“Tell me the truth, mommy”
I’ve always been very torn over the “Santa Claus” issue. On the one hand, I don’t want to lie to my kids. On the other hand, I don’t want to be one of those parents that seem to be “no fun”, and completely literal. DH leans more to the “no lying, just tell them the stark truth” side, as well. The uneasy compromise we’ve reached (very Unitarian of me, of course) is to tell the story as “some people say that …”, and I’ve always added “I like to think of Santa as the Spirit of Winter”. It’s just lousy lying, actually, but as long as the kids have been young they aren’t thinking too critically, and it lets the fun and wonder of early childhood coexist with our rationalist parenting.
Carbon is starting to think much more critically, however, and this morning I was faced with the point where I couldn’t tell a bald-faced lie. He just lost his first tooth last week, and there was the visit from the tooth fairy.
This morning, as we were driving, he asked “mommy, did you put the money under my pillow?”, and when I hesitated, he said, very sternly “tell me the truth, mommy”.
Well, there you have it. I always said, no lying if asked directly. So I confessed, that yes, I put the money under his pillow. I asked him why he had thought it was me. His answer – he knew that fairies are “mythological creatures” and since the tooth fairy is a fairy, it must be mythological also. He did allow, that if there is a fairy land somewhere, that there could be a tooth fairy in fairyland.
I remember the original conversation, probably a year ago, that started him on his list of “mythological creatures”. He was afraid of vampires, and his dad told him there was nothing to worry about, because they are just “mythological creatures”.
But he doesn’t seem to be putting 2 and 2 together and figuring out that if mommy is just pretending to be the tooth fairy, she might also be the Easter bunny and Santa Claus. I’m sure it’s just a matter of a bit more time.
We’ve always be realists when it comes to Santa and the gang, too. I always frame it as a “special kind of pretend”.
We also use the frame of pretend. We call it “the Santa game,” the “Easter Bunny game,” etc. The kids know it is us, ’cause we always remind them, but then we get really into the game part…even leaving carrots out for the bunny and saying, “Oh, what did Santa bring you?” So far it doesn’t seem *too* confusing for them.
Sylvia seems confused by the whole thing to some extent. There’s the family assumption that we are building that fantasy, so they ask her what Santa or the Easter Bunny brought. That confuses her, so she asks every now and again who gave her the things in her stocking or basket. I just tell her it was me. Maybe that’s no fun, maybe it’s too literal, but I’m not interested in constructing a myth like that when there are so many other magical traditions that aren’t lies. I’m functionally an atheist, though, and a lot of people would say I’m doing something terrible to my kids by, say, not telling them that their deceased grandparents are in heaven.
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