I know I said I was over Christmas, but now that Christmas is actually long over, I’m ready to think about it again.

Let’s talk Santa.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you have at least one child old enough to have conversations with, you celebrate Christmas, you’re living in a culture where Santa-belief is normal in children, and you don’t feel the need to explicitly tell your child that Santa isn’t real. I realize that not all my readers fall into those categories, but it’s not the first time I’ve asked you to pretend, right? So we’re pretending.

These are all things that I can understand, and my point is not to debate them. What I want to know, is if you’ll go that step further to actively and explicitly lie about the existence of Santa, and if so, why? Why is there this whole battery of tools designed with no other purpose but to convince children that Santa is real? And I don’t mean vague junk like the “Yes, Virginia” letter. I mean things like NORAD Santa and paying money for fake pictures of Santa in your living room. I get going along with it when your kid declares there’s a Santa. But I don’t get spending an hour putting “reindeer prints” on the roof so you can point to them the next morning and say, “Look! Reindeers really were here!”

So, I just want to know, what’s the point? Anyone?

One Response to “Santa”