The Great Santa Claus Fraud

When I was six years old, Robert West told me there was no San­ta Claus. It was a cou­ple weeks before Christ­mas, a sun­ny warm day for that time of year. We had climbed an old oak tree on his grandfather’s farm and we were sit­ting side by side on a big branch, tak­ing turns spit­ting at a wheel­bar­row down below. The wheel­bar­row stood about ten feet from the tree, so it was a long spit. Robert could beat me at almost every­thing, but it turned out he wasn’t much of a pro­jec­tile spit­ter. All his attempts fell short. I hit the mark every time, and it was get­ting under his skin.

We hadn’t been talk­ing about Christ­mas when he dropped the bomb on San­ta Claus. It caught me off guard. “What?”

“There’s no San­ta Claus. Your par­ents buy the presents and put them under the tree while you’re asleep.”

I didn’t believe him. We had a big argu­ment, where­upon Robert pro­ceed­ed to dis­man­tle brick by brick the fortress I had built in my sub­con­scious mind to pro­tect Santa’s mag­ic from the real world’s cold logic.

Rein­deer can’t fly, he point­ed out. A fat old man can’t slide down a nar­row chim­ney, much less claw his way back up to the roof. No way he could vis­it every house in the world in a sin­gle night even if he flew on a jet plane. And so on.

By the end of it, I knew Robert was right, and I was on the verge of tears, which seemed to be what he want­ed. He couldn’t stand los­ing to me at any­thing, even a spit­ting com­pe­ti­tion, so he used the truth about San­ta to put me in my place. 

I climbed down from the tree and slouched home. On the way, my grief over San­ta turned into anger at my par­ents for play­ing me for a fool. By the time I found Mom in the back yard, hang­ing clothes on the line, I was out­raged. I con­front­ed her with what Robert had said. “You and Dad lied to me about San­ta!” I shout­ed. “What else did you lie about?”

Mom didn’t take much guff off any­one, least of all me. “Don’t you dare say we lied to you,” she said angri­ly. “We didn’t lie. We told you a sto­ry. A good sto­ry about a nice man who does right by chil­dren. We went to a lot of trou­ble to make Christ­mas fun for you and you should be grate­ful for it.” She picked up her clothes-bas­ket and marched away.

I didn’t have the temer­i­ty to argue with her. It was a good sto­ry, like she said, but it was also a lie, and it didn’t take me long to fig­ure out they’d lied about a lot of oth­er stuff. San­ta was the big one, but the East­er Bun­ny ran a close sec­ond. That sto­ry nev­er made sense to me. Rab­bits don’t grow to be six feet tall and walk on their hind legs, thank God, but I had bought into it any­way, naive­ly believ­ing every­thing my par­ents said.

The Tooth Fairy was anoth­er lie, but I didn’t care much about him/her/it. At only a quar­ter per tooth, there wasn’t a big enough pay­off to wor­ry about. 

A host of addi­tion­al minor char­ac­ters also fell like a row of domi­noes – the Sand Man, Jack Frost, the Lep­rechaun with the pot of gold at the end of the rain­bow. One guy I was glad to see bite the dust was the Boogey­man. My uncle claimed he lived under my bed. “You’d bet­ter behave your­self, or the Boogey­man will get you.” I nev­er real­ly believed in the Boogey­man, but I looked under my bed every night before I turned off the light just to be safe. It was com­fort­ing to know with cer­tain­ty he wouldn’t kill me in my sleep just for sass­ing my uncle, who usu­al­ly deserved it. 

I felt betrayed by all these lies. My bond of trust with my par­ents had been bro­ken, and I was angry and hurt for a while, but as best I can recall, I for­got about it with­in a few days.

Over the six decades since then, I hadn’t giv­en the death of my child­hood myths much thought. Then last month a news sto­ry broke that remind­ed me of those days long ago. A sub­sti­tute teacher at Cedar Hills School in New Jer­sey told twen­ty-three first graders that San­ta Claus didn’t exist, con­fronting them with the same cold log­ic Robert had heaped on me. After that, she mowed down the East­er Bun­ny and the Tooth Fairy. “Mag­ic does not exist,” she told the kids. “There is no such thing as mag­ic anything.”

This set off a firestorm among the children’s par­ents, result­ing in the school super­in­ten­dent ban­ning the sub­sti­tute from teach­ing in the dis­trict. Cable news pun­dits pounced on the sto­ry as anoth­er skir­mish in the War on Christ­mas. In the debates that fol­lowed, most every­one agreed the teacher’s actions were wrong, but spir­it­ed bat­tle lines formed around a dif­fer­ent ques­tion: Should par­ents trick their chil­dren into believ­ing the San­ta story?

I was sur­prised to learn that a lot of experts believe San­ta is tox­ic. Pro­fes­sor David John­son thinks the San­ta sto­ry impairs a child’s devel­op­ment of crit­i­cal think­ing skills and that learn­ing the truth, after so much parental decep­tion, trau­ma­tizes chil­dren. He tells the sto­ry of a child who defend­ed San­ta in front of his school class on the sole basis that his moth­er wouldn’t lie to him and then burst into tears lat­er when read­ing to the class an ency­clo­pe­dia entry about San­ta that proved she had indeed lied. “Lying to chil­dren about San­ta,” John­son con­cludes, “is immoral and unjustifiable.”

Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher Boyle and Dr. Kathy McK­ay believe lying to chil­dren about some­thing so spe­cial and mag­i­cal could under­mine their trust in their par­ents for­ev­er, throw the children’s moral com­pass per­ma­nent­ly off-kil­ter, and leave them vul­ner­a­ble to “abject dis­ap­point­ment” for the rest of their lives.

Pas­cal-Emmanuel Gob­ry may be the most mil­i­tant of the anti-San­ta advo­cates. In his arti­cle, I Tell My Kid San­ta is a Lie and You Should Too, he prais­es an event at a Catholic dio­cese in France where church offi­cials told chil­dren San­ta was not real, denounced him as a heretic, and hanged him in effi­gy. “Join the move­ment,” Gob­ry says. “Togeth­er, we can kill Santa.”

Seems a lit­tle extreme to me. My mom used to say, “Some peo­ple are too smart for their own good.” The San­ta Truthers may have fall­en into that trap. I agree lying to chil­dren is usu­al­ly wrong, but the San­ta sto­ry makes Christ­mas a lot more fun for a lit­tle kid, and chil­dren are more resilient than the experts seem to under­stand. Look­ing back on it now, I wouldn’t for­feit my child-hood belief in Christ­mas mag­ic just to avoid the short-lived dis­ap­point­ment that came from learn­ing the truth.

Of course, every child is dif­fer­ent, and each par­ent should make an informed, care­ful deci­sion about Santa.

My parental deci­sion was nev­er in doubt.

I was watch­ing the weath­er report on tele­vi­sion Christ­mas Eve forty years ago when my four-year-old son came bounc­ing down the stairs. I told him the weath­er­man was track­ing San­ta Claus on radar. “He’s over Pomona right now, head­ed our way!”

We ran out in the back yard and stood by the pool, star­ing up at the sky.

“There he goes!” I shouted.

“Where?!!!

“There!” I point­ed. “He just streaked over the house!”

“I didn’t see him!”

“Dang! Maybe we can see him from the front yard!”

My son ran around the house as fast as he could, des­per­ate for a glimpse of the fly­ing rein­deer and the jol­ly old man, who didn’t exist.

It’s not a lie, I told myself as I jogged along behind him. It’s a sto­ry. A good sto­ry about a nice man who does right by children.

Post Script: Hey, Robert, wher­ev­er you are, I still hate you.