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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

  • I am not talking about a fictional story where children know it is make believe, I am talking about children being led to believe that something that cannot physically happen is fact...and as I have pointed out it leads to a whole series of lies... this is nothing about being joyless or being some kind of stick in the mud depriving children of fantasy....I am not saying children should not read stories or watch movies, there is a distinct difference between telling something as a fact and telling something as a fantasy and telling something as a fact that is not true - especially to the growing and vulnerable mind of a child can interfere with a childs rational thinking.

    If you were to isolate 2 children from the world for a year and put them in separate rooms and tell one child in room A that outside the room is full of fairies, father christmas, the stork, the bogeyman, that jesus performed miracles etc and you tell the other child in room B nothing but the truth, then which child do you think will cope better mentally once they leave the room - yes it's a far fetched scenario, but each lie is like a drop of poison, you can eat a microscopic amount of poison and it has very little effect that it almost goes unnoticed, so the only way to prove it is poisonous is to take a sufficient amount - in the same way that the child in room A is being told lots of lies.

    The problem with the many santa lies is that they are all told over and over and over again, year upon year for weeks at a time.

    Would you be proud of a child who had the wisdom and intelligence to work out he was being told lies or proud of a child that believed all these lies to be facts ?

    If it was your child and you had to put them into one of the rooms, which room would you choose ?

    If you consider it being joyless not to lie to a child and to tell them the truth then you have a serious misconception of joy. To live with lies is to live in darkness, to live with truth is the purest joy.

Reply

  • I am not talking about a fictional story where children know it is make believe, I am talking about children being led to believe that something that cannot physically happen is fact...and as I have pointed out it leads to a whole series of lies... this is nothing about being joyless or being some kind of stick in the mud depriving children of fantasy....I am not saying children should not read stories or watch movies, there is a distinct difference between telling something as a fact and telling something as a fantasy and telling something as a fact that is not true - especially to the growing and vulnerable mind of a child can interfere with a childs rational thinking.

    If you were to isolate 2 children from the world for a year and put them in separate rooms and tell one child in room A that outside the room is full of fairies, father christmas, the stork, the bogeyman, that jesus performed miracles etc and you tell the other child in room B nothing but the truth, then which child do you think will cope better mentally once they leave the room - yes it's a far fetched scenario, but each lie is like a drop of poison, you can eat a microscopic amount of poison and it has very little effect that it almost goes unnoticed, so the only way to prove it is poisonous is to take a sufficient amount - in the same way that the child in room A is being told lots of lies.

    The problem with the many santa lies is that they are all told over and over and over again, year upon year for weeks at a time.

    Would you be proud of a child who had the wisdom and intelligence to work out he was being told lies or proud of a child that believed all these lies to be facts ?

    If it was your child and you had to put them into one of the rooms, which room would you choose ?

    If you consider it being joyless not to lie to a child and to tell them the truth then you have a serious misconception of joy. To live with lies is to live in darkness, to live with truth is the purest joy.

Children
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