Parents' Forum

So I’m participating in the local Santa chatter this year. It’s usually along the lines of how does one negotiate the question of two religions in a household, what about the kids at school who say he doesn’t exist, what if we’re atheists, kind of thing. But this year the discussion has taken a slightly different, and to my mind, disturbing turn for the worse. It’s not so much that some parents aren’t playing along with Santa, it’s why they’re not playing along. They don’t want to “do” Santa because it’s “wrong to lie” to the children.

Now just to say from the outset, I LOVE Santa and Christmas with every humanist bone in my body. They will have to pry the holly from my cold dead hand before I give up on Christmas. But I do recognise that not everyone celebrates the holiday (although I personally think we all should – it’s about as religious as The Grinch and the return of the light after the solstice is a universal symbol of hope) and there’s no reason why, whatever a family celebrates, it shouldn’t be a magical occasion for the kids – Santa or no Santa. But to eschew Santa because it’s dishonest seems to me to miss the whole point.

Not only do I think it’s okay to lie to kids. I think it’s important to lie to them. Lies we tell to children are really more like over simplifications. Because, as Jack “St” Nicholas says in  A Few Good Men, they “can’t handle the truth”. There are things they need to know something but not everything about.  There are things they don’t need to know about and shouldn’t know about until they are adults.  And Santa?  Santa is in a class of his own.

To ban Santa on the principle  that we some how owe it to them not to participate in The Myth of Santa isn’t just an awfully worthy and rather kill joy thing to do, it undermines one of the last vestiges of the distinction between kids and adults. Santa Claus is a vast adult conspiracy carried out on behalf of the next generation. It’s a tacit agreement that for a few years we will give our children the gift of fancy. We’ll make keep faith with their belief in magic and collectively make it real.  For me, this is one of the most genuinely miraculous things about Christmas and to see it eroded this way is a bad tiding indeed.  Bah! Humbug!