a Christian by pointing out to him that stories and legends are, in an important sense, true. Lewis plays with this theme even more explicitly; for him, characters show real maturity, not when they finally accept that there is no such thing as fairies, but rather when they begin to wonder: might there, after all, be fairies? And if so, what would they be like? What place would they have in the grand order of things?
The underlying principle here is not, of course, “believe everything you hear.” If that were the lesson, you would soon have children believing every campfire story they ever heard… and then they might get older and start believing in healing crystals and Tarot cards. Obviously that would be bad. We do want our children to exercise some discernment. My contention, however, is that discernment should not come in the form of a rigorous fact/fantasy line. It should come from a firm grounding in the faith. Grace can manifest itself in many forms, but Satan has many faces too. He throws up many shallow copies of divine perfections in an effort to trap us and lead us astray. And the way to discern the difference is through prayer, assisting in the liturgy, frequent reception of Sacraments, and fidelity to the teachings of the Magisterium. But the really wonderful part of it is that these safeguards, by steering us away from danger zones, liberate us from the need for skepticism. They leave us free to be credulous again, with that lighthearted, childlike credulity that nonbelievers feel they must eventually sacrifice for fear of being “taken in.” Why couldn’t there be fairies? Who says there are no elves?
It is perfectly good, and perfectly Catholic, to think of intrusions of the supernatural as a regular part of everyday life. That can come in the form of Sacraments and sacramentals, holy water, prayers, and other familiar Catholic conduits of grace. But we should also (as Lewis and Tolkien would probably recommend) maintain a healthy sense of humility about how well we know the supernatural side of things. Reading my friend’s post I had an amusing (admittedly caricatured) image of them sitting down with their little daughter and presenting her with a list of mythical creatures about which the record should be set straight. “Angels? Yes. Elves? No. Leprechauns? No. Demons? Yes.” And so on. Surely this is not how we want our children to think about the supernatural. Rather, we should want them to live in delightful anticipation of what else may turn out to be true. Young children manifest an easy readiness to believe anything fantastic and wonderful, and the last thing we should want is to squelch that.
Of course, my friends don’t want to squelch their daughter’s sense of mystery. They would presumably say — and in a sense this is very good and proper — that they want to direct it towards the true and infinitely more joyous mysteries of the Catholic faith. Obviously I agree that this is the goal, but these mysteries are deep and complex, difficult for an adult to contemplate let alone a child. A healthy sense of credulity needs other, less difficult forms of nourishment, and if a child is quickly disabused of all her other happy fantasies (especially ones that most of her peers believe) it’s hard for me to imagine that this won’t contribute to the development of a general attitude of skepticism.
So, after that discussion of mystery and credulity, let’s return to the question of Santa. There’s an obvious rejoinder to what I’ve been saying, and it is this: it may be very well to encourage children to be generally credulous, but when we teach them to believe in Santa, aren’t we deliberately telling them lies? We know perfectly well that their stockings are filled, not by a jolly man in a red suit, but rather by tired parents in the late night hours, and that their toys came not from the North Pole, but from Target or Amazon. If we tell them otherwise, won’t they be scandalized (in the most proper sense of that term) when they learn the truth? Might they not conclude that all the other things we told them about the supernatural are also just happy lies, manufactured to produce pleasure or comfort in a harsh world?
It’s probably a sign of how firmly the fact/fantasy line is engrained in our minds that this seems like a serious problem to us. (And I don’t exempt myself from the “us.” I’ve puzzled over this one myself in past years, until I finally came to a conclusion that satisfied me.) Because of course, it’s not a peculiarly modern custom to introduce children to whimsical fantasies that they will one day associate with childhood. At any rate, it’s certainly not a peculiarly Western custom; I remember with some amusement how the Uzbeks had a sort of bogeyman figure with which they threatened children who ran away from their mothers in the bazaar, or in other places where there was danger of getting lost. I suspect all cultures have various stories and customs of this kind. As children grow older they learn to identify the more serious stories from the less. But they don’t need modern skepticism to teach them the difference. Their elders’ own mannerisms should be sufficient to give the game away when the appropriate maturity level is reached.
In the case of Santa Claus, I’ve had to develop some strategies, because my younger siblings and babysitting charges used to turn to me as a source of “reliable” information for things their parents would not tell them. In the latter case especially, this was dicey, because of course I didn’t know what their parents’ “Santa policy” was and I didn’t want to undermine parental authority. So I learned to strike a jolly, whimsical demeanor when answering Santa questions, which left the children trying to decide just how seriously my replies should be taken. Here is a sample of how such a dialogue might go:
child: How do Santa’s reindeer fly? I’ve seen deer at the zoo and they don’t fly.
me: Huh, good question. Flying dust, maybe? Maybe Tinkerbell works for Santa too!
child: Well, maybe. But how does he get down chimneys when he’s so fat?
me: Let’s see. I guess I can think of two ways. Either he gets thinner, or the chimney gets fatter. Which do you think it is?
child: Chimneys don’t just get fatter. They always stay the same size.
me: For YOU they do. But are you Santa?
You get the idea. The great thing about this strategy, I learned, was that it could be read on multiple levels depending on the children’s maturity. So, if there were older children in the room, they could see that I was playing and just found the whole thing funny, and most of the time did not feel compelled to interrupt and disillusion the younger children. A two or three-year-old might take my words more or less at face value and start a game of Tinkerbell-makes-the-raindeer-fly. Kids in the middle might sit in genuine perplexity, trying to figure out what to make of the conversation. But the point is that a child introduced to Santa Claus in this not-too-serious fashion shouldn’t need to have her heart broken at some point by the shocking revelation that Mom and Dad fill the stockings. She’ll figure it out gradually on her own. And she should be able to distinguish between the demeanor her parents adopt when talking about Santa, and the one they use when discussing Our Lady or Jesus Christ.
As far as I can remember, this is how Santa Claus worked for me. I believed in him as a young child, and at some point it became clear to me that this was a bit of a fairy tale, but I don’t remember any specific point where I, with heart-sinking dread, realized the truth. I never had a serious heart-to-heart with my parents about it. It just became clear to me as I got older that it was all kind of a game. It was the Santa game. And the thing was, I still enjoyed the Santa game for years after I realized what was going on. There was something beautiful and mysterious about St. Nick, and I sort of enjoyed the fact that my much-younger siblings prevented us from dropping the pretense entirely until very recent years.
I can’t see that it would be particularly hard to connect the secular Santa with St. Nicholas. Tell the children the story of St. Nicholas, and then explain that the good saint went on to take up this new job of leaving presents and candy for children in celebration of Our Lord’s birth. (You might even point out to them that their friends at school or in the neighborhood may not know all about Santa’s past… so they might want to fill them in.) For a child who believes that St. Anthony helps them to find lost things, that St. Michael and St. Benedict chase demons away, that Our Lady helps heal them when they’re sick, etc etc, it shouldn’t be too much to swallow that St. Nicholas leaves them presents at Christmas. You could soft-pedal some of the more fanciful details as in my conversation above. (“Does St. Nick really live in the North Pole?” “Well, I don’t know anyone who’s gone to look. But there would be a lot of space up there, I suppose.”) But if, as they get older, they become more persistent with their questions, or seem genuinely troubled about the Santa issue, I think it would be all right to simply explain. I certainly would not threaten children with no Christmas presents “unless you believe in Santa.” Even after explaining, though, I don’t see why the game couldn’t continue (at least until a child is ten or twelve.) You might put the matter something like this, “St. Nicholas is very generous and loves to see children surprised with presents in celebration of Jesus’ birth. So Daddy and I buy the presents in his place and leave them out on Christmas the way he would want. Some of the stories about the reindeer and the North Pole were made up later, but it makes Christmas more fun to play along a little, don’t you think?”
It’s a sad thing if we’ve reached the point where we can’t play these kinds of games with our children without thinking of ourselves as “lying.” It seems to signify that we’ve lost our grip on the point that was so important to Lewis and Tolkien: that stories aren’t lies, and part of the excitement of life lies in figuring out how they’re true. If you wanted to apply logical positivist-type rigor, you’d have to say that we lie to children all the time, because we’re regularly offering them simplifications of things that, strictly speaking, are at least partly false. (For example, a two-year-old I babysat recently warned me that I must not go near the iron, because irons are dangerous except to mommies. Hmmm. What liars his parents must be!) As children mature, we expect them to develop a more nuanced understanding of the world that will enable them to discern what was true and important in those early lessons, and what was merely child-appropriate. We judge the success of a child’s upbringing in no small part by their demonstrated ability to do this.
Likewise, the imaginative games that we play with our children might, over time, teach them a healthy credulity, and an appreciation of mystery, that will help them to contemplate with real joy the glorious mysteries of our faith. And they will hopefully develop the ability to discern, over time, which aspects of the story are more just childish games, and which really teach something important about the mystery of Christmas. I think my friends are certainly right that the Santa Claus story, handled wrongly, could be disillusioning and harmful to the development of a child’s faith. Parents who themselves believe in a strong distinction between fact and fantasy, are likely to (eventually) present the matter to their children in that light. Some may even deliberately use Santa Claus as a helpful lesson in the unreality of the supernatural (as sad a thought as that is.) But just because some people pervert this ancient custom to serve their misguided ends, doesn’t mean that all of us need to abandon it! The tradition of St. Nicholas (not just as Turkish bishop, but as the bringer of treats to children on Christmas) dates back to long before the modern era, so there’s no reason to think that it’s irredeemably the fruit of modern error. And it seems to me that the legend of St. Nicholas can be a good way (think of it as a “training wheels” way) to help children appreciate the mystery of Christmas. God sent down His Son, miraculously, on that night millennia ago in Palestine. St. Nicholas leaves his offerings, also mysteriously and in the late hours of a very special night. Explained rightly, the excitement of those mysterious gifts might, particularly with age and maturity, help young Catholics to appreciate the excitement of a much more significant, much more mysterious, gift.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
We have switched horses in midstream at my house. For years when my two older sons were young, we did the whole Santa thing, always stressing that the birth of Jesus was the real Christmas story and the most important one to be told. My kids thought Santa came down the chimney, imagined they heard reindeer on the roof, etc. I always thought it was kind of heartless to do Christmas without Santa. But when we joined the traditional parish we now attend, we found that many of the kids would say there was no such thing as Santa, that it was really Saint Nicholas who brought the gifts, and my children actually loved this idea – I guess in a way it made more sense, because since it is the birth of Jesus we are celebrating, of course a saint would be involved in bringing the Christmas gifts. So that’s where we are now. At this point, my older ones are in on the secret but good about letting their younger brother still believe (since they always knew it was really about Jesus anyway, they had no trouble making the adjustment).
Poor Santa started as a saint, too, but from what I understand, when Rudolph was created (as a department store promo), the secularity of Santa, and of course Christmas itself, took off from there. The store’s sales had skyrocketed because of Rudolph’s popularity, then a song was written, and soon everyone else was jumping on the band wagon. The result can be seen in any mall across America starting around Halloween.
I guess I find it actually helpful that my kids believe in Saint Nicholas instead of Santa. No one is making a Saint Nicholas version Homer Simpson or Elvis – he is pretty much ignored by all but a very few. I can point out the more grossly secular (or downright sacrilegious) aspects of Christmas by pointing out the distinction between the two, by making Santa the heavy, since much of commercialism is tied to him. Sorry, Santa!
But I love the fact that my kids believe(d) in Saint Nicholas, I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater as your friends seem to be doing. I think modern American culture may be the first one in which stories and legends, and songs and dances for that matter, don’t play an important role. Why is another post altogether. But childhood is such a tender time, and at least up until they are teens, children are beautifully open to the mysteries, symbols and traditions of the Church.
When I was a child, after the gifts were opened it seemed Christmas was over, and it was kind of sad. We had done all the parties and celebrating already, at school, etc., and I wasn’t taught that Christmas was the beginning of a 12 day feast in Jesus’ honor, ending with the beautiful feast day of epiphany. I don’t want my children to feel any sadness about one of the most beautiful celebrations in the Church! We take it easy during Advent, try to prepare our hearts and souls for his birth, and then after Christmas do lots of special little things to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas, so they know Christmas is the beginning, not the end.
This is a good article on a major issue in childrearing — thanks, Clara.
I was still holding onto the Santa Claus myth with white knuckles at the age of 10. I was a True Believer. I believed all the Bible stories — were Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy and more incredible than those? I believed in the Eucharist and wine turned into water, etc., but a man on a flying sleigh was supposed to trip me up? I was developing sophisticated scholastic arguments in favor of his existence, or at least against claims of his non-existence, when my mother finally took it upon herself to break my heart. At the end of *that* conversation, I asked her if God was made up too.
I wonder — might it be good to return St. Nicholas to St. Nicholas’ Day, which is Dec. 6? When my grandmother was a girl, she would put out her shoes on the evening of the 5th and found them full of oranges and candies the next morning. Maybe Santa Claus wouldn’t impinge on Christmas if he were moved forward by about three weeks.
As for Rudolph, the fact that a dept. store created him (I guess) does not mean that the legend is not charming. A child’s purported fault and source of shame turns out to be the quality that saves the day. Simply because a story is secular in origin does not mean that that it is somehow wrong.
In some countries, Germany for instance, “St Nicholas” still brings presents on the night of 5/6 December. Then on Christmas Eve (rather than on Christmas morning)family and friends exchange other presents. In Germany St Nicholas traditionally has had a rather fearsome helper called Knecht Ruprecht (there are versions of him in other central European countries too), who does dreadful things to children who haven’t been good – a little like your Uzbek bogeyman, Clara!
I was brought up with the Santa myth, and I don’t think it did me much harm, nor was my disappointment all that great when I realised that it wasn’t true. A very interesting and thoughtful post – many thanks.
It’s not that secular ideas about Santa are *harmful* necessarily, but that it’s *helpful* to have a bishop sitting on your mantle instead :) . Then there isn’t a complete disconnect between the real Christmas story and the Santa/Rudolph side of things, both of which we would be asking the kids to believe wholeheartedly (hence the problems with heartbreak, etc. described by B.). There are sweet movies and songs about St. Nicholas, too, and wonderful stories and traditions (shoes filled with treats, etc.) These all reinforce Catholicism in the home but allow the children the fun of fantasy, too.
By the way, we aren’t militant about Santa/Rudolph, the children just know it’s a story, kind of like Bambi. I have always loved the classic Rudolph movie with Burl Ives as a singing snowman – it’s the sweetest thing going and my kids watch it every year.
There are many resources today (like this blog!) to help us to know the Faith better and to help us live it out daily in our homes – those of us who were poorly Catechized, like myself, need all the help we can get. I envy those who grew up with the ricj tradition of Catholicism in their daily lives, but the fact is, my parents, good people though they were, did not provide such a home life (VII and all that), and the result was, as I said above, that Christmas was the end for us, not the beginning.
When you all are parents, you will be surprised how quickly you will jump on every opportunity to drive the Faith deeply into the hearts and souls of your children, and Christmas provides a great opportunity for this.
That’s *rich* tradition of Catholicism. And by the way, folks, I believe that is also a classic run-on sentence. Can you tell I’m in a hurry??
Myths are true in the essential themes they convey (in the case of Santa, there is an ominscient, omnipotent being who punishes evil and rewards good). It certainly would be better to have St. Nicholaus than Santa, but the culture is doing Santa. Since Santa was originally St. Nick, that just puts one more layer of representation into the thing: when I found out Santa wasn’t real from a friend and furiously confronted my mom in the kitchen, she said that Santa really represents St. Nicholaus, who represents God because all the saints do. She told me it was a myth, and carefully explained what a myth is, and it made perfect sense to me.
Like Plato’s Republic, the myth of the metals: people who are too young to get abstract truths in abstract format (“As a rule, it is better to marry someone with roughly the same intelligence level and interests as oneself.”) need to have truths explained to them in concrete representations (“Your soul is silver; the gods made you that way; the gods don’t like the metals to be mixed; so you should marry a silver-souled person.”).
Speaking of modern, the paranoia about “lying” reminds me of Kant.
Furthermore, they ain’t NOOOO way that that 2-yr. old understands the distinction between imaginary and real which this overly earnest parent is so laboriously explainig to him. Just look at Piaget’s experiments. Poor child!! Are these parents academics?? It seems to me that only academics would inflict such conversations on a toddler.
None of this is to say that the material excess associated with Santa and his enormous stature, which dwarfs the Christ Child, should be followed along with; but those are not necessary parts or accompaniments of the story.
Yes, I was thinking of (at least loosely) identifying St. Nicholas with Santa Claus, but I guess contrasting them sounds all right too, especially if the other kids from the parish reinforce this idea. As you might get from the above post, my inclination is to be fairly noncommittal on some of the secular Santa details (raindeer, chimneys, North Pole) but definitely to emphasize the sainthood of St. Nick. But these are mere variations on a theme. It makes sense to adapt your approach a bit depending on your kids’ questions and the things they hear from other children. It does seem nice at least to be able to enjoy some of favorite movies or songs; it would be a shame to discourage kids from singing such Christmas classics as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” We loved all those fun songs as kids. But it doesn’t sound as though Meg’s family has been deprived of any of that.
Of course, what I don’t want for my children is an experience like yours, Bonifici! Perhaps someday we should sit down and compare notes about how our parents handled Santa Claus. What you say makes sense — if you believe in miracles and saints and graces, why should it be so strange to believe in Santa? Credulity can be good, as I already observed. But we don’t want that credulity to lead to heartbreak, or to children concluding that their parents aren’t trustworthy. In my case, as I said, it was never like that, because the way my parents talked about the more fanciful Santa details just made it clear that they weren’t very serious. And I realized that when I got old enough, without experiencing any heartbreak or crisis of faith.
Bonificius’ experience highlights something else, though, that seems important to me. For faithful, healthy children it should be natural to believe in St. Nick. So if you teach them not to, how will that affect them when they start talking to other kids who do believe? One commenter on my friend’s blog (who was apparently of the same general persuasion as my friend) said he had told his daughter (now of school age) that “other kids think Santa is real and it’s not her job to explain otherwise.” I found that troubling. Sounds to me like she’s getting a great first taste of the esoteric thrill of being sophisticated and “in the know”, smiling at the simple credulity of others. Is that a healthy experience for a Catholic child?
I can’t blame my parents, at least not entirely, for my investment in the myth. I was also one of those kids who was terrified of sitting on the dept. store Santa’s lap; I was usually in tears by the time it was my turn. Had I really been a good boy? Catholic guilt set in young; nowadays I have much the same feeling, if not the same reaction, in the Confession line.
Actually, strike that, the Santa wasn’t at a dept. store but rather at the local Masonic lodge. Every year they (and just who precisely were “they”?) invited the village children to the lodge for a showing of Disney’s “The Wind in the Willows,” then Santa came out. Maybe my anti-Masonic fervor stems from that early trauma . . .
On a related note, the Santa scene in “A Christmas Story” is one of the best scenes in all of cinema history.
The name Santa Claus came from the Dutch name for St. Nickolaus – Sinter Klaus.
When the Dutch and German immigrants came to America they brought their traditions with them.
Since it was such a joyful tradition, non-Catholics also started doing the same things, but they removed the Catholic bits and replaced them with secular ideas.
Thus, instead of the Christ Child (Cristkinder in Dutch/German) who brings gifts on Christmas Eve, non-Catholics developed Kris Kringle who came.
That is how the names Santa Claus and Kris Kringle came into being. We need to go back to the traditions with our Catholic children, but do it in ways that promote love and charity.
We do not need to run around telling everyone that they are pagan and celebrating a pagan figure like so many traditionalist I meet are doing.
Just stress St Nickolaus, and minimize the Santa Claus version of St. Nick
It took awhile to go from Sinter Klaus and the Christkinder to Santa Claus and Kris Kringle, so it will take a while to get back to it.
I’m glad my post inspired such a long reflection. I just wanted to say a few things. First, I don’t think we’ve “ruined” fantasy/fiction for my daughter by drawing a hard and fast line between what’s real and what’s not. She’s spent much of the last few days playing a game where she pretends to be Santa. We all have to fall asleep and then she enters the room with “gifts” for us (like my nativity set, which she swiped from the coffee table). She seems to be quite enjoying the legend of Santa with or without her “disillusionment.” As you probably know, Clara, Jeff is a huge Tolkien fan (I think I sent you the article he published on him, and as you mentioned he is reading the Hobbit to our 2-year old). But while his stories are true in some sense (e.g. the real struggle with evil), Maia will never run into an elf while she’s at the park. And she seems to recognize that the same way that she seems to know that real animals don’t talk even though most of the ones in her books do talk. So I have to disagree with the anonymous commenter who thinks that a 2 year old can’t know the difference between the imaginary and the real. O
Secondly, I think it’s important to mention that my husband’s background is as a nominal Jew (on the paternal side) who – though he celebrated Christmas with the maternal secular side of his family – didn’t learn that Christmas had anything to do with Jesus until he was in middle school. And yes, believe it or not – though he always went to the Easter egg roll on the White House lawn – he didn’t know that Easter had anything to do with Jesus until he was in college. Meanwhile, his maternal grandfather saw it as a special mission to disillusion him from all things religious or supernatural. He was a hard-core evolutionist who prized “science” and “objectivity” above all else. Jeff has fond memories of a secularized “Christmas” and of his grandfather, for that matter, but he doesn’t want his own kids caught up in the commercialized aspect of the holidays. Since that’s all he ever knew of Christmas until his conversion, it’s no wonder it’s scared him off. And I think he might be on to something when he suggests that’s the rise of the commercialized Santa in the U.S. (note that it is the U.S. specifically here) coincides very nicely with the rise of skepticism toward the traditional Catholic understanding of the supernatural such as the communion of saints.
For my part, I’m a cradle Catholic, and Santa always came while we were at Christmas Eve Mass – a tradition started by my parents after one *very* early Christmas morning, thanks to the toddler me. I loved both the vigil Mass and the opening of Santa presents afterward. The Santa “game” was fun, I admit. But in all honesty, it did detract from the more religious aspects of Christmas.
Thirdly, in regard to telling her who her presents are from, that seems only fair. Since we only bought her one large gift and a few small things, most of her presents were from family members who live far away. Part of why they send her gifts is so that she can know they’re thinking of her and expressing love for her. I don’t think it would be fair to them to say those gifts were from Santa.
Fourth, we never worried that we were deliberately telling her lies. That never even came up in conversation. Nor have we felt the need to clarify exactly which creatures are imaginary and which are real (despite her current obsession with unicorns, I might add). Like I said, she seems to know that animals don’t talk, but maybe she does expect to see a unicorn at the zoo. We aren’t working at creating a hard and fast distinction. Santa was just something we felt we had to address because of the commercialized culture she was imbibing.
By the way, the commenter on my blog who you mentioned is an Evangelical who doesn’t believe in the communion of saints. So of course for him it’s a much easier pretend/real distinction. Part of the difficulty of this particular case is that St. Nicholas is a real person – a historical figure, a part of the Mystical Body, a saint that can intercede for us. But he doesn’t live in the North Pole.
Anyway, lots to think about here… maybe we’ll change our mind on Santa… the good news is that Maia won’t remember this Christmas by next Christmas, so she won’t know the difference. Aren’t kids great?
Santa Claus can be very imaginatively represented in storytelling, but the idea of maintaining a child’s belief in Santa Claus as anything more than an obviously false Paul Bunyan is little different than direct deception. How can writing that a gift is from Santa rather than from Mom and Dad, unless the child knows Santa Claus doesn’t exist be anything but a lie?
Even if this is siding with the moderns, we must at least concede that they were right in deploring false superstitions. While they are wrong to blame the Church for ignorance, people in the Middle Ages really did believe in incubii and vampires. Surely giving credence to them would be a boon for the imagination, but no one suggests that belief in them be promoted. Santa just gets the sympathy because everyone grows up hearing about him (I did too, but as I hate being deceived I detest the thought that I was ever made to believe in fiction). When I find me a wife, I will raise a nice large Catholic family with no Santa Claus nonsense.
“people in the Middle Ages really did believe in incubii and vampires.
Surely giving credence to them would be a boon for the imagination, but no one
suggests that belief in them be promoted.”
Speak for yourself! I keep a sharpened woooden stake under my mattress at all times (the mallet goes under the bed, as putting it under the mattress alone is rather uncomfortable).
Seriously, though, I think that Scholastic philosophers lent credence to incubi and succubi. I thought St. Thomas Aquinas mentioned them. I don’t think there’s anything impossible or implausible about demons seducing people in their sleep as is suggested, even though it may not happen. They sound like the sort of phenomenon whose existence Fr. Amorth would assert.
If anyone can find evidence of Catholic thinkers debating the existence of vampires and werewolves, please share.
Here is a nice website pertaining to this topic:
http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=23
Thanks, Theologian Mom, for your reply! I’m glad we got to hear your thoughts, and I’m appreciative as well of your initial post for getting this started. Obviously I found it thought-provoking, but it didn’t seem likely at this point that a lengthy discussion was going to get going on your blog, so I thought I’d just import the topic to mine.
Of course I do know that Jeff is a big Tolkien fan. But that’s why it seemed particularly appropriate to speculate as to what Tolkien’s position might be on this topic, or what a devoted fan of Tolkien ought to say about it. :)
Some of the objections you raise to Santa Claus seem fair to me, but I think they can mostly be answered, depending on how the Santa issue is handled. For example, it seems right to me that friends and relatives who send presents ought not to have their gifts subsumed into the “Santa” offerings. Especially once they get older, kids should be taught to be grateful (probably to write thank you notes, for example) to the givers of their gifts, and it would be hard to teach that lesson if they didn’t know who the real givers were. But in my family at least, that was never a problem, because we were never told that ALL our Christmas gifts came from Santa. Some came from friends and relatives, and some from Mom and Dad. Santa filled our stockings, and also our one largest present was generally from him. So if we got a bike or a pair of roller skates or something, that was “from Santa,” and the rest were from other people. My mom didn’t like to have all the presents be “from Santa”, in part for the reason you mention, and also because she liked to wrap the gifts and put them under the tree as she bought them. It looked pretty. But it would have been hard to explain to us why Santa was making repeated trips to the house every few days. So they just went with the two-tiered approach.
Also, as far as the concern about Santa overshadowing the religious aspect of Christmas: that was the main reason why my parents always insisted on not opening any gifts on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve was for reading the Christmas story and thinking about Jesus and singing the religious songs. Then Christmas morning we could wake up and celebrate Jesus’ birth by opening our own gifts. Were we sometimes a little distracted from the religious component on Christmas Eve by our excitement about the following day? Sure. No matter how you arrange or explain it, it’s hard not to make all those shiny presents the Christmas highlight for a little kid. But the religious component was certainly significant, and I think could be even more so if the sainthood of St. Nick were emphasized more. (As Mormons, my parents naturally didn’t stress that bit.)
It’s true of course that Christmas has become secularized/commercialized to a significant extent, and we obviously want to minimize that with our own families. But then, pretty much every Christian occasion has been either 1) commercialized, or else 2) forgotten by society large. When it’s the former, it seems a shame to seal ourselves off too completely from such quasi-Christian elements as our society does have in the name of preserving the original purity. And also, I hate to see us rejecting or minimizing traditions that were originally ours simply because they’ve been turned to other purposes to some extent… anyway, I guess my position is pretty clear by now.
My children now range in age from 27 to 7 and we handled the Santa Claus issue almost identically to the way your friends have. (Although we discussed the topic when our children were a bit older than 2.) I could not do anything else in good conscience. I would have felt I were lying.
I was raised Jewish and became Catholic as an adult. I am married to a cradle Catholic. I wonder if this is a factor since it seems similar to your friends’ experience.
First let me state that (a) I have no children, and (b)this is my very first time visiting this site. This subject has always fascinated me though, and even after reading the post and commentary — well I still could not make up my mind about this ‘Santa’ subject.
We should keep in mind that the Dutch settlers who introduced SinterKlaus, and the Episcopalian minister/author of “A visit from St. Nicholas” were Calvinists who treated saint cults as just so much silly superstition and fairy tales that would be cast aside by the child as he/she matured.