The truth about Santa.

The other night my friend Nicole commented on what I had written that she raised her girls believing in Santa.  She offered it up as something of a challenge, because she knows my boys were raised to believe that Santa is not real.  So here is the cold, hard unvarnished truth about Santa.  It does not bother me for other families to believe in him.

I grew up believing in Santa, and left on my own, in all likelihood I probably would have done Santa with my boys.  However, Kat was raised differently than I was.  Her family didn’t do Santa, for all the right reasons. 

When Kat and I were newlyweds the whole ‘do we have a tree or not’ sort of eclipsed the Santa issue for us.  I have written how Kat’s sister raised her daughter Elisa Gail to know the truth about Santa, and failed because her mother in law told Elisa that Santa was real, and then showered Elisa in Santa presents every single year.  How do you argue with a Granny like that?

So since I sort of won the tree issue, I compromised with Kat and we didn’t tell Paul about Santa.  The first year we really had issues was 2001, when Paul was 3 and Matthew was a newborn.  That was mostly because Paul didn’t trust strangers, and he was certain Santa was a stranger, and a nosy one at that.  What business is it of Santa’s what Paul wants for Christmas?  Combine that with his big brother protectiveness, (NO, Santa can NOT give my baby brother a gift, that is a brothers job!) and Matthew grew up without much temptation to believe.

We had a few rocky years where Matthew was convinced it was lying if he let other people believe in Santa, but we have recovered from that.  With minimal scaring to the adults involved. (Read about it here).  Which brings me to my point, I am ok with other people telling their kids about Santa and believing in that, provided you are ok with me telling my boys otherwise.

It may be that I am like the atheist who thinks he might be wrong about God.  The arguments with true believers make me uncomfortable.  And that my friends, is the truth.