"The Death of Santa"

I’m going to comment on a post by Scott Clark. Let me say at the outset that I have no firm opinion one way or the other about raising kids on the Santa myth. If some Christians don’t go in for that, I won’t take issue with their decision. I’m mainly interested in Clark’s reasoning.

It wasn’t because we didn’t have much money for presents (we didn’t). We told our children that the man in the red suit was the “Christmas clown” (thank you Vern Pollema) on the premise that, while pretending is fun and necessary, the Santa story isn’t quite the same thing. When we were reading pretend stories to our children they knew the convention, that we were making up stories and that we were temporarily entering into a make-believe world, that we were exercising our imaginations about possible worlds. That’s why make-believe stories begin with conventional lines such as “Once upon a time….” This language is a verbal wink. It signals to the participants: “please place your tray in an upright and locked position, turn off your cell phones, and stow your carry-on bag. The flight is taking off.”

http://heidelblog.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/death-of-santa/

I agree with Clark that kids can normally tell the difference between fantasy and reality. But it’s an interesting question how they can tell. To begin with, do most young kids consciously recognize literary conventions like “once upon a time” as fictional cues?

Likewise, lots of kid’s stories don’t begin with fictional cues. Take the opening lines of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe:

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because if the air-raids.

Is that obviously fictitious to a young reader?

To take another example, I watched Bugs Bunny as a little boy. I knew it was fictitious, but not because someone told me “that we were temporarily entering into a make-believe world, that we were exercising our imaginations about possible worlds.”

Also, I don’t know if even if the late David Lewis thought there was a possible world where Bugs Bunny is a real person.

Or, to take yet another example, consider all those spooky campfire stories about the bogeyman (and analogous tales) that have no other function than giving kids a good scare. No doubt there are feminists who object to “traumatizing” kids with tall tales about things that go bump in the night. Should Christians raise boys in a “safe” environment that protects them from campfire stories?

In the Santa faith, however, there is no such convention. The story is told earnestly and even passionately. Expressions of doubt are met with rebuke and exhortation. Evidence is presented and a defense of the faith is offered. The cookies and milk are gone in the morning. New presents appear. There are other rituals.

I think Clark is overextrapolating from his personal experience. My parents raised me in the Santa myth, too, but they certainly didn’t get that carried away with the hoax.

Moreover, it’s not necessarily a case of indoctrinating your kids in the Santa myth. That’s something they will pick up whether or not you, as a parent, indoctrinate your own kids in the Santa myth.

So often it’s less a question of whether you should indoctrinate them in the Santa myth, or whether you should simply play along with the cultural osmosis, or, conversely, whether you should actively disabuse them of the Santa myth.

That’s just it. At some point we learned that the Santa faith isn’t really a true faith at all. It was a complex hoax, a conspiracy even. Santa can’t live your heart if he doesn’t really live at the North Pole. At that moment, in a small but sometimes painful way, we learn that people lie. The pain of the truth is buffered by presents and Christmas cheer but things are never the same. We become just a little bit cynical, perhaps for the first time.

We decided not to tell our children that there was a Santa because we did not want our children to suspect that we were liars. If we lied to them about Santa, why weren’t we lying about Jesus and the resurrection? Why weren’t we? After all, they had never seen Jesus. They only had a book, a story, and a storyteller. Who can blame them for doubting? If Santa doesn’t really fly through the air then perhaps Jesus didn’t ascend? If Santa didn’t really eat the cookies, then perhaps communion is just a thing we do; it doesn’t really mean anything?

In its own way, the Santa myth tells children (and grown-ups) that this really is a closed universe, that there isn’t really any such thing as transcendent reality, that Christmas is really about being nice to one another and thus so is Christianity. Perhaps modern people believe so easily in the “death of God” because they learned a long time ago in the death of Santa?

Here is where Clark gets to the heart of his thesis, and not coincidentally, where his reasoning goes more seriously awry:

i) To begin with, that's a popular argument in militant village atheism. Belief in Jesus is no different than belief in Santa. Does Clark really think there’s anything close to evidential parity between the Santa myth and the Christ-Event?

ii) Should we believe in Jesus just because our parents did? Is that the only reason? Can’t we do better than that?

iii) Should children vest unquestioning faith in whatever grown-ups tell them? What if your father is Richard Dawkins or the Grand Ayatollah of Iran?

iv) On a related note, Clark is a proponent of 2-kingdoms statecraft. So he presumably doesn’t think we should abolish the public school system. He presumably doesn’t think Christian parents have a duty to either homeschool their kids or send them to private Christian schools.

But if we’re going to send our kids to public school, then wouldn’t it behoove them to cultivate a degree of scepticism in what adults may be teaching them?

v) As long as we’re speaking anecdotally, I can say with some confidence that when I lost my childish faith in Santa, I didn’t become disillusioned in my parents. I can say that because I don’t even remember the transition. I just know that at a very early age I believed in Santa, while at a somewhat later age I didn’t. It happened unconsciously.

Looking back on my short-lived, childish faith in Santa, I don’t hold that against my parents. To the contrary, they did it because they loved me, and they thought that was something little kids enjoy. Which I did–at the time.

vi) Sometimes fiction is equivalent to lying, but oftentimes it isn’t. And even if we say it’s equivalent to lying, “lying” is a loaded word which carries moral connotations that aren’t always suitable to the occasion.

Take certain pranks and practical jokes that young men are sometimes prone to play on one another. These may involve a temporary element of deception. The payoff comes when it finally dawns on the butt of the joke that this is staged. At that point he may find it hilarious. But what makes it hilarious is the build-up, when he still he thinks this is for real.

On a related note, I’m reminded of a show I saw as a kid: Candid Camera. Is that equivalent to “lying”? If so, is that particular brand of “lying” immoral?

Or take movies. Yes, I know that when I watch a movie, this is illusory. Yet therein lies a certain paradox. For many films go out of their way to create a realistic illusion. To have realistic dialogue. Realistic acting. Realistic sets. Realistic stunts.

We judge an actor by how real he seems, and how well he can make us feel what he is projecting.

vii) From what I’ve read, Clark’s psychological theory is false. Indeed, ironically enough, Richard Dawkins is opposed to Santa Claus and other fairy tales because he fears this sort of thing predisposes impressionable young minds to also believe the Bible. If it were up to Dawkins, he’d ban fairy tales–not because he fears it will spur a “the death of God” movement, but just the opposite:

Magic-talk gets under the skin of many, like renowned scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins. This is doubly so when it is what the Christ-figure Aslan, in C.S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," calls "the deeper magic," an allusion to divinity. Mr. Dawkins is reportedly writing a book examining the pernicious tendency of fantasy tales to promote "anti-scientific" thinking among children. He suspects that such stories lay the groundwork for religious faith, the inculcation of which, he claims, is a worse form of child abuse than sexual molestation.

I suspect that fairy tales and Santa Claus do prepare us to embrace the ultimate Fairy Tale, the one Lewis believed was ingrained in our being. New research from the Université de Montréal and the University of Ottawa indicates that children aren't overly troubled upon learning that Santa is a myth. But the researchers remained puzzled because while children eventually abandon Santa, they keep believing in God. Lewis would say this is because God is real, but Mr. Dawkins fears it is the lasting damage of fairy tales. While Mr. Dawkins stands ironically alongside Puritans in his readiness to ban fairy tales, Christian apologists like Lewis and Chesterton embraced them, precisely because to embrace Christian dogma is to embrace the extrarational.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122963990662019887.html