Wonderfully Weird Parenting: Part ll

The next way I'm weird is that I didn't really want my children to believe in Father Christmas. I never did, since my older sister had been terrified at the idea of a strange man coming into the house, and so my parents had never had the chance to spin the story. I never felt I missed out. Parents talk fondly of the magic of Christmas, but I always had plenty of that in the sheer excitement of waking up on Christmas morning and kicking at the end of the bed to feel the lumpy stocking there. It hadn't been any less fun for knowing where it had come from. As a family, we enjoyed the whole charade, and played along with the story, while we all knew it wasn't true. It was like a great shared secret.

When our first child reached Christmas-appreciating age, I'd rather planned to go down the same route. Then I discovered that to the great majority of parents, it was hugely important to keep the Father Christmas myth alive for as long as possible. I honestly had had no idea before then, that this was of such consequence. I didn't really want to get my son to believe the story because of my own experience as a child, and because I anticipated a day when he would find out and would then wonder what else I'd been fibbing to him about. I wanted him to be able to trust me 100%, always. It made me uneasy to sell him a fiction as a fact. I also knew of older children deeply upset on finding out they were the last child in their class still to believe.

The assumption at my son's preschool was so strong, that we were all doing the Father Christmas thing to the Nth degree, that it would have been very difficult to opt out. I heard tales of mothers who had let older siblings tell, and how this had ruined Christmas in previous years. I heard of the devious tales that children were told to explain how Father Christmas managed to get gifts to the right place, when a child was spending Christmas away from home. It was a huge conspiracy, carefully guarded, and even if I'd been brave enough to have broken out myself, I had to think through the ramifications of that for my son. For him, it would have been a hard burden to bear to be the only 3 year old at the Christmas party who knew that Father Christmas was in fact one of the dads with a pillow up his front, and to know that he must not tell any of the other children under any circumstance. I certainly wasn’t going to risk letting him be the child who spoiled Christmas for 20 families.

So I went along with the majority, but I confess that I did sow seeds of doubt. I would tell my son "it's amazing how Father Christmas manages to get round all the houses in the world in one night - I wonder how that can be", or "you know that song about how you only get presents from Father Christmas if you've been good? well, the funny thing is, when it comes to it, ALL children get presents after all". Call me subversive, but hey, in this house, the children imbibe doses of irony along with their mother's milk, so even at 3, I was fairly sure that my son was picking up at least some vague sense that when we talked of “Father Christmas", we did so with invisible inverted commas.

The saving grace for me, was a Canadian couple who hosted a St Nicholas’ Day party, early in December the following year. I hadn’t known before then how the Father Christmas legend had developed from an early East European bishop (Saint Nicholas becoming Santa Claus). He gave money and food to the poor, leaving it tactfully in the shoes they left outside their doors, which over time became the presents in the stockings. To me, this gave the perfect half-way house between truth and fiction, with the divide nicely blurred. Now, I talk about how there was a real man, a long long time ago, who was the real Santa Claus. But when they've asked me outright what happens to the stockings by the fireplace, I've started by fudging with "who knows?", and then over time, have come clean and confessed that it is really Mummy and Daddy. But we say "it's fun to pretend it's him", and we do just that. We do the carrot for the reindeer and the mince pie and whisky for Santa, and on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, we act it out just like proper believing families. There’s plenty of mystery and magic, but no room for future disappointment.

But here’s the really intriguing thing. Even when I have debunked the myth, my children have each believed, because they have chosen to. For each of them, there have been 2 or 3 years when they have known that Santa isn’t real, but they’ve believed in him anyway. I don’t know whether it’s peer group pressure, or the desire for fairy tale, but they have taken the lead and acted the story out so hard, that Husband and I have followed along. For you non-weird parents, that may well be an argument to support your approach of keeping the myth alive from the outset. I prefer to interpret it as an argument that it doesn’t really matter which approach you take, so long as everyone has fun.