At the family dinner table a
couple of days before Christmas, my nephew, who is about to become a father,
expressed reluctance to lie to his child about Santa Claus. That led to many
stories around the table about belief in Santa.
My son Sam remembered that he
was getting skeptical about Santa one Christmas when his great wish was for a
Lego Monorail kit. He didn’t have much hope, however, because in his 6-year-old
judgment that toy was much too expensive for his frugal parents. Then the
Monorail appeared under the tree on Christmas morning in his grandparents’
house, after a long night of secret construction in the company of my similarly
busy brothers-in-law. Sam’s skepticism vanished for another season.
One year my daughter Mae told
her slightly younger cousins Helen and Ann that she knew “the truth about Santa”
and she would be happy to pass on this knowledge. They were not ready for “the
truth”, but the next year Helen went looking for clues before Christmas. She
found some hidden gifts that then showed up in her stocking on Christmas.
Most Christmas movies,
especially the older ones I love, like “Miracle on 34th
Street”, not only assume that Santa is real, but that all good people will
eventually come to believe that. In the modern
remake of “Miracle on 34th Street”, when some military man
testifies in court that it would be impossible to make billions of toys at the
North Pole, Kris Kringle scoffs. Of course you can’t see the factory – it’s
magic.
“Dear
Prudence” on Slate recently argued that children don’t get hurt by
eventually discovering “the truth about Santa”. She wrote that “one of the
delights of being a parent is to spread a little fairy dust occasionally.” But
not everyone agrees. Philosophy professor David Kyle Johnson at King’s College,
a Catholic college in Pennsylvania, denounces
the “Santa lie”. His argument appears to be about the immorality of lying,
while most psychologists say that parental tales of Santa do no harm.
The wonderful story “The
Polar Express” directly addresses how belief in Santa gradually disappears as
children get older. University of Texas psychologist Jacqueline Woolley
interviewed children and found that
belief in Santa peaked about age 5, when nearly all children believed, and
then dropped off quickly, so that by age 9, only one in three thought Santa was
real. Research by Occidental College psychologists Andrew Shtulman and Rachel
InKyung Yoo showed that children gradually lose
their belief in Santa’s purely magical qualities as their understanding of
the physical world grows. But to preserve something of Santa, they develop explanations
for his impossible activities which are more plausible to them, such as that he
has millions of elves as helpers to make all those toys.
My children are too old to
have had experienced the Elf on the Shelf
craze, and I’m happy for that. Scaring children into proper behavior with
stories about magic spies for Santa is, in my opinion, a perversion of Santa’s
magic into something that parents, not children, want. I might not go as far as
Professor Laura Pinto, who argues
that the all-seeing Elf prepares kids to accept the controversial activities of
the NSA and the surveillance state, but I find the whole idea creepy.
In a New York Times opinion
column, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes
that Google searches for “depression” and similar words are less frequent
around Christmas. Gallup surveys show Americans’ mood improves around
Christmas, while the number of suicides drops. Maybe that’s part of Santa’smagic.
Can Santa really deliver toys
across the world in one night? Can he squeeze down all those chimneys? Those
are the wrong questions. Even in some Jewish families, Christmas is a magical
time, when we all can dream of giving the perfect gift, of seeing our loved
ones smile with delight as they discover what’s inside those carefully wrapped
packages. For me, as long as belief in Santa might fascinate another generation
of children with images of magical generosity, I’ll grin when Kris Kringle wins
his case one more time.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville, IL
Published in the Jacksonville
Journal-Courier, December 30, 2014
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