I’ve read a number of blog posts this year concerning the apparently controversial topic of Santa.   Some Christians embrace the whole North Pole mythology whole-heartedly, others avoid him at all costs in order to keep Christmas solely focused on Christ.  Honestly, I see both sides.  Here’s how we’ve dealt with the Santa ‘issue’ in our family.

What We Do:

Each year, usually at the insistence and arrangement of our very dear Aunt Junie, the girls make an appearance at some mall and sit on the lap of some Santa.  We dress them up and take their pictures, and it is a special tradition that they enjoy.  (Everyone, that is, but the resident two-year-old, who always seems to find him the most terrifying person she’s ever seen.)

When Pippa was a baby, I grumbled and rolled my eyes at having to do this.  We hadn’t planned on doing the whole Santa thing, and felt a bit painted into a corner by the whole situation.  A few years down the road, we realize now that this small part of our Christmas celebration that brings so much joy to our extended family is not really having any adverse effect on the truth we want to teach our children about Christmas.

What We Don’t Do:

We have never taught, and don’t intend to teach, our children that Santa is a real person who comes down our chimney on Christmas Eve to deliver presents to good little girls.  I realize that that’s what everyone does.  It’s what my parents did, and what Trevor’s parents did, but when it came to teaching it to our own children, it just didn’t feel right.

Up until this year, our position on the matter was really more theory than anything else.  It didn’t seem right to perpetuate the fantasy of Santa, but it was out there, and the girls picked it up, and we didn’t really do a lot to correct it.   But at the ripe old age of five, Pippa has started asking questions, and the rubber has officially met the road.

I forget what the exact question was: something along the lines of “How does Santa get into houses with no chimneys?”   And there I was, caught like a deer in the headlights of these innocent blue-green eyes that were hanging on my words, waiting for me to confirm or deny these rumors of a jolly red-suited present-delivery guy that she’d been hearing all her life.  It was all hanging on this moment, and in that split second before I answered, I weighed my options.  I’m a pretty creative girl, and I knew I could easily have come up with an answer to satisfy her, but I couldn’t do it.  I just couldn’t make myself tell her a story, how ever nice a story, that wasn’t true and let her believe that it was.

“Sweetie,” I said, “you know that Santa’s pretend, right?”  And there it was.  An unspoken cardinal rule of parenting tossed out the window.  I imagined the angry phone calls from Sunday school parents pouring in, and I waited for her face to fall and her heart to break.

But you know what?  It didn’t.  She calmly and thoughtfully answered, “I guess so”, and we went on to discuss pretend other ways that pretend Santa could get into a chimney-less house.  It was completely fine, and I felt a burden had been lifted.  (Of course, I quickly briefed her on proper other-kids-and-Santa etiquette, and so far… no angry phone calls.)

My grandmother was surprised to find out that we are willfully depriving our kids of so much fun and excitement at Christmastime, and I wondered, are we really?  They still have the surprise of presents under the tree on Christmas morning (or at least they would be a surprise if Miss-Nosey-Pants didn’t peak a little  too long into a forbidden Target bag!) .  Does it make them less special to know that they come from the people who know them and love them best?  The people who know just how naughty (read here about the part of the whole Santa thing that bugs me most) they really are sometimes and love them anyway, unconditionally?  It just doesn’t seem so to me.

I suppose our kids will grow up enjoying Santa Claus the same way that they enjoy seeing Elmo at Sesame Place: sure, he might not be real, and they know that, but it’s still pretty fun to see a character from a favorite book or show brought to life to touch and talk to.  If we were raising our children in a vacuum, with no grandparents or great aunts around, I’m quite certain we’d be sidestepping Santa altogether, but in the real world it just isn’t a big enough issue to make it worth disappointing and potentially alienating dear friends and family.  Now Halloween on the other hand… but that’s a topic for another day.