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		      TEACHING ADULTS ABOUT SANTA

			      Dylan Holmes
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			      2021/Nov/25


The main problem with teaching children about Santa, I thought, was that
the Santa story is not true. It's not true that a benevolent spirit
visits everyone's house annually and delivers gifts based on how
well-behaved they were during the year---and it's perverse to mislead
children about that. Consider the damage to children's ability to reason
about the world or trust their caregivers. Consider how it closes off
children from their non-christian peers. Consider how a child feels
receiving fewer gifts than their wealthier friends---how it becomes a
moral failing.

So instead you tell your kids that Santa isn't real and they go off and
lord their worldliness over their gullible classmates and reject all
whimsy. That, too, doesn't feel quite right to me.

My original clever solution was to invite children into the mythmaking
process. Tell them "Each year, some families play pretend and tell the
old story of Santa Claus. They say he lives at the North Pole and has a
sled pulled by reindeer and brings gifts to people on christmas and so
on. How about we participate in this game, and construct our own myths
around who santa is and what he's like and what he does?"

The advantage of this approach is that it's not deceptive. It welcomes
children into the spirit of cultural mythmaking, experiencing firsthand
how folktales accumulate through personal additions. It elevates the
role of stories in human life.  And it doesn't make "knowing it's a
game" or "poking holes" into such a dominant position: every child
understands playing pretend, the shared agreement to participate in
magic. You don't score any points by reminding other people they're
playing a game.

And yet, even with this approach, we must be careful to honor the magic
in our stories. When I reflect on how people typically teach Santa, I
keep coming back to how the real ugliness is in the reveal. Yes, the
deception, the betrayal. But also how it sets up children to link
"throwing away fantasy" to the coveted process of growing up. The
implied lesson is that adulthood is a club of banal secrets---knowing
it's all just made up. You can sneer at babies who still believe in the
con.  You reach adulthood faster by jettisoning as much of your old
magic as possible.

The Santa tradition ultimately ends up cheapening fantasy, turning
children against their own vital imaginative powers. Maybe that, in the
end, is the point of it.

I get the feeling that many adults grow up perpetually longing for their
lost magic. But what can you do when you've been sold a shallow
understanding---that magic feels nice but isn't proper or real? I
suspect some adults end up teaching Santa to their kids so they can
vicariously enjoy it before inducting them into sober, magicless
adulthood. The cycle of alienation perpetuates itself.

To teach Santa this way is damaging to children, but also damaging to
adults. Such an adult must believe that what is precious about magic is
the fragile, false joy it brings to children. What violence we do to
ourselves! We are /supposed/ to find life full of magic. In other words,
we are supposed to be sincere when we meet something that moves us. We
humans live through the splendor of special moments, the potency of our
hope. Our politics imagines possible worlds, shaped by sacred values.
Our culture is made up of the stories we tell each other about what
matters and where the monsters are.

My mythmaking approach doesn't go far enough. While it doesn't mislead
children about Santa, it might mislead them about stories.  We can't be
so intellectual about things: folktales are not just stories that lesser
people used to tell each other before they knew better. Rather, the
stories we tell get at the root of who we are as people, what our
biggest questions are, how we look at the world.

Children know how to take play seriously, how to be nourished by
stories. They are perfectly capable of distinguishing between myth and
other ways of understanding. And they need myth as much as we all do.


So let's take it seriously. Let's invite children to make myths about
santa /because/ myths come from the root of who we are. We can begin by
remembering ourselves. We begin with a story for when the world is
dark---the dead cold of winter, the longest night of the year. For many
people, there's family that comes together. There is fire, and feasting,
and light. There is the memory of warmth, and the knowledge that the
world will thaw again.

We begin by remembering how every holiday, every winter, joins up with
the ones before it, juxtaposed against the winters we used to have, the
ones that others have, and the ones we wished we had. We remember the
story of the saint from the north---his generosity and righteousness,
the hopes sent into the dark. We remember that there is ritual and
rebirth in the lonely winter.

When children ask, we begin by remembering.  We look inward to see what
these stories shake free in us, and we tell them.


1 Further reading
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  - Ursula Le Guin --- Why are Americans afraid of Dragons?
  - Terry Pratchett --- Hogfather
  - Ludwig Wittgenstein --- Remarks on Frazer's golden bough