What else is lost when the make-believe of Santa is left behind?
We create the illusion for our children that Santa is real, fully expecting them to eventually see through the artifice and outgrow the story. This and similar enactments are often understood to serve a purpose – such as cementing a moral order – ‘be good for goodness sake’. Money in exchange for a tooth placed under the pillow perhaps helps to make sense of ejecting a bodily part – the loss of a tooth becomes an enrichment via the tooth fairy’s largess where a traumatic event is fitted into a wider pattern of loss and reward. In these ways, lived fairy tales introduce social concepts in a manner suitable for children to digest – as well as (helpfully) priming them to become economic actors in a consumer society. Ahem. Non-cynical readings are also available – enacting the story of Santa is commonly seen as part of the magic of childhood, where belief and wonder at fantastical manifestations has a charm of its own.
However, I think there is more here than meets the eye. The transition from the childish naivety of a belief in Santa to a more ‘grown up’ worldview marks the moment when children are initiated into our adult sense of what counts as ‘real’. At one level, it’s a demonstration of competence – of being able to distinguish between those things that are ‘actual’ for grown-ups (cars, compound interest, material causality) and those things we consider ‘pretend’ (Santa, the tooth fairy, ghosts and other spiritual beings or effects). While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this I feel an unevenness has crept into the process – or perhaps has been there all along. Establishing the bona fides of reality involves the negation of an opposing order – one constituted in stories and myth – such that it’s not just the reality of Santa or the tooth fairy that is denied but often the validity of stories themselves. Revealing the Santa story as untrue – frivolous even – leads to these negative qualities being applied to things that exist in the imaginative realm more generally, with an overall message that stories and myths are fine for satisfying for childish minds, but have little or no currency within an adult world view. For grown-ups, ‘reality’ of a particular kind is what matters – one constituted by a material order, governed by reason – one where what is important is what actually happens. It is as if our mythological worlds are sacrificed so that there is room for our material worldview to flourish.
Yet, as grown-ups, stories and myths still organise our beliefs and give us our sense of being in the world. Despite our insistence on the primacy of material reality, our reliance on stories is unaltered, it has just been somewhat degraded and heavily concealed. There a paradox here: our rationality is underpinned by commonplace myths that emphasise the value of reason, yet that same rationality goes on to teach the unseriousness of myths, casting them as frivolous and useful only for entertainment.
Nowadays, our collective storytelling experiences are, by and large, delivered in the form of mass media. We lap up stories served to us by powerful news, entertainment and gaming industries and giant social media platforms. These are stories with infinite variations made from the fragments of dismembered original forms harvested from multiple cultural traditions. They deploy faded symbols and recycled narratives which we have lost the skill to interpret fully, but which nevertheless tug us along by dimly recalled associations. While these stories arouse our emotions, they also confer a hollow experience, a sense of shallow waters and diluted meaning. Paradoxically, these weakened currents sweep us along as we have few defences – so little in the way of an anchoring tradition. To have tradition we need a few consistent stories to live by, but instead we experience an inundation of stories continually assaulting our consciousness, each told with the aim of furthering the interests of political or corporate sponsors while at the same time disguising their underlying motives.
This leaves us vulnerable to ‘popular’ narratives featuring skewed versions of happiness, achievement, agency, love and belonging – where these are not told to us to reveal wisdom, but instead to entrap, envelop and enslave. We do not believe in stories, yet we greedily consume them. We live by them but deny this is what we are doing. We become grown ups who no longer believe in fairy tales with the outcome that we are as credulous as children.
There is an alternative. We don’t need to see children as outgrowing the Santa Claus story, but rather we can help them to frame it in a different way. We can acknowledge there isn’t a literal Santa, while explaining that there is a Santa that exists as a metaphorical being – the spirit of giving if you like. And by exchanging presents this is a spirit that we all embody at Christmas. The story of Santa Clause is just as ‘real’ but in a different way to its literal reading and is no less important for that. It is a story that helps us to exercise and develop our faculty of generosity (and serve all the other purposes mentioned at the outset of this essay).
We can use the moment of revelation as an opportunity to help children develop a literacy of myths and stories; to empower them to interpret their symbols, read their metaphorical meanings and to become more skillful navigators of treacherous narrative waters. Instead of saying “you are grown up now, you can leave all that behind”, we could say “you are growing up – you need to know how all this works”.
Once upon a time…
The image (public domain) is of Father Christmas carrying a yule log and is by Alfred Henry Forrester and appeared in The Illustrated London News (source: Wikimedia).