Sticking up for Santa Claus

An essay about the skin I have in the Santa game, and how to play intergenerational poker for fun

“I’m going to show you where my tooth is so the Tooth Fairy can find it,” my daughter Miriam said. She’s eight.She didn’t say it with any special emphasis. But it showed where she was at with the practical realities and the actual realities of the Tooth Fairy and the broader magical world.

It’s not that far off from most people are at when it comes to the practical and actual realities of the unseen world - hedging our bets.

But it’s bad news for Santa Claus. She’s been testing Santa - his logical basis and my conviction about him - since she was three or so. I’m proud of my little girl’s intelligence and politesse, but also a little sad to that our Santa time is nearing an end.

I like Santa Claus. I’ve played the jolly old chap at family events and in restaurants. He’s a good guy: benevolent and hard-working, but impish, mysterious. Some of it is that I like lying to children. That’s an Irish tradition, where older family members families often engage in a practice known as “merciless teasing.” This includes making up and insisting on elaborate tales until the child demands to know just what is true, and the adult refusing to answer, often past the point of tears. It may sound cruel, but I think it’s good for the kids. It encourages critical thinking and a healthy skepticism of received wisdom. And it’s fun to get them riled up.

My wife, who was raised in a reformed Jewish household, isn’t nuts about Santa. The Christmas after my daughter turned two - 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 Saint Nick as a family.

Credit

“We’re giving her the presents. I want credit,” was my wife’s 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 said that, as a toddler, our daughter wasn’t keeping personal ledgers like that just yet. It was only later that we’d really need that, I argued. 

What’s more, Saint Nick is a kind of shield that protects parents from the sheer avarice of a toddler in a toy store. “I’ll tell Santa, and we’ll see what he says.” Santa is also an enforcer, now with an army of paid-informant elves on shelves to snitch out wrongdoers, though I have no interest in introducing this development - or dynamic - into our home. 

Tradition

“We’re Jews. We don’t celebrate Christmas,” my wife said, during one all-out assault on Santa. I made the point that Santa wasn’t an object of worship, and only at most a tangentially Christian figure. 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. My wily wife would not concede that particular point.

But seriously, Santa carries about as much of a theological punch as Donald Duck. That’s one reason almost no one is demanding his removal from anyone’s lawn - though I’m afraid to google it for fear of what I’ll find. And while people will pick a fight about anything, it’s hard to argue that 'Twas the Night Before Christmas and hanging stockings is a gateway drug for the Nicene Creed and rosary beads.   

Confusion

“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, and the other 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 three, my daughter asked some of these same questions. But it was easy to make up the answers, because she wants to believe. People have a lot of questions when you take something away. They demand to see ID and a writ from a judge. They turn into Sherlock Holmes. 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.

Reality-testing

But as my daughter has gotten bigger and smarter, the outrageousness of Santa stands out more. Still, she has to to parse contradictory answers and weigh her desire for truth against her desire for a Polly Pocket.   

This may be the year that my daughter will figures Santa out entirely, and announces as much. He’s too big an outlier from the functioning state of the day to day.

But it was fun, and I like to think it opened up the world, created possibilities in how she might see, and how she might understand what she does see. When you make room for magic, that space doesn’t go away just because the story doesn’t hold water. The space stays open, and the wide-open hopefulness of the story stays on, and finds its way into the people, places and activities around her. This, to me, is the magic of Christmas that’s truly non-denominational.  

Conspirators

When Miriam does get wise about Santa, and vocal about it, the next phase begins. Her brother, Walter is three. And I think my little girl is going to have a lot of fun telling him about the man in a red suit who breaks into the homes of the world’s children once a year to leave gifts.

Note: An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Washington Post

Buried lede: I have a novel about Santa Claus, and the last few decades of Christmas called The Reign of the Anti-Santas - a Christmas misadventure for grownups coming out November 16. Pre-order it now, or subscribe to No Homework at the founders level and I’ll mail you a copy early.