Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: @sun.acs.udel.edu:stabosz@sun.acs.udel.edu (stabosz) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Santa Claus Message-ID: Date: 18 Jan 90 04:25:47 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 47 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article kw1r+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kevin Whitley) writes: >Thinking about it I realized that I tell my children the truth about >everything, within my ability to tell and their ability to understand. >I tell them the truth about people, about the world, about God, about >everything. Why should I make this exception for Santa Claus? I have seven children; we've raised them sort of as two families: the older three and the younger four. With the older three, my husband and I were very careful not to lend creedence to Santa Claus. We didn't exactly sit them down and disabuse them of the notion that Santa was real, but we never played him up and if he came up in conversation around Christmas time, we were very noncommital or said things like, "Gee, I don't know if Santa Claus is real." Our Christmases were still fun, and I didn't think they were missing anything. Still, some of our fellow Catholics thought we were being extreme. (I myself had been sort of terrified of Santa when I was a child; one Christmas my sister and I were afraid to come out of our rooms to go to the bathroom because we were afraid we might run into him and he'd take all the presents away. So I had no fond memories of Santa to contend with.) With the younger four, we've mellowed. The older kids get a kick out of playing up Santa to their little brothers and sisters, and we let them. We still don't do it ourselves, but I have enjoyed seeing them get all excited at the prospect of Santa coming. I don't know why it used to worry me and now it doesn't. I still find that communicating my own strong faith in God to my children is as difficult a task as ever. I bend over backwards not to teach them warped ideas, since I thought that a lot of what I was taught when I was young was warped. Consequently I probably err on the side of using less language about God to them than I should. But I don't think Santa Claus is going to matter much to them one way or another. It is kind of a rite of passage of older childhood to find out that Santa is not real. In some ways this parallels the experience that many adolescents go through, when they "find out" (from the world, from their friends) that God is not real. But the difference is, nobody ever tries to counter their knowledge that Santa is not real: the entire adult world is agreed upon his non-existence. With God, the doubting/agnostic/atheist child or adolescent encounters the same division of belief that any adult encounters. There's no agreement, and the complex of faith goes on. Besides, God IS real: reality and truth resonate in children as well as in adults, at some level. Didn't you always really know that Santa Claus wasn't real? And wasn't it a confirmation of your deepest knowledge, when you found out he wasn't real? -- Rae D. Stabosz University of Delaware