The Christmas Devil

 

No doubt we all make mistakes as parents. 

The thing I feel worst about is telling my kids that Santa Claus filled their stockings at Christmas.

I probably lost many of you there. You think I’m a grinch.

Deal with it. There is no grinch.

We at least never seriously pretended there was an Easter Bunny or a tooth fairy; that was only pro forma, a joke we all shared. We never restricted what they could read or where they could go online. I remembered too well how psychologically valuable superhero comics were to me as a child, and how some other kids were not allowed comics. I did explain to my son that Santa Claus was really Saint Nicholas. But because he was a saint in heaven, I told him, he could still influence events on earth. That left him with the false impression that St. Nicholas brought the gifts. 

I hope he has forgiven me. I need forgiveness.

To be clear, telling children that Santa brings the gifts is a lie. Telling a lie is always wrong. Telling children this lie deliberately teaches them that lying is not wrong, but clever. It is laughing at them behind their back. It is humiliating them, and trying to establish your own superiority. It is manipulating their emotions. It is despicable.

Moreover, the figure of Santa Claus also looks like a deliberate distraction from the real point of the day; and it shifts the focus from the sacred to the mere acquisition of stuff. Our modern Santa Claus clearly derives in part from the old Lord of Misrule, his red nose from partaking of the wassail bowl, his rotundity from overindulgence.

Wrong lesson altogether; it looks like subversion and acedia.

The Devil says the opposite of the truth: it is precisely these things we claim to be doing “for the children” that most reveal our culture’s hatred for the young.

At the breakfast table this morning, I had a good conversation about death and sex with my sixteen-year-old daughter. She agreed with me that people talk too little of death, because we are afraid of it. She agreed that it is dangerous not to teach children about sex. She agreed that the general bowdlerization of kidlit and fairy tales “to avoid traumatizing children” was harmful. The duty of parents is to raise children to adulthood, not to treat them as pets. They need to learn that wolves eat little girls, you ought not to trespass on a bear’s home, and you should not accept apples from strangers. 

Far worse the newer woke versions, in which ogres are simply misunderstood, wolves are actually vegetarians, fairy godmothers are busybodies, and so forth.

We are positively grooming children for predators of all kinds.

Helicopter parenting, drag queen story hour and genital mutilations are just the latest stages in this progression of hatred towards our children, which has been developing since Victorian times.