‘Dad, is there really a Santa Claus?’ Should we lie to kids or tell truth?

By David McElroy · November 26, 2018

We never talked much about Santa in my family. I don’t remember ever believing that a jolly man in a red coat delivered toys to children all around the world. To me, it was just a fun story — just like all the other stories I enjoyed so much as a kid.

My father wasn’t sure whether any of us believed in Santa Claus, but he figured it out one Christmas season as we were all walking through a department store one evening.

“Look, Daddy,” said my youngest sister, who was about 4 at the time. She was pointing to the department store Santa with children in line to visit him. “There’s an old man dressed up like Santa Claus.”

We enjoyed Christmas stories — about Santa and Frosty and the Grinch, among others — but we knew they were fantasies. I was never told at home that Santa was real or that he wasn’t real. I just knew it was a fun story.

So why do so many people get angry about the question of kids and Santa?

Most people I’ve known seem to go to great lengths to make their children believe Santa is real. If you suggest that maybe it’s a mistake to tell their children things which clearly aren’t true, they’ll angrily accuse you of wanting to spoil the magic of Christmas. (They never seem to ask themselves whether it’s their children’s fun or their own fun they’re trying to protect.)

Another group of people I’ve known have been aggressively anti-Santa — to the point that they seem to be wanting to kill the joy and fantasy of the story. If you suggest that maybe it’s a mistake to insist that their children see Santa through the eyes of an adult, they tell you to quit being frivolous or (even worse) pagan.

I’m thinking about this today because a friend on Facebook brought up the question of what to tell kids about Santa. It’s amazing to me how many different answers there were and how strongly some people feel about the subject.

It seems to me that there’s a reasonable middle ground instead.

First, I don’t ever want to tell my children something which isn’t true. Period. I don’t want to say, “Santa is going to bring you toys if you’re good,” or, “I saw Santa and he told me to tell you this.”

I don’t want to do that because the day is going to come when they will know the truth. At that moment, the obvious question for any child to ask — consciously or unconsciously — is, “What else have they lied to me about?”

I don’t want that. I want my children to know I’ve always told them the truth.

Second, I don’t want to rob my children of their joy of experiencing a fantasy. When I was a child, I lived much of my time in the worlds of my stories. Those people and their worlds were as real to me as my own home was. I didn’t need anyone to aggressively tear down my enjoyment of those worlds. I would have been devastated.

I want my children to experience the joy and magic of living in stories — of knowing fantasy — as much as they want to make it. If they want to believe Neverland exists or that Captain Kirk and the Enterprise are out there somewhere or that they can escape to the Secret Garden, that’s fine with me.

I think there’s a mature middle ground where parents can tell their children the truth but also allow for fantasy. If a child asks you whether Santa is real, there’s one obvious answer:

“Well, tell me what you think.”

A child will tell you what he’s ready to believe. If a child tells you that Santa is real and he saw him with his reindeer, let him enjoy his magic. Go along with his story, just as you would any other fantastical story he might tell.

If the child instead presses you for an answer, there’s another obvious response:

“Well, I’ve never seen Santa, but a lot of kids believe they have. What do you think?”

In this way, you can avoid lying but you can also avoid breaking the news if the child isn’t ready. And at some point, the child is going to say, “Mom, I don’t think there’s a real Santa Claus.” If you’ll ask why the child came to this conclusion, you’ll find out the rest of what you need to know — and you’ll know that he’s not fooled by “an old man dressed up like Santa Claus.”

I love the magic of Christmas and I loved it as a child. I think we can allow our children to experience the magic and fantasy of Christmas — but without doing it in a way that will threaten to undermine our credibility.

The day is coming when they’ll decide for themselves that the white-haired man in a red suit is nothing but a story for children. I think we ought to allow them to treat it as a great story for kids — of all ages — who enjoy believing some fantasy every now and then.

Share on Social Networks

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Related Posts