Ho-ho-ho, headbangers! There’s a chill in the air and angst in our souls as we approach that magic day. I hope you and yours are digging it and not letting the whole thing, as it were, snow you.
Here at Sleeveen we really do want to spread joy, peace, and love to you and yours with these last missives of the year. And I promise, next week I’ll show you just how into Christmas we are. But to get there we’re first going to have to deal with the elephant in the room: the red-faced, white-bearded, jackbooted, could-be-January 6-attendee with the German surname. The man I saw Mommy kissing in one of so many Christmas songs that aren’t the least bit upsetting or perverse.
I’m talking about that elf slaver from up North who still commands such loyalty from so many otherwise decent and loving Americans. To put it bluntly, where do we stand on the Santa Question?
Don’t worry, this isn’t to queue up some lachrymose yes-Virginia newspaper column that urges you to keep the spirit of Christmas alive in your heart. I’m actually asking, as both parent and recovering kid: What’s a healthy age to opt out of this consensual delusion? To answer this, I’m going to share some of the perils and discoveries I’ve made negotiating this issue, in terms of faith, disenchantment, parenting, and trying to be a less flawed person.
My son lost his belief at age 8. Even with innocence extenders like the absence of older siblings and pandemic sequestration, Calder got wise in his own quietly tragic way. In the winter of 2020, he was out on the freezing NYC playground, and passingly referenced Santa Claus to another boy, who was Jewish and more importantly had older brothers. Whereupon this kid bumped himself right up to the top of my shitlist by sneering “Pfft, there’s no Santa Claus,” then telling him that all gifts, joy, and wonder don’t come from the North Pole but “from Amazon.”
The next day, Calder followed up with me, casually sidling up to the query on some old “Hey Dad! Funny thing. I was at the playground the other day, and Ben, you remember Ben, right? Anyway,Ben and I were talking and…” When he got to the point, I felt a small freight elevator in my guts lurch then plunge, and to stall for time, I asked him what he thought. And while he was busy with that one, I split to make a panicked phone call to my sister.
I wanted to compare notes on our respective falls from grace, and figure out how to get through this one. Though four years younger than me, my sister lapped me in most developmental stages. She recalls one afternoon when we were both walking along with our mom, who’s Irish Catholic in the hardcore Boston manner that doesn’t exactly fast-track sex education and who, for some reason, decided to share that our uncle and aunt were having difficulty “having a child.” At which point, my 7-year-old sister thoughtlessly blurted, “Why don’t they just mate?” This drew only a stony silence as we continued to trudge along. My sister would go on to become a doctor and run an OBGYN clinic in Maine; I’d make it to seventh grade half-believing conception required a priest.
As we went over all this, Merideth recalled facing a similar wall of silence around a certain overweight and bearded geriatric in red, someone who seemed part municipal employee and part distant relative, and for some reason had access to our home, wishes, and year-long criminal records. One morning at breakfast, right around this time of year, she saw an advice column in The Boston Globe handling that week’s thorny question: When and how should you tell your kids Santa isn’t real?
Whoot, there it was.
Since this was before fake news, my sister couldn’t rush to Fox, Breitbart, or Facebook to rebut the ugly rumor, but had to let the new reality settle in. I asked her how this was for her. Did she feel crushed, heart-broken, grief-stricken?
“Played,” she said. “I felt like a chump.”
As the first-born son, I had a slower and more morally damaging rapprochement with new realities. Unlike Catholicism, Santa Claus doesn’t come at you arrayed with a vast architecture of Holy Mysteries, Divine Enigmas, and other logical countermeasures against your lying eyes and sinful mind. Even so, I’m surprised that I don’t have a single memory of disenchantment. There’s simply no moment when I recognized that the very idea of a North Pole resident who visits the home of every single little girl or boy on planet earth on one extremely busy night was a grievous insult to my intelligence, something that my self-respect and future autonomy required a firm rejection.
Here’s what I probably did instead: weigh the cost and benefits of continued participation, consider what believing in Santa had got me so far, and then figured, well…. who’s to say if Santa is real?... The truth is, no one really knows … More study is needed… Don’t trust so-called experts… In other words, mental MAGA soundbites.
To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, it’s hard to get someone not to believe in someone when his trainset, firetruck, cap-gun, and chemistry setdepend upon believing in it. Which I imagine applies to supply-side economics, the meritocracy, or any number of other ideas that are much more pleasant for some to believe than others.
A few weeks back, psychologists Candice Mills and Thalia R. Goldstein co-authored a NYT piece that summarized findings from their recent paper on “Parent promotion of belief in and live encounters with Santa Claus,” which places the average age of Santa disillusionment at around 8, and offers some suspiciously low-ball estimates on the psychic effects. “In general, this project suggested that children’s reactions to discovering the truth were mild and were not clearly connected to how they discovered the truth,” they write, then deliver a report that abounds with evidence to the contrary.
A third of kids and half of adults reported “some negative emotions upon discovering the truth.” Right. Only some respondents had some negative emotions on learning that there isn’t a benign Nordic godfather who can grant all their wishes. (Just imagine how few negative emotions face European kids discovering that there isn’t a kidnapping Christmas demon Krampus, a throat-slitting Christmas witch Frau Percht, or that crypto-racist mindfuck Dutch parents put their kids through. Not real? Thank Christ!)
The report also correlates these negative emotions to “higher levels of parental Santa promotion” since learning that your parents have been lying to you would indeed correlate—like a motherfucker—to “negative emotions.” The researchers hedged on whether parents consider this a lie, calling this “a question of ongoing research,” though they added “there’s no question that, in some cases, children feel like they have been deceived by claims made about Santa…and that there’s evidence that parental lying impacts children…[including] more issues with psychosocial adjustment (e.g., internalizing problems like anxiety or externalizing problems like aggression.” Ho-ho-ho.
For such a festive topic, their full report on the Santa disenchantment process is scattered with thumbnail tragedies. Under “Emotions,” there are soundbites like “I felt mad that my mom was lying to me” and, under “Hiding Beliefs,” there are parentified-child testimonials like “I hid it for about a year because, um, it made my parents—I thought it made my parents like really happy thinking that I knew it was real. I was thinking that I thought he was real so I just pretended like I thought he was real.” After going through the various paths to Santa skepticism—testimony, experience, and logical reasoning—the report concludes the harsher way for a kid to learn the truth is “abruptly, at an older age, with high levels of parent promotion, and through being told directly.” So don’t do that, I guess.
Nine years ago, when Slate’s advice columnist Dear Prudence suggested that parents should nurture the Santa Claus myth — “one of the delights of childhood, and of being a parent, is to spread a little fairy dust occasionally” — s/he got so lit up by readers they wrote a clarification that looks a lot like a retraction: “If your kid is near double digits in age, time to get him or her off Santa’s knee at the mall and give it to ’em straight.”
I can tell you this: I still feel like apologizing for putting my son in a situation to get shamed for his beliefs. And though we’re not big on advice here, if you have very young kids, I will suggest that you give 15 minutes of thought to whether or not you want to hand this tradition of parental deception down.
Maybe there are good reasons to promote a white lie that’s meant to preserve or enhance the magic of childhood, which is pretty magical on its own. Or to preserve your own children as a kind of wondrous mirror to all creation or to, well, yourself. But to me, with respect to Dear Prudence, one of the delights of childhood, and of being a parent, is having your kid know that they can trust you to tell them the truth.
Since we’re a one-and-done family, I don’t get a second take on this one. The kid and I are cool about this years-long culturally sanctioned bit of Christmas propaganda, and my regret about the Santa issue is so vastly outweighed by my guilt about other things that it barely merits mention outside the holiday season. To pick one not-entirely-random example: I’m also a bad Catholic. So not passing on the one true faith to our son and helping save his immortal soul makes Santa a misdemeanor. But it is instructive.
Should I have done the same thing with Jesus Christ? Told Calder about our Lord and Savior, the creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen, who suffered for our sins, died, was buried, and on the third day rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures? Convey all these nourishing, punishing alternative facts to my son with the expectation that he’ll eventually, heh-heh, you know, outgrow it?
Maybe. I happen to believe that there’s actual evil in the world and in this country. And it’s no secret that the most greedy, hateful, lying, and power-grabbing are moving blindly within these very same spaces of light and joy.
So maybe Edward Gibbon’s postmortem on the Roman Empire has the appropriate paraphrasis: To the unwashed masses, all Santas are equally true; to the philosophers, all Santas are equally false; and to the politicians, all Santas are equally useful. It’s up to us to figure out which one applies to us.
Great piece! I debated an ethicist on the ethics of Santa here https://youtu.be/1Nc8L_O01RM?si=Mpt_k--o4o6OfcUY I’m inclined to think systemically lying to children about Santa is usually morally OK, on the grounds that *most* children - though your daughter might be an exception - will retroactively consent to the lie (in the way a passerby would consent to a street magician lying to her about there being nothing up his sleeve, on the grounds that the lie was well-intentioned allowed her to enjoy the magic more. If there’s nothing wrong with street magic, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the Santa myth.)
White Santa aint about to come down No Nigga's Chimney. (Dick Gregory)