I have some questions

[andrewducker]

Comments

[broin.livejournal.com]

A friend recently wrote about how some teacher had been disciplined at her school for revealing Santa wasn't real, lol. She's Christian.

I just don't get it.

[andrewducker]

It's because lying to children is cute.

[broin.livejournal.com]

INDEED.

Here's another one. Two colleagues, T and R. T is a mum in her 40s, R is 23 or so.

We were having a general conversation about Santa and kids and stuff. T was saying that her daughter (aged 7) was really into fairies, and asked her mum if fairies existed. And her mum said 'Well, I don't know, but if you don't believe in fairies, you won't get anything for your birthday, haha!'

So obviously I asked if that was... uh... helpful or fair. And T came out with the classic 'You'll feel different when you have kids'.

Thankfully, the workplace has an IM system so R and I could wtf at each other.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

As a data point, since having kids, I feel even more strongly that stringing them along like that is Wrong than I did before.

(For us the Santa thing is proving a great teaching prompt around respectfully disagreeing with people's strongly held beliefs.)

[broin.livejournal.com]

That's really good. Did they have trouble in school disagreeing with commonly-held beliefs...? Particularly because presumably they'd be disagreeing with teachers a lot?

Lying bad

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Santa has always been "pretend real" for our kids. Dealing with adult expectations to actually *believe* in Santa has already proven to be good practice for the challenges children face if raised in an atheist household.

Re: Lying bad

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I could totally get behind an approach of "Every Christmas we pretend that Santa visits. It's a fun game to play together.". Kids, after all, love both games and lets-pretend.

[simont]

This is the approach my parents took with me, and yes, it's always seemed to me that it preserved most of the positive aspects of the whole Santa thing while avoiding most of the negative ones.

[ias.livejournal.com]

I think the garklet can see right through Father Christmas (even at 4) but he likes to pretend with us (just like stealing each other's noses).

This Christmas he's far more engaged and his interested in Father Christmas (of the Raymond Briggs' variety) has meant we've been able to talk to him about traditions in other countries where they call FC different things/is a different person such as Pere Noel, Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Father Frost, Santa Lucia and so on.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Agreed - I think that he's well aware that all the people he sees who are dressed as FC couldn't all possibly be FC.

[dpolicar]

My $0.02: anyone who does not understand the role of mythology in human life has no business relating the exploits of a child and his friendly sapient animate stuffed tiger.