My wife is Jewish, and I was raised Catholic. When we married, we agreed to raise our children in the Jewish tradition, with all the holidays, rituals and so forth. And because I still have a sentimental, though passive, connection to Catholicism, we also agreed to a tree at Christmas. But we never discussed Santa Claus until our daughter was born.
I love Santa Claus. I’ve played the jolly old chap at family events and elsewhere. I like his story, and I like his character: benevolent and hardworking but impish and mysterious.
I also like lying to children. Some of this is my own Irish background, in which older family members often engage in a practice known as “merciless teasing.” This involves making up elaborate tales that grow more and more absurd until the child demands to know just what is true, the adult refuses to answer and the child storms off. It may sound cruel, but I think it’s good for the kids. It encourages critical thinking and a healthy skepticism about received wisdom. It’s also fun to get them riled up.
But my wife is more literal-minded and was raised without Santa Claus. Last year, when my daughter was 2 — her first verbal-and-vertical Christmas — we started talking to her about Santa. At least I did. My wife said she’d rather we opted out of St. Nick as a family.
“We’re giving her the presents. I want credit,” was her first objection. With Kris Kringle in the equation, she argued, we wouldn’t get proper appreciation from our daughter for the gifts we gave. I rebutted that, as a toddler, our daughter isn’t keeping personal ledgers like that just yet.
What’s more, St. Nick is a kind of shield that protects parents from the sheer avarice of a toddler in a toy store. He lets parents pass the buck. “I’ll tell Santa, and we’ll see what he says.”
“We’re Jews. We don’t celebrate Christmas,” she said. I made the point that Santa is not an object of worship, and only a tangentially Christian figure — that not talking about Santa to our daughter because he’s technically a saint is the equivalent to never going to San Diego because it’s named after a saint. Admittedly, my wife would not concede that particular point.
But, seriously, Santa carries about as much of a theological punch as Donald Duck in American culture; after all, you don’t hear anyone demanding his removal from anyone’s lawn. And although people will pick a fight about anything, it’s hard to argue that “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and hanging stockings are a gateway drug for the Nicene Creed and rosary beads.
“Won’t she be confused?” was my wife’s final objection. This is almost a good argument, because I remember being a kid, and Santa was confusing. He was at the mall. He was on TV. He was at the North Pole. How did he do that? Why did all the Santas look a little different? How did he read all the letters, make all the toys, while making all these appearances everywhere? And how did he deliver all the toys in one night?
At 3, my daughter has started asking some of these same questions. But it’s easy to make up the answers, because she wants to believe. People have a lot of questions when you take something away. But they’re not so picky about the details when you’re giving them things. So, as a parent, I tell my wife, you don’t need very clever answers to skate by.
But as my daughter gets bigger and smarter, the outrageousness of Santa will stand out more. She’ll ask one too many hard questions and either my wife or I will cave. But, for now, she’ll be happily confused. She’ll have to parse contradictory answers. She’ll have to deal with not understanding. It’s good practice for the bigger mysteries to come.
Eventually, my daughter will figure out Santa, like she’ll figure out so many things. I don’t imagine that day will be the happiest of her life. But it will be a new step in understanding the world and its many layers.
I don’t lie to my daughter just because it’s fun. I do it to open up the world, to create possibilities in how she might see and interpret what she does see. I think when you make room for magic, that space doesn’t go away just because the story doesn’t hold water. The space stays open for new ideas, and the wide-open hopefulness of the story remains, and finds its way into the people, places and activities of everyday life. This, to me, is the magic of Christmas that’s truly nondenominational.
I hope I remember that last bit for when my wife and I get into an argument about Santa Claus next year.
