• Replies 182 replies
  • Subscribers 28 subscribers
  • Views 29261 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Related
Hints and tips
  • To quote someone's message, first select/highlight the relevant text, and then use the Quote button that appears
  • To "mention" someone, type @ followed by the start of the forum name, and choose from the list; that person will get a notification of being mentioned

Is Santa silly?

Arran

I'm writing this as someone who doesn't celebrate Christmas in either a religious or cultural sense. From a young age I was told that Santa doesn't exist and is just a silly hoax that parents play on their kids. It never affected me in any bad way and neither was I expecting to find wrapped presents mysteriously appear on the morning of the 25th day of December. If anybody in my family received a Christmas gift then it was usually opened on the same day. A downside to this is that even from the age of 4 or 5 I went round telling kids at school "Father Christmas isn't real, it's all made up, your parents buy Christmas presents from the shops" which often resulted in me getting into trouble whenever they got upset. I once had to report to the head teacher after completely reducing a classmate to tears.

Is the concept of Santa a silly nonsense or is it part of the joys of childhood? Do you tell your own children the truth or would you prefer to go along with the cultural norm? Is pleasing one's classmates more important than knowing the truth? What about children at school who follow different religions so do not celebrate Christmas - where do they fit in?

Parents

  • Paull said:
    Small lies may seem trivial but they are the seeds of bigger lies, therefore filling a child's head with lies is far from harmless fun.

    Technically, what you've just said is a logical fallacy known as the "slippery slope" - the idea that one thing leads to another without any actual proof to make that connection.

    If people only believed in what could be immediately proven in the here and now, we'd be saying goodbye to many innovations and future inventors of whom pursue their unprovable theories by belief and conviction, and not what can be proven right at this moment in time. There's definitely plenty of lies out there in the big wide world of ours: stock market manipulation and fraud; secret government surveillance programmes which violate age old liberties; state propaganda and tyranny; corruption in the police and military. To spend time getting annoyed over Santa or making out that it somehow leads to those crimes just doesn't hold any water, I'm afraid.

    However all this seems to be a product of the last hundred years or so. The period of childhood protection was much shorter, with boys being apprenticed to a trade as early as 11 or 12, or going down the mines at 9, and even from first being able to walk survival meant learning reality not myth.

    That's a very good point, longman and I definitely agree with that. The modern world has definitely tailored existence in a way to ease children along with life, which I think is a very noble trait of our society in recent years.

Reply

  • Paull said:
    Small lies may seem trivial but they are the seeds of bigger lies, therefore filling a child's head with lies is far from harmless fun.

    Technically, what you've just said is a logical fallacy known as the "slippery slope" - the idea that one thing leads to another without any actual proof to make that connection.

    If people only believed in what could be immediately proven in the here and now, we'd be saying goodbye to many innovations and future inventors of whom pursue their unprovable theories by belief and conviction, and not what can be proven right at this moment in time. There's definitely plenty of lies out there in the big wide world of ours: stock market manipulation and fraud; secret government surveillance programmes which violate age old liberties; state propaganda and tyranny; corruption in the police and military. To spend time getting annoyed over Santa or making out that it somehow leads to those crimes just doesn't hold any water, I'm afraid.

    However all this seems to be a product of the last hundred years or so. The period of childhood protection was much shorter, with boys being apprenticed to a trade as early as 11 or 12, or going down the mines at 9, and even from first being able to walk survival meant learning reality not myth.

    That's a very good point, longman and I definitely agree with that. The modern world has definitely tailored existence in a way to ease children along with life, which I think is a very noble trait of our society in recent years.

Children
No Data