Against Santa Claus

Or, Why Teaching Your Kids About Santa is Bad, and You Should Feel Bad

It’s that time of year again. Yes, that’s right: Time for us to fight about Santa Claus! For the unaware, this is the season that runs parallel to Advent on the Twitturgical calendar. This particular year, the fight seems to have broken out downstream of a tweet by journalist Caitlin Flanagan. “You’re fine to tell your kid there’s no Santa,” she said, “But if your kid tells my kid there’s no Santa, it’s going to be you, me and some very complicated and unresolved emotional issues.” Someone strongly took issue with this in a quote-tweet, saying that while his own parents didn’t perpetuate the myth, he took it as a general sign of bad parenting. Whereupon, all Twitter hell broke loose in his mentions.

Soon Matt Walsh weighed in, shocking fans of his curmudgeonly persona by coming out loudly pro-Santa. “This is dumb,” he declared. “Young children think Batman is real. They think fairies and mermaids and dragons are real. I let my children believe in all of that stuff too. If my daughter tells me that she saw a fairy in the garden, I don’t say, ‘No you didn’t! Fairies are fake!’ No, I play along. I say, ‘You did? Awesome! Where was it?’” So it is with Santa. Why, he asks, are people going out of their way to kill magical thinking in the minds of their 5-year-olds? Once the kids naturally grow out of the Santa fiction on their own, you can tell them it was just a fun game of pretend, and no one will be traumatized. Lighten up, people.

This is echoed by Hans Fiene, known to Christian Twitter as the creator of Lutheran Satire: “Lying and pretending are not the same thing, but it’s fun to pretend that we don’t all know this every Christmas season.” He’s insisted before that the vast majority of kids know what’s up and are just choosing not to “break kayfabe” as part of the game so they’ll get more loot. Asked if it’s important to note those kids who don’t take the reveal in stride and are in fact quite hurt, he says, “Not really, no.”

Clearly, this is not a partisan fight of religious versus irreligious, or even less versus more conservative religious. Back when my mother was writing in the heyday of the conservative blogosphere, I don’t think she ever generated as long and fierce a comment thread as when she dared to say it’s a mistake to teach kids about Santa. That thread was a microcosm of a bloody internecine war, still raging to this day. It sets brother against brother, Protestant against Protestant, Catholic against Catholic.

Some people’s reasoning is more fleshed out than others’. Sometimes there’s an explicit philosophical agenda at work, or an explicit philosophy of how faith intersects with reason. Sometimes the urge to take a swing at the Santa-skeptical is really an urge to take a swing at some very specific puritanical niche group that makes a useful strawman. Whatever flavor it comes in, I am here to say that it is all extremely wrong-headed, and that it is most especially wrong-headed, cringe, and even pernicious when Christians do it.

I should confess, though, that my title was a tad sweeping for clicks—I have nothing against Santa Claus, strictly. He seems like a jolly old fellow. It’s “doing Santa Claus” that I’m against. As a child, I was That Kid who broke the spell for my little friends, innocently wondering why this sent the adults around them into such a panic. My parents would tell me to try to read the room a little better, but they assured me it wasn’t really my fault, it was the fault of said adults.

I realize this may come as a shock to some people. If you’ve read this far and already decided I am a joyless Grinch, feel free not to read further! You may even unsubscribe if you feel strongly enough, though of course I hope you don’t. Should you choose to read on and get even more mad, let it not be said that you weren’t warned.