Merry Christmas, Baby - Whitehorse
If I ever raise children, I wonder how much I’ll lie to them. I know my mother was reluctant to tell us the standard Christmas lie, but “the thing is,” she said, when I asked her about it this morning, “the whole culture is set up to sabotage my efforts.”
So many of the ads on the children’s channels featured toys being added to Christmas lists and my aunts and uncles and grandparents wanted to send me gifts from Santa. Even if my parents had insisted that Santa was a collective game of pretend, would it have been wiser to believe them over the songs and the NORAD tracker and all the other evidence to the contrary?
So I go along for the sake of the kids, who probably don’t believe it just like I never did,
I guess you gotta make believe sometimes.
I believed in Santa, but some adults must have answered some of my questions honestly, because I also believed that no one had ever seen him, and that the red suit and white beard were just something that we made up because it looked nice. (I remember privately concluding, on this basis, that there was no good reason not to believe that Santa instead looked like a very cool fairy princess with glowing blue wings.)
I am sure that I’d lie to my children, for both convenience and fun, but I don’t think I’d want to lie about Santa. While it’s not entirely unrealistic to believe that one is subject to constant surveillance—as implied by “he sees you when you’re sleeping / he knows when you’re awake” and the Elf on the Shelf—I don’t think it should be presented as a benign (even moral) state. The consequence of that surveillance, at least in North American lore, is Santa won’t bring naughty children any gifts. My mum said that she wondered how she could have been so much more good than the poorer children at her school. After all, she’d received so many more presents.
That doesn’t seem like an ideal lesson for children to learn.
Obviously, it’s much easier to moralize about parenting before trying to navigate the constant exhausting process of it. My dad, currently in possession of an ample white beard, played Santa at his office Christmas party last week. He ran into one family in the hall and their younger child was rendered speechless with excitement. Santa!! It’s not a noble lie, but it sometimes makes makes children very happy.
Merry Christmas Solstice, if that’s what you’d call this time of year,
- Tessa