PARENTING
Why Kids Need To Believe In Santa Claus
Young children deserve the precious, all-too-brief gift of magical thinking
What if, as an adult starting to read this essay, a genie were to come out of nowhere to grant you not a wish, but a blessing: to have one magical night a year.
A night — and the morning following it — that you knew would be so wonderful that you would positively quiver in anticipation for weeks beforehand, your head filled with the most fantastic imagery, the air filled with the most adored sounds, and your entire world awash with feelings of excitement and promise. A night so special that everyone around you would prepare for it and celebrate the very idea of it, again for weeks ahead of time, with decorations, songs, and all sorts of traditions and customs handed down for generations. What a thought.
Well, that is exactly the special once-a-year occasion that young children (well, let’s be honest, a good number of lucky young children in the West) enjoy, for a few years. The arrival, sometime between the evening of Dec. 24th and the morning of Dec. 25th, of Santa Claus.
But belief in Santa Claus is more than just a feature of early childhood innocence. It is, to every effect, a multi-dimensional and highly positive stage of young children’s lives, with numerous long-lasting benefits.
Quite apart from the overall meaning and celebration of Christmas, with its attendant Christian-based significance and manifestations, and that holiday’s secular agenda for adults — with its office Christmas parties, the conundrum of adult-to-adult gift giving, and those few precious days off from work — the concept of Santa Claus constitutes what we should consider a sacrosanct right of children. A right so valuable to their wellbeing that it should be every parent’s inviolable duty to build it up and prolong it as long as feasible.
That we should want to protect the innocence of childhood for as long as possible is a given, despite that mission becoming increasingly difficult in the face of too-easy access to unfiltered online content intended for adults. But belief in Santa Claus is more than just a feature of early childhood innocence. It is, to every effect, a multi-dimensional and highly positive stage of young children’s lives, with numerous long-lasting benefits. It helps in their development at a crucial time in their lives, and enriches those lives culturally, morally, socially and psychologically.
The bliss of happy anticipation
As adults, we realize that anticipating something is often even better than the satisfaction or happiness we feel when when we finally receive or attain it. Yet the most formative experience of anticipation we will ever have, at an age when its impact is at its most powerful on our psyche, is that of the Night Before Christmas.
In a world increasingly dominated by digital experiences and rational explanations, belief in Santa Claus fosters a sense of wonder about the world, and creates a space for magical thinking.
It’s not just about the gifts to be opened the following morning. From the favorite Christmas films and cartoons watched in the days beforehand, to the Christmas songs and carols played and replayed, the tree decorated, the special cookies baked, the wreaths and stockings hung, right up to the injunction to go to bed after having left cookies and a glass of milk for Santa and a carrot or two for his reindeer: everything combines to create a positive and happy anticipatory fantasyland that is openly dedicated to children, and that makes them the center of existence for a brief moment. For young children, that fantasyland revolves around a single figure: Santa Claus.
The developmental dimension
Developmentally, believing in Santa Claus is a powerful stimulant to a child’s imagination, which is a critical component of cognitive development. Constructing a mental image of Santa’s workshop at the North Pole, his reindeer, and the epic gift delivery journey on Christmas Eve starts children off in their ability to visualize things they cannot actually see, and to project stories as wondrous mental universes.
Even more importantly, believing that a red-suited kindly old man can deliver presents in a reindeer-pulled sled to the world’s children over the course of a single night instills in a child a wonderful capability to think that anything is possible. That capability, refined with time as an adult, is what can fuel a person’s ambition, ingenuity, and willingness to challenge conventions. And bring into being a belief in the infinite power of storytelling.
The importance of magical thinking
In a world increasingly dominated by digital experiences and rational explanations, belief in Santa Claus fosters a sense of wonder about the world, and creates a space for magical thinking.
By “magical thinking” what I mean is not credulousness with regards to fairy tales, or an inability to relate to concrete facts, but the ability to think and abstract beyond them. Thinking in transcendent terms helps develop children’s cognitive flexibility — the important ability to think in different frameworks. Something they will need more and more as adults in a world in which the distinction between the real and the digitally engineered is becoming ever harder to hang on to.
Unfortunately, not every childhood is a happy one. Importantly for those unlucky children growing up in difficult circumstances — in poverty or in distressed families or disadvantaged in other ways — belief in Santa Claus can offer psychological comfort, providing a respite from everyday reality and a horizon of hope at a time, in many parts of the world, of seasonal cold and darkness. The anticipation of Santa’s visit, if fostered by parents or other caregivers, creates joy and excitement, which can be a positive emotional anchor for young children during challenging times.
The moral dimension
Belief in Santa Claus also serves as an accessible moral framework for young children. The core narrative — that good behavior is rewarded and poor behavior is not — provides a straightforward introduction to ethical reasoning.
And if parents refrain from indulging their children by having every last items on the child’s letter to Santa appear gift-wrapped under the tree on the morning of the 25th, this can also serve as a life lesson that simply asking for something, regardless of good behavior, does not automatically result in getting the desired item. An introduction to happy serendipity in life can furthermore be created by gifting children things that they didn’t ask for, but are pleasantly surprised to receive and perhaps didn’t even know existed.
Santa’s perceived act of giving without expecting anything in return is, among other things, a moral lesson that absolute kindness and generosity can exist beyond that expressed by one’s parents. That awareness, in turn, constitutes an important mental reserve that will keep children from seeing the world too cynically as they grow up and experience, on occasion, harsher interpersonal realities.
Family and culture
Writing letters to Santa or leaving out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve is a way that children can participate — as protagonists for once — in family rituals that create cherished memories. And those happy memories will motivate those children, as adults, to uphold those traditions and repeat those rituals with their own children, thus perpetuating the positive effects of childhood belief in Santa Claus across generations.
Even when older children no longer believe in Santa Claus, the tradition of gift giving at Christmas can be maintained and even widened to children starting themselves to give presents — however modest or improvised, given their limited means — to parents and siblings. The once-believed altruistic one-way generosity of Santa Claus thus evolves into a more holistic form of generosity and thoughtfulness within the family, further solidifying parent-child and sibling bonds.
In many children, the love they experienced through their parents’ perpetuation of the myth of Santa Claus is returned in the form of a pretend continuation of that belief.
(One of my clearest memories of Christmas at age 12 was the frantic shop-to-shop search, together with my younger brother, for something to give to our parents as a present. The search concluded, with 30 minutes to spare before the stores in town closed for the holiday, with the purchase of a battery-operated handheld breadcrumb-sweeping gadget designed to be employed on tablecloths after meals. My mother’s performance of delight at the unwrapping of this totally absurd and unneeded contraption was worthy of an Oscar).
In societal terms, common childhood experiences, beliefs and traditions help children to feel part of a greater whole, which in term instils a sense of collective belonging and security. The cherished cultural narrative of Santa Claus, as the most child-focused part of the wider experience and celebration of Christmas (one with no complications represented by diverse religious beliefs), points all children to a central external figure and a common promise they can discuss with their peers, siblings and friendly adults. It thus creates a powerful bonding experience and a sense of shared excitement in an atmosphere of positivity and festivity.
Transition from belief
As we have all experienced — in ourselves as well as with our own older offspring— there comes a point at which children inevitably start to question the Santa Claus narrative, sharing those doubts (or certainties as to the truth behind the narrative) with other children and challenging parents to come clean.
Given everything stated above, the puncturing of that bubble should be traumatic for children. Yet, by and large, this revelation and its acceptance come gently and naturally, and with no real ill effects. In many children, the love they experienced through their parents’ perpetuation of the myth of Santa Claus is returned in the form of a pretend continuation of that belief. It is a pretence meant, incredibly, to shield those parents from sadness at their children no longer believing: a remarkably mature form of empathetic sensitivity.
Children, at this stage and pretty much universally, realize that their parents transmitted the myth of Santa Claus and kept it alive as long as they could not to deceive or trick them, but rather to delight them and fill their world with magic and wonder. That realization enhances the love and trust they feel for their parents, and is a rite of passage to a stage of childhood more aware of the realities and complexities of the adult world, yet still secure in the knowlege that their parents were, and continue to be, keen to protect them from it.
The personal angle
The fact that I am writing this today, several decades after my own belief-in-Santa years, attests to the lasting impact those formative years and that tradition have had on me. My sole surviving artifact from those times is a large picture book of The Night Before Christmas (pictured as the main illustration here below the title), the verses of which I knew by heart — and still do, despite never having heard them read to me since.
With my own children, in a more recent era in which forces conspired to betray the myth at an earlier age than I would have liked, I did my best to keep the illusion going as long as I could. As their doubts grew, my staging of the fantasy grew ever more elaborate, extending, towards the end, to the creation of slightly glittering boot footprints in soot leading from the fireplace to the pile of presents under the tree, and back.
How I long for the days that they truly believed. And for that very special night. When the children were nestled all snug in their beds, and visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.
Parents, do everything you can to keep this sacred tradition, this magical blessing, alive for your little loved ones. No matter what presents they wish for, believing in Santa Claus — for a while at least — is the greatest gift you could possibly give them.
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!
