The Santa conundrum: the blurred lines between stories and lies…

Who knew Santa Claus was such a minefield? It’s all fun and games telling your children the story of a benevolent grandfather figure who exists only to bring them joy in the form of presents. But what happens when they start to ask serious questions? How far do you push it? And when does a seemingly innocuous story become a kind of lie?

The idea of Santa Claus isn’t told to children as a fabled story, it’s told as fact - fact which is living and present. We tell them he’s watching, that he’s omnipresent, that he’ll reward or punish them. The story of Jesus Christ, of Easter, of myths and fables, they’re also received as fact by some - but there’s a big difference. Whether you believe religious or mythical stories as fact, enjoy them as fiction or denounce them as a load of old crap, they’re historical, not present. These stories don’t usually ask us to suspend disbelief now, in real time. But when it comes to Santa, that’s exactly what we ask children to do.

So what’s the problem with all this? Don’t get me wrong, I love Santa as much as the next person. It’s a story of wonder, joy, and magic - what’s not to like? But, when my seven year old daughter started asking questions (many questions), imploring us to tell her the truth, it made me think about how and why we tell this story.

What she was looking for was the kind of emphatic reassurance we would give her if she was questioning whether the earth was definitely round or if the moon is made of cheese. All her doubts were based on pure logic: how could one man travel around the entire world in one night when it took us 14 hours to get to Hong Kong on a plane? How did the sleigh land on the thin spines of rooftops? How did he monitor every single child’s behaviour? 

How could we tell her she was totally wrong, that her theories were unfounded? How could we dissuade her from rational reasoning? We tried, but our responses lacked commitment, they lacked the belief of certainty.

When the questions began, they were easy to answer. A simple: ‘is Santa really real?’ can be met with an equally simple and evasive: ‘of course he’s real’. But when she presented her case like a seven year old QC with solid evidence, our position grew more and more shaky. If you’re looking into your daughter’s big eyes as she asks: ‘You are definitely telling me the truth, aren’t you?’, it starts to feel at best like lying, and at worst, like gaslighting.

About a month ago, we told her. It came after a year of questions which grew more persistent, and were coupled with anxiety. She ultimately didn’t believe that a man was going to squeeze himself down our chimney after parking his reindeer on the roof - but she felt guilty for not believing. 

In true 2020 style, it didn’t go how I expected. We thought she’d be relieved to have her suspicions confirmed but instead she was devastated. She sobbed - it was the crying of loss, of grief. She was heartbroken. It sounds melodramatic but it was my worst moment so far as a parent. It felt like I’d taken a sledgehammer to her childhood, to her innocence, to her happiness. We’d ruined Christmas! I felt such profound regret - why didn’t we try harder to convince her? 

The truth was we couldn’t have convinced her. She knew the story was fiction, but she wanted us to continue the dance - the one where we know, and we know she knows but we pretend nobody knows anything. She wanted to be allowed to pretend. We’d both played it wrong - but she’s seven, so really, we’d played it wrong. We were honest with her. We told her the reason we decided to tell her was because she seemed distressed about it and had begged us to tell her the truth. She understood but she was sad. That’s when we started to descend into back-peddling Santa lunacy.

She went to bed and my husband and I spoke about it. I cried, a lot. We came up with a plan - one which consisted of waking her up and telling her we might be wrong, that Santa might exist after all - who knew?! We said we’d been chatting and had discovered that neither of us had eaten the mince pie last year - both thinking the other one had. And it was the same with some of the presents - we both thought the other parent had bought them, so where did they come from? Her eyes widened in disbelief (faux disbelief) and she smiled - we were dancing again.

The next day I took it further. I created an email address for Santa (clausnorthpolesanta100@gmail.com, if you want to contact him). I sent him an email explaining that we’d told our daughter he didn’t exist but now we weren’t sure. Could he tell us? He wrote back - very swiftly I might add - saying he didn’t blame us for not believing such a seemingly preposterous story, and that he was real if we wanted him to be. I was pretty proud of the email’s Dumbledorian tone (if I do say so myself) - light and jocular yet wise, with a touch of whimsy and an overtone of soothing gravitas. She read it and smiled, then she said: ‘Yeah, I kind of think you wrote that email?’ 

‘Of course I didn’t - look at the email address!’ We left it there. We’d both learned our lesson.

In the end, it was fine - better than fine. She wrote her letter to Santa last week, and is just as excited about Christmas as ever. Knowing that Santa doesn’t exist hasn’t made the story any less powerful. As long as she can pretend, as long as we keep the dance alive, the spell of Christmas remains unbroken.

What I learned is just how powerful and unifying the story of Santa is. We tell it as truth to make it more real, to make it more magical, to give flesh and bone to a beautiful idea. But our need to immerse ourselves in magic and wonder doesn’t end at the age of seven or eight or nine. When our suspended disbelief can no longer be suspended, it doesn’t mean the story has ended. No matter how old, we all have an innate human need to feel the tingle of wonder, to be part of a collective narrative, to keep the dance going. It turns out Santa was spot on in his email: he is real if you want him to be.