👁️🗨️ Happily (Not) Believing in Santa Claus
Last Updated: 3 months, 2 weeks ago
Please don't Lie to your Kids
I am autistic, and like many autistic people, honesty really matters to me.
Deception - more specifically being deceived (though often, too, I think, the process of deceiving others) - is something that tends to wind up hurting people. Badly.
And that hurt is often not subjective, not that that would justify it.
Psychological Abuse, Damage and Trauma
Having betrayal treated as normal and acceptable, or even played off as a joke between adults, can make a child feel unsafe.
Even a well-meaning betrayal itself can be incredibly painful, but betrayal causes far more than momentary emotional distress.
It can be psychologically damaging abuse to be gaslit about reality, as well as destroying one's sense of safety and healthy sense of whom to trust, when that trust is betrayed by those who lied to you.
This is particularly if it was so normal to be lied to starting at a young age and persisting for years.
CPTSD is caused by ongoing trauma, often abuse or neglect, living through an inescapable situation, and most often develops due to abuse that started in childhood. Having your needs, particularly for safety and security, not met as a child, is often the foundation of this trauma.
Even as an adult, the treatment we received as children and things we were lied to about can still be internalised and persist in unexpected ways, such as making us believe that objective realities do not matter if those who claim to be on our side claim that a different reality is what matters, or that abuse from a loved one is normal and justifiable.
What complicates this even further, is we have often forgotten where the origin of our subconscious beliefs from childhood started - we may not remember what early memories planted ideas such as "the people who love you most lie to you protect you, you should trust them regardless" or "you can't expect anyone to tell you the truth" or even "lying to loved ones is normal, everyone does this when they know better than you".
Developmental Damage: Inability to distinguish Reality from Biases or Fantasy
It can also be hard to convey how damaging it can be for people who are taught to believe in things that aren't real at a young age to unlearn this, and to adjust.
It can affect your entire adjustment to adulthood, as well as your ability to navigate through, even your likelihood of survival, in society, when you have been outright discouraged from learning healthy scepticism and are taught to take things at face value, and then to accept betrayal as simply normal and acceptable if it comes from a loved one or an authority.
Deception, Indoctrination and Betrayal
Perhaps my particular experiences of manipulation and control, and the risks I was subjected to through misinformation, and worse disinformation and abuse to control me, highlight where I'm coming from.
Deception was something I had to learn resistance towards, being something I was particularly vulnerable to - at least in the past.
Being raised in a cult by indoctrinated parents didn't help at all. Rather, it hindered and delayed my development of necessary scepticism, until the time I fortunately attended university.
Cult Deprogramming and Healing From Indoctrination
There, I received significant exposure to perspectives, situations and experiences outside of my evangelical echo chamber. But that all is another, longer story.
Unsurprisingly, as a result of this childhood upbringing, I am now in the process of trying to unlearn a lot of the CPTSD responses and defense mechanisms against being lied to and manipulated.
This crippling childhood trauma is not helpful for navigating the world as an adult.
My Parents' Santa Strategy - No Lies, just Playing Pretend
Because honesty - and being able to trust the people I am relying on - is so important to me, something I greatly appreciated about my parents was that they never lied about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
Basically, make-believe Santa (and the easter bunny) was like a game we played.
Any talk about Santa Claus was something I was well aware was something we were just pretending was real, like any other fun game.
We’d still put out Christmas stockings. It wasn’t a secret my mom was buying us presents for them - often the presents would have “love from mom”, “love dad” and “love from [cat’s name or dog's name]” but she'd still be mysterious about it and when I was little I wasn't quite sure how she managed to sneak the stockings away without us noticing sometimes when tucking us in, to fill them later and return them when we fell asleep.
So the whole mystery surrounding Christmas was kind of like when you're watching a stage magician and you know it's a trick somehow, but there's still plenty of suspension of disbelief and you love it.
It still feels magical, but safe and comforting in the boundaries that are there.
If I had kids I wouldn't lie to them about it either, I'd do what my mother did for us as kids, which was still fun, and in my opinion, a more responsible way to treat the topic of Santa Clause, since it didn’t end in an eventual sense of heartbreak, betrayal, and shame at being fooled years later.
I contrast my experience to how upset and bitter my cousin was to discover one Christmas - through an accidental slip-up, as well as becoming more aware as he grew older - that there was no Santa Claus.
Not to mention how awkward and likely humiliating for him this situation was with him being as I recall around age 12, (which was rather old to be believing in Santa in my opinion), a highly self-conscious age particularly for him as the oldest child, with his mother playing along the whole charade every Christmas Eve - leaving out treats for Santa and the reindeer, etc.
Fantasy vs Reality: Lying is not the same as Playing Pretend
Adults tend to think that not truly believing in Santa Claus will ruin the fun, the "magic" of childhood, but kids enjoy playing pretend all the time, and I think we can all agree that knowing that fairy tale characters from our favourite stories or media are make-believe - or that our stuffed plushies and figurines are just that: toys and not living beings - doesn't make them cease to be fun, or precious to us, or loved.
I would argue what isn't fun is not knowing something is made up, but being initially sincerely deceived, and then having the gut-punch realisation that you were lied to for years, only to have to be told the truth, or worse, eventually discover it for yourself, later, and have your entire trust in the person who lied to you shaken.
This is particularly true if they attempt to cover it up when you ask, or play it off as trivial (or laugh at your reactions with the other adults), as the kind of thing that is "ok" to lie about, because they think (or claim to think) that it didn't matter and you had no say in the matter, or because you were "just kids" and it was "just fun".
As mentioned, well-meaning adults in their eagerness to make childhood as real and magical for their kids as possible may forget that kids love playing pretend and yet gain a sense of stability from adults being the ones to assert what is real and safe and be a trustworthy source on where the boundaries are, while kids are still figuring out for themselves (and hopefully being encouraged regarding) how to develop healthy skepticism and to set healthy boundaries.
So many things are fun in fantasy that are not so fun in reality.
Fantasy vs Reality 2: Adults need Self-Awareness about Why they Lie to Kids
I think sometimes parents need to ask themselves whether they’re truly doing what they think is best for their kids, or are actually living vicariously through them, re-living their childhood the way they remember through rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, or else living it the way they wish it had been.
Ironically, even adults can struggle to have the awareness to distinguish whether they want something in fantasy or in reality.
Side Note: Please Don't Compare Against My Parents
To be honest, this article makes my relationship with my parents sound idyllic, and I want to be clear (because people will often compare their lives to other people's lives), that, as you will notice from some of my other writings, they were actually very psychologically abusive performative parents. In fact, we don't have a relationship anymore. In reality, while they would spoil us with gifts on our birthdays and for Christmas, this was later weaponized against us as a way of guilting us, as a way to "prove" actions of "love" (similarly to sending us to school and not letting us go hungry), while bypassing other parental responsibilities and used to justify being outright abusive.
For this reason, even now as an adult, I actually as a rule genuinely dislike receiving gifts from people for my birthday or Christmas, due to the associations with them being insincere, either given out or guilt or to later provoke guilt, and a way of keeping up appearances, which makes customary gift-giving in a relationship feel strained and inauthentic to me.
However, how we treated the Santa Clause tradition was separate to this. Additionally, a lot of the negative associations (guilt tripping, etc) happened and accumulated later than the youngest age I am talking about, with the onset of parentification that often is assigned to oldest (particularly AFAB) children in conservative cultures.
Back then, before the accumulated abuse and the connection with gifting, we did love and look forward to Christmas. While there is much about my parents’ bigoted, gaslighting and generally abusive parenting style I really would steer clear from emulating at all costs, in being truthful with us about Santa Claus from the beginning was one way at least that they got Christmas and trust relationships right.
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