The Santa Conspiracy

[kerravonsen]

Saw an article on kuru5hin today (Tis the Season to be Dishonest) which reminded me that I'd been intending to say something about this topic anyway. Why is it that in Western culture there has been this collusion, this conspiracy to deceive generation upon generation of children? Not only telling them that Santa Claus exists when they know that he doesn't, but coming down hard anyone who dares to say otherwise.

(Florida)
Teacher tells kids Santa is 'make-believe'

Kindergarten Teacher Tells Class Santa Doesn't Exist

(Canberra)
(Teacher tells six year old children Santa Claus doesn't exist)

A teacher is banned for telling the truth. What sort of a warped society do we live in?

There can be no justification for lying to your children. None. Not deliberate, elaborate pre-meditated deception, which is what the Santa "myth" is.

But the supporters of the Santa conspiracy protest vehemently when you point out this sordid truth.

• What are you all worked up about? It's just a myth, like all religions.
  

  This is usually said by atheists, who equate religion with lies. However, the significant difference between the Santa Conspiracy and religions is that the proseletisers of religions actually believe what they are saying, while the Santa-speakers are knowingly and deliberately lying. A deliberate lie is not a myth.

• It isn't a lie, it's a white lie.
  

  Well, of course, white lies are just as much lies as "black" lies are. But even apart from that, the Santa Lie isn't even a "white" lie. A white lie is a lie told to spare someone's feelings, to be polite. The elaborate Santa-"myth" hasn't got anything to do with politeness.

• Oh come on, you're not giving kids enough credit. They'll figure it out, and be none the worse for it. Don't you think they know the difference between truth and fantasy?
  

  Of course kids know the difference between truth and fantasy, between the real world and "let's pretend". But statements like this make me wonder if the people making them actually know the difference between fantasy and untruth, as if to them, there's no difference between lies and fiction. Maybe someone told them once too often "Don't tell stories!"

  If Santa were played out as a global "let's pretend" game, that wouldn't be a problem. The problem is, that parents are telling their kids, not that Santa is a game or a story, but they are telling their kids that Santa actually exists. This is a lie, not a story. A lie, because they are passing it off as true.

• Oh, I suppose you tell your kids the horrible unvarnished truth about everything, scarring them with things they don't need to know?
  

  Er, how can you equate "refraining from lying" with "telling kids things they're too young to know"? Except, of course, that if you buy into the conspiracy, kids are obviously too young to know the truth about Santa.

  Well I guess that depends on how you tell it. My parents told me about Saint Nicholas, how he loved children and gave them presents. Is that a horrible truth that children shouldn't know?

• If you don't tell them about Santa, you're depriving them of the wonder and magic of Christmas, stunting their growth and crippling their imagination.
  

  Well, no, I'd say that kids have plenty of imagination and wonder -- the world is a wondrous and amazing place to a kid, to all kids, whether you give them the Santa Lie or not. The world is full of wonders, like flowers that go to sleep at night and open in the morning, like snow flakes and sea shells and polished rocks and glinting crystals, like birds feathers and sparrows' nests and TV remote controls (my youngest nephew, a toddler, is absolutely bonkers about TV remote controls).

  The problem is the reverse -- if you give kids the Santa Lie, you are stunting their growth and crippling their imagination, because when they learn the truth, they may toss out the baby with the bathwater, and consider that imagination, and wonder, and miracles are only things that naive little kids believe in.

• They gotta learn about the Real World.
  

  Betraying the trust that a child has in their parents by telling them an elaborate fabrication as Truth, in order to prepare them for the lies of the real world, is on par with beating up your children in order to make them "tough". They're already going to get plenty of knocks and lies in their life without having you deliberately and pre-meditatively destroy the one thing they thought they could rely on -- the trustworthiness of their parents.

  Note that most of the people who give this response are atheists. Doubtless they figured that if Santa isn't true, then God obviously has to be a lie also. Baby => Bathwater.

• It provides a moral foundation. Threatening kids with Santa Claus makes them behave.
  

  If your moral foundation is based on a lie, you're in real trouble. To borrow a metaphor from a famous wise man, it is like a house built on sand. Dumb. Real dumb.

The whole thing is totally insane. If not insane, then wicked. So let's just be charitable and say it's insane.

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I think the primary purpose of the fiction is to allow young children to ask in an uninhibited fashion for what they want, because they don't realise that mum and dad are responsible for getting the stuff.

My approach to the Father Chrsitmas story was to stand ready to answer questions honestly, when they were asked. I reckoned that if the kids didn't want to know then they wouldn't ask. My son asked me some very searching questions when he was still quite young (5 years old 'How can Father Christmas get to everywhere at the same time?, 'How come he brings the same things that we see on sale in the shops?')I still don't know if I did the right thing, but I just could't tell him bare faced lies in response to those questions.

You could also argue that FC is a symbolic representation of the abstract concept 'generosity'. In that respect it is not a simple 'lie', but a way of talking about and celebrating an idea. But it would be quite wrong to force kids to continue to talk about this non-existent symbol, once it becomes intrusive or plainly dishonest.

BTW I have never come across Santa used as a moral foundation. I think parents would have to be very sick to use Santa as a threat or bribe.

[kerravonsen]

I think the primary purpose of the fiction is to allow young children to ask in an uninhibited fashion for what they want, because they don't realise that mum and dad are responsible for getting the stuff.

I don't see why knowing that mum and dad are responsible for the gifts is a problem. What we used to do (actually we tended to do this for birthdays more than Christmas) was write down a "hint list" of things we wanted -- and I know that I put difficult things down on the list too, "just in case".

I still don't know if I did the right thing, but I just could't tell him bare faced lies in response to those questions.

Let me reassure you: you did the right thing.

You could also argue that FC is a symbolic representation of the abstract concept 'generosity'. In that respect it is not a simple 'lie', but a way of talking about and celebrating an idea.

I think this falls under "the difference between truth and fiction" problem. I mean, the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom, but nobody has made up a huge mythology about it. I reckon one could simply use the real Saint Nicholas as a symbol of generosity anyway.

But it would be quite wrong to force kids to continue to talk about this non-existent symbol, once it becomes intrusive or plainly dishonest.

My reckoning is that it's plainly dishonest from the start.

BTW I have never come across Santa used as a moral foundation. I think parents would have to be very sick to use Santa as a threat or bribe.

In the kuru5hin discussion, there was at least one poster who mentioned this.

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

After some thought, I'm going to have to disagree, both about the teachers, and about Santa in general.

The point with the teachers isn't about truth vs. fiction. It's about whose truth vs. whose fiction; it's about an arm of the government (which is what the school has become) deciding to contradict the mythology that parents are choosing to raise their children on. If the school can explode the "Santa myth", what's to prevent it next exploding the "Buddha myth" or the "Jesus myth"? And it's no go saying that Santa isn't a religious figure, because he's a permutation of St. Nicholas, who is a religious figure, and a very important one in some faiths, at that. Schools ought to serve the parents' plans for their children's education, not the government's.

Now, I don't believe that the teacher should be banned. But I do believe that the issue should have been side-stepped: "Some people say X, some people say Y; why don't you go home and ask your parents what they think?" That is far more respectful of both the parents and the children, and still is not a lie; instead, it encourages respect for the parents and also promotes a dialogue with the parents that will most likely lead to the child learning the facts.

As far as raising your kids on Santa, maybe it's all in how you do it. It certainly never hurt me any, or my nieces and nephews. It didn't make me greedy, because I'd much less rather ask a stranger for presents than my parents. Santa has always been a lesson about giving in our house. And I never felt particularly betrayed or disillusioned at finding out the truth, only about ten minutes' mild disappointment between the time my Mom admitted there was no Santa and the time my Dad came home, winked, and said that of course there was. I understood immediately that Santa was a game we were all playing for fun, and the excitement of being in on the game far outweighed that very mild disappointment. But they waited until *I* was ready to tell me, so there was no shock. Their answer to "is there really a Santa" was always "what do you think?" and they waited until I said I didn't think there was one to tell me otherwise.

When we tell a child a story, we start: "Once upon a time there was..."; we don't start: "Let's pretend that once upon a time there was...", and yet the child still comes to understand that it's a story, not a history lesson. One of the things that adults tend to forget is that small children genuinely cannot separate fact from fiction--literally cannot tell waking from dreaming, in many cases--and need some practice in learning to separate fantasy from reality. It isn't wise or even possible to learn that lesson all at once. Maybe the reason I came to disbelieve Santa with so little upset was because I was very carefully taught that magic is made-up and only exists in stories, and miracles are all from God, and the standard answer for "How do reindeer fly?" was always "It's magic", but I think the ability to finally come to that conclusion on my own was a good thing. Having it thrust upon me by a teacher would have been traumatic.

When a five-year-old is crawling under the furniture and hissing and says "I'm a snake!", we don't jump down his throat for lying. Five-year-olds understand that pretending isn't the same as lying. Pretending is a good thing for children to do; Santa is just a group pretend in my family, and, I suspect, in many others. Insisting that children believe in Santa after they start to disbelieve would indeed be a bad thing, but raising children on Santa doesn't have to automatically be bad.

On the other hand, I suppose it may be true that I'm insane. It's as good an explanation as any.

[kerravonsen]

When we tell a child a story, we start: "Once upon a time there was..."; we don't start: "Let's pretend that once upon a time there was...", and yet the child still comes to understand that it's a story, not a history lesson.

That's because the phrase "once upon a time" is a formula used for introducing stories -- we never say "once upon a time, there was a King called William the Conqueror", we say, "in 1066, William of Normandy conquered England".

I just haven't gotten the impression that Santa has ever been introduced with "once upon a time", or treated from the start as a "let's pretend". From what you're saying, your parents seem to have managed to do so, at least from your point of view -- particularly the point you make about how your parents always distinguished between magic and miracles; when they said "it's magic" about reindeer, they were telling you right then (if you could put two and two together) that Santa was a made-up story.

As I said above, if Santa was treated as a global game of "let's pretend", then there wouldn't be a problem.

The other puzzling thing about this whole thing is that people don't seem to get half so worked up about the other two "myths" of Western culture -- the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

{{When we tell a child a story, we start: "Once upon a time there was..."; we don't start: "Let's pretend that once upon a time there was...", and yet the child still comes to understand that it's a story, not a history lesson.}}

That's because the phrase "once upon a time" is a formula used for introducing stories -- we never say "once upon a time, there was a King called William the Conqueror", we say, "in 1066, William of Normandy conquered England".

Ah, but that's my point. Adults know that it means that; children don't, not when they first begin to hear it; they learn it over time. We start telling them stories before they are able to comprehend that stories aren't true. We start telling (and reading) them stories when they're pre-verbal, before they know that 'story' means 'not-real', before they even understand that real and not-real are two different things (children often cannot even tell the difference between a dream and waking life). We say "I'm going to tell/read you a story," and never worry about whether they understand that a story isn't true, until they're old enough to understand what 'true' is (an exception being those parents who eschew fiction entirely, because it's all 'lies').

Eventually as a child grows, the need or opportunity arises to explain "no, it's just a story", and as the "just a story" explanation is repeated over time, the child learns gradually that stories are not true. But no child understands that stories aren't true until they are taught it, and we don't hear about anyone feeling betrayed or distrustful of their parents because the parents didn't wait until the child could separate fact from fiction before telling or reading them stories. We don't consider that parents are lying to their children every time they read them Green Eggs and Ham or Go, Dog, Go. In fact, most of us would think it was a very poor parent who didn't read stories to a small child.

I don't see any reason that the idea that Santa is make-believe can't be absorbed gradually by a child in the same way, or why it should necessarily be more harmful than any other kind of story. The problem arises, I suspect, when some parents deliberately try to extend the child's belief in Santa past the point the child is ready to let go. My impression is that you must know more of that sort of parent than I do, since I don't actually know any who don't approach Santa as a game of pretend.

[Mind you, I would have agreed with you entirely about the Santa thing being lying to children until just a few years ago. But it finally dawned on me that the Bible is full of metaphor, and God didn't seem to feel the need to point out which passages are 'true fact' and which parts are 'true fiction'. So I'm less worried about literal truth than I used to be.]

As to why Santa is more popular than the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, I think that, at least in the US, it has rather a lot to do with the way in which the history of the American version of Santa is so closely bound up with advertising and rampant consumerism (our modern visual idea of Santa was heavily influenced by advertising, especially Coca-Cola advertising; neither the Easter Bunny nor the Tooth Fairy has any such widespread visual image). Thus Santa = toys and sweets = happy childhood memories. And parents are reliving their own happy childhood memories (or compensating for the happy memories they don't have) by trying to preserve that state of 'innocence' for their children as long as possible. That's why you get people who are unwilling for their children to learn the truth. But that's about irresponsible parenting generally--using a child to satisfy one's own emotional needs rather than thinking ahead to what's best for the child's maturity and competence--far more than it is about the Santa myth in particular. It's an oversentimentalism about childhood that's pervasive in our child-centric society.

Eh. Not to be ranting in your journal, or anything. ;-)

Coming along belatedly in the conversation

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

I came across you from RJ Anderson, in case you're curious.

Santa Claus. Speaking as the mother of 4, we've dealt with this pretty up front. There is no "Santa Claus". There is, however, this great saint of the Christian Church, an historical figure, named St. Nicholas, called the Wonderworker. And we tell the stories of the real St. Nicholas, not St. Nick.

I think that there is an element of attack against Christmas that is committed to destroying the truth of the feast. There are those who want to destroy the Incarnation of Christ. Destroying the celebration of that event by subverting it is one way to go. Using a pseudo-saint to do so is insidious.

I fully expect the Easter Bunny to become the next Santa. If you can't destroy the birth of the Saviour of the world, then destroy His work of salvation. Easter has been marginalized by "Spring" for so long that it's managed to avoid the commercialization that Christmas now manifests. It's only a matter of time until the Easter Bunny becomes a larger-than-life character as Santa has become. When someone finds a way to completely hide the Resurrection (the Virgin Birth and Incarnation have been swept away from Christmas by the so-called leadership in the Protestant Churches. Even the Archbishops in England admit that they don't believe in these cardinal tenants of the faith) then the culture will be swept away by the Easter Bunny.

I think that the tooth fairy, because she is NOT a religious character, is perceived as pretty innocuous. We don't do the TF here, mostly because I forget or I've pulled the kid's tooth myself and it's already in my possession.

I think it's all a part of Spiritual Warfare. The enemies of Christ believe that Christmas must be destroyed. And as it cannot truly be destroyed because Christ was incarnate as a man, fully bearing both natures, then the truth that God became Man must be hidden or attention diverted.

Kizmet