My eleven year-old daughter still believes in Santa!
She has an iPhone. She wants to get a Facebook account. She’s asking me when she can wear makeup… and she still believes in Santa!
I really wasn’t expecting to be doing this again this year — or last year. Her brother had already figured it out by the time he was ten. In fact, I started dropping hints this year, asking her if her friends still believed in Santa.
Her response was: if it was really just the parents doing this, generation after generation, how could that many people possibly keep that big a secret? So he has to be real. And if she still believes, even at this age, even with so many other kids her age telling her he isn’t real, I can only wonder if believing in Santa does fill some kind of important need for her.
Also, to be fair, my daughter is convinced that she has actually met the real Santa – twice! And if I didn’t know any better, I would have thought so too. You see, when we lived in Texas, our HOA hired a Santa to go visit around our neighborhood before Christmas. Well let me tell you! This guy was six foot two, had a real round belly, twinkly blue eyes and a for real huge, snowy white beard! He was awesome! The kids didn’t even ask why he got into an SUV and drove off afterwards (I guess it was better than riding his Harley. I did see him another time out of costume.)
And I know that I grew up with the Santa tradition too, even though my parents did not believe in mainstream religion. But teaching me to believe in a legend about a magical being that somehow came out of the Catholic Saint Nicholas merging with the white-bearded Odin of ancient Yule celebrations, and then further embellished by a confluence of European traditions mixing together in the US (and possibly added to by clever marketing campaigns by the Coca-Cola Company), well, that was totally acceptable!
So it makes me wonder, do we as parents need our children to believe in Santa as much as they need to believe in him? Why else would we have worked so hard at it? I remember doing a lot of artful explaining over the years.
“How does Santa get down the chimney? How does he make it all around the world in one night? How does he get all the presents in his sleigh?”
“Ah, that’s easy. Magic, magic, magic!”
Maybe that’s the real reason why. Who doesn’t need a little magic sometimes?
Happy Holidays!!!
