Children are traumatized by the truth about Santa in only one situation. If they perceive that there’s a foundational lie in the fabric of the family and don’t know how to verbalize it, they use Santa as a way of showing their discomfort with the actual lie.
For example, if one of the parents is cheating. That’s the trauma. The child intuits it but doesn’t know what it is that is bothering him. When he says “You lied to me!”, it’s not about Santa. It’s the actual, terrible dishonesty in the family that is bothering him.
Clarissa's Blog 
This i/o guy is such a soulless asian striver bot. His life begins and ends at “test scores.”
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Meh. I don’t judge anybody else for playing the Santa game, but can’t do it myself– I’m a lousy actress and simply cannot maintain the pretending past the first legit “but how does he get in when we have no chimney” type question. We have always explained to the kids that Santa is a fun game, with certain rules, that some parents like to play with their kids, and that they are under no circumstances to disenchant other kids about it. They all find out eventually, and it’s not polite to interfere in other families’ games.
This dude is probably autistic, and has simply failed so far (like a lot of us) to figure out that *not being able to lie* is not the same as *being honest* and does not count as virtue 😉
-ethyl
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“cannot maintain the pretending past the first legit “but how does he get in when we have no chimney””
I don’t honestly remember how much I ever believed in Santa…. I think for some time I kind of half-believed and half-didint’ (we need a good word for the state of knowing and not-knowing at the same time).
I sort of did an empirical test at one point and the results were…. no Santa but I still sort of wanted to believe.
Mostly I thought of it, like you said, as a fun game.
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My point here is that if a child is so traumatized by Santa, it’s really not about Santa. A child in a normal environment will be happy with or without Santa. This is not the kind of stuff that traumatizes children.
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“it’s really not about Santa”
I get that, but bringing Santa up is a way to guarantee everybody starts talking about their memories or ideas about hos to share Santa with kids.
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Yes, but it’s easy, as someone who is constitutionally incapable of lying, to fall into the trap of assuming that people who *can* do this with their kids are doing something bad, dishonest, and evil. It’s difficult to understand the game when you cannot play it. It’s complicated by the part where a lot of us have considerable baggage from our school days, when people took advantage of our credulousness (it’s hard to figure out that other people are lying, if you can’t lie, there’s a lot of very painful childhood experience that goes into figuring this one out) in order to humiliate us.
So, you know, I don’t think the dude is right, but I think I can see where he’s coming from… and maybe he doesn’t realize it’s an ‘autism’ flag rather than an ‘I’m more virtuous than you’ thing. He’s either very young, or he’ll probably never figure it out
We shall hope it’s “young”.
-ethyl
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I tried that approach with my kid (don’t spoil the game for other children), but it turned out that my 4-year old was not prone to higher-order reasoning at this early age. After reading a book about the real St. Nicholas he went to school and told his friends that “Santa is dead” (obviously, as a real person, the story explained that he died a long time ago). No parents came after me with pitchforks, so I think everyone is OK. I am still puzzled that was his main takeaway from this story that explained about his life – that he was a bishop and all the good deeds and miracles he has done while he was alive…
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Klara knows that some of her friends don’t believe in Santa and she’s very much OK with that. She does and it’s good enough. Although, as Trump said, at her age it’s getting to the tipping point.
But we play a lot of magical stuff. We notice yellow cars, we feel the presence of elves, we have good luck rituals. Obviously, it’s not for everybody but it’s kind of my thing and I’m happy to share it with her.
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We talk to the moon. It is a fun game that isn’t too much of a “lying” stretch, because tbh, even as an adult I am totally cool with anthropomorphizing the moon. So when the night is clear, and the moon is out when we leave church, we say hello and invite the moon back to our house. And the moon always follows us home!
-ethyl
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That’s a great game. Whatever the tradition is, the children will love it. I still have the fondest memory of going on a hunt for magical apples with my dad and then trying to cook them. The cooking came to nothing because they were extremely unripe but the memory stayed forever.
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It needn’t be magical, it’s more about the relationship anyway. My parents and grandparents were not inclined to play pretend with kids. But when I would visit my grandma, she had *all* the field guides, so whenever a bird would show up in the yard, we’d look it up and find out its name. There is something magical about knowing the names of the birds.
It totally stuck, too– I have a whole shelf devoted to field guides and we go looking for everything’s names: the mushrooms, the flowers, the birds, the butterflies, the snakes, the frogs… to me it is much the same as talking to the moon: it is noticing the details. Oh moon, you are so thin tonight! Are you feeling all right? Now the kids notice the moon phases… same with frogs. Is it all green with round toes? Does it have a Y marking on its back? Stripes on its legs? Now it is not just “a frog” but a particular frog, with particular habits and a particular call.
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Hahaha! I love this. My youngest is fairly obsessed with St. Nicholas– we do the shoe thing on December 6, and he in fact believes St. Nicholas leaves stuff in his shoes, because all his church friends also do. I stay out of it as much as possible, but he is totally enthralled by stories about St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, but also wants to know all the minute details of what happens when you die and become a saint and get superpowers. I’ve gotten good at answering: “I dont’ know, maybe you could ask Fr. (the priest)”. 😉
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We also do the shoe thing on December 6! Saint Nicholas brings presents on his feast day and baby Jesus brings the Christmas presents. But my child understands that they bring these presents “through the hands of others,” like a mom or dad. It’s something we do for others to commemorate these special days.
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This is literally the first time in my life that I’m hearing about “the shoe thing.” I grew up without Christmas and don’t know many of the traditions.
I will now go interrogate AI.
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Really?
St. Nicholas’ feast day is December 6. The kids leave their shoes by the door before bedtime on the 5th, and St. Nicholas comes and puts candy and little toys in them.
I want to say it’s Dutch in origin, but… super popular in all the Antiochian churches I’ve been to also.
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I can’t believe I’m finding this out now.
Please, my friends, remember, I’m Soviet. We’d all be interrogated by the KGB if anybody mentioned a Christian saint around me.
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I was never taught to believe in Santa Claus because my parents never taught me to believe in anything that they didn’t believe in themselves. I followed the same policy with my kids, because it was so much easier than trying to keep up a pretense. Ditto for the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy.
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