Every year, I hear of more and more parents ditching Santa. While they all have different reasons, those reasons seem to be variations on a theme. Some religious parents think the holiday should be about God alone- that including Santa detracts from Jesus. Other parents say that they don’t ever want to lie to their children. Some just seem to want the credit for it. As one friend put it:

“Why do so many parents give away the credit and glory of their children’s Christmas presents that they worked hard to be able to buy…to an imaginary obese white man? What subliminal things is this teaching our kids? I’m personally thankful I was able to deconstruct this indoctrination before my kids got too old.”

So why Santa? Because the human psyche was forged from stories, mysticism, imagination, rituals, and fantasy. Since pre-history, our stories and imaginations have shaped and defined us. Our beliefs have dictated our actions as a people, more than our actual abilities. Although I’m not sure why, as human beings, we seem to have a psychological need for stories and rituals and fantasy that we don’t fully understand.

If you’re religious, you could say it’s the first step a child may take on the path of faith. Although a religious person believes God is real and knows that Santa is not, it is precisely that act of imagining, of being open to miracles, of believing in something illogical, improbable, and unexplainable as a child that prepares the mind to be open to miracles as an adult.

If you’re not religious, then you might think of believing in Santa an exercise in emotional processing. As adults, we have psychology and shadow work, religion, taroh, ancestors and dreams, archetypes and ego, signs and omens, superstitions, karma, good luck charms, rituals, chakras, feng shui, energy work- all kinds of stories and rituals and frameworks that we use to try and understand our place in the universe or process our emotions. And Santa is part of that, as are the stories and fables from every culture around the world. Our fairy tales have taught us how to feel.

There’s a great book on this subject called “The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life” by Thomas Moore- he makes the case that we need to believe in a bit of magic (even as adults) to be psychologically healthy.

It’s good for us to believe that something miraculous and happy is possible, even if we can’t understand HOW it’s possible- that’s an allegory for much of life. And when a child discovers that Santa isn’t real, that’s when he’s mature enough to see the allegory for what it is.

But isn’t that lying? No, of course not. Santa is made up because all stories are made up- that doesn’t make it a lie. That black and white thinking- reducing everything to pure fact and logic- is robbing our children of an essential part of being human. As much as we may wish for our emotions to be subject to logic, the facts is that the emotional mind is a shadowy dreamscape, a land all its own, where few things “make sense.”

While all stories are made up, that doesn’t mean the feelings that a story generates in our hearts & minds, or the emotional processing that occurs, aren’t real. It doesn’t mean that the empathy we experienced wasn’t real, or that it doesn’t actually change us. That’s akin to claiming that one shouldn’t read fiction, and should therefore miss out on the emotions that works of fiction release in us, because fiction is also “a lie.” (Sadly, you do see that argument sometimes with memoirs. If folks find out a memoir isn’t accurate, it’s a death knell for the author. But if that memoir had been marketed as fiction all along, it would’ve been fine.)  The value of a story lies in what happens in us from hearing the story, not the accuracy of the story itself. Stories do change us. They fall outside the framework of black & white, truth or lie. Fiction is something else entirely.

Paradoxically, I find folks who deny all fantasy in favor of only logic and fact actually seem a little unhinged. And I find folks who indulge in a bit of fantasy are actually the wisest and healthiest of us all. Cultures that have managed to preserve their stories have a richness and community that I fear the West is beginning to lose.

This principle was illustrated in the novel Watership Down. At one point, the main characters (rabbits) visit a strange warren. They try to tell their traditional stories to the strange rabbits, but the strange rabbits say they no longer need the old stories. The main characters say they will always need the old stories, because the old stories teach them how to survive. But the strange rabbits say that, instead, they need “dignity and the will to accept their fate.” In the end, we learn that the strange rabbits who forgot the old stories are riddled with apathy and have lost the will to live.

The stories are what make us. Without them, we forget who we are. We forget our purpose. We forget how far we’ve come. We forget how to truly live.

So I teach my kids to believe in stories, to believe in Santa and fairies and tomte and elves, because I think it’s part of the human experience, it will make them more resilient, someday it will help them understand art and poetry and joy and sorrow, and because it’s good for their souls. 😉