Just yesterday me and my girlfriend were talking about this exactly. You made everything so clear man, I feel like an idiot for not seeing this before. Thanks so much! Happy New Year too!
This is the rare take that understands myth without infantilizing it. Santa isn’t a fact claim. He’s a practice. A pattern you step into, not a coordinate you verify with Google Maps. Treating that as a “lie” says more about modern materialist anxiety than about children. Belief here isn’t delusion. It’s participation. And yeah, that should make adults a little uncomfortable. It means we’re already living off things we didn’t personally invent but are still very real.
This is exactly my view on Santa. I almost wrote the same thing a week ago after reading all the "I won't like to my kid, Santa is evil" nonsense. Excellent piece.
I remember my daughter crying in Germany when she found out “Santa Claus is not real”. At the time, I felt deeply sad in my own heart that he “wasn’t real”. It was a sense of emptiness of the universe, an existential aloneness.
I have learned since then that Santa is very real, and that he must be invoked and brought to life in the Spirit of Christmas.
Such a great essay, my fav part: “If I told you that I know my wife loves me in my heart and pointed to my chest, would you try to convince me that my brain cells are actually in my head? Or would you just know that what I’m saying is truer than any facts about anatomy and that probably “symbolism” around the heart is so deep in the human psyche as to mean a multitude of things we can’t quite bring words to bear on but we know by intuition is more meaningful than a technical definition could ever be?”
Fun fact: belief is an instrument to do things; I loathe the silly definition of belief whereby we reduce it to literal belief. Belief comes from Middle English bileve / beleve, which in turn comes from Old English belȳfan, meaning “to hold dear, to trust, to have confidence in.” To believe originally meant to love something enough to trust it. What we now call “literal belief” (accepting a statement as fact) is a later, narrowed meaning. The older sense is closer to faith, loyalty, and trust, not evidence-based certainty. Even in Latin: Originally, credere / meant trust, commitment, entrusting oneself, giving one’s heart, rather than mentally assenting to a claim.
Anyone who gives the gifts they were meant to give has embodied the Santa spirit with integrity. So I am witness to the fact of your becoming Santa. The heart of that generosity beats here on your page and in all the rest of what you write.
I loved this! My ten year old wants me to tell him this year whether he is real or not, and my thoughts ran very parallel to yours and Miracle on 34th Street. :)
When I was parenting my eldest, and a much younger mom, I was more anti-Santa because the commercialism and surveillance state the cultural paradigm put forth (Elf on the Shelf wasn't a thing yet as far as I knew, THAT would have put me into a total tizzy) but I was, and remain, pro magic, myth, shared reality/fantasy. As long as we believe he's real, he's real- not as a lie, but as a piece of magic and spirit. By the time my younger two learned "the truth" they were also old enough to be interested in other traditions and they all went through a bit of an existential whollop, but it was *discussed* with philosophical rigor, not some vapid nihilistic critique of the human spirit but rather an invitation to animism and whatever magic they wanted to conjure and bring into our family traditions.
Learning that everything is "made up" and we get to create our realities is the ultimate anti-consumer move come to find out. Finding the sweet spot between the imposed cynical "real world truth" and holding on to the magic of festivity is where I tend the hearth of our mythos. And there's stockings, and some purchased gifts and way more shared experiences, silliness, sweets, candles and embrace of hunkering down to be, to reflect and to imagine the next turn of the wheel; greasing our gears for spring and beyond.
Thanks for this essay..I needed to know others think along these wavy lines ✨
You can literally go to North Pole, Alaska where they “are become Santa” with gusto. You can also mail them an envelop with a self addressed envelop with a letter back to your kids inside, and they post mark it and turn it around for you. Their mayor legally changed his name to Santa Claus.
Perfectly encapsulates my thoughts. The best I’ve ever come to expressing the sentiment is to point out that the North Pole sits on the border of our world and fairyland, and Santa’s village lies on the side of the fae folk, and anyone who would say Santa is not real might as well go trampling through fairy rings to show that fairies don’t exist, but those of us who have read our fairy stories know a fairy ring doesn’t always take you to fairyland and is even less likely to do so under coercion.
This is probably the truest thing I've ever heard about Santa Claus.
Just yesterday me and my girlfriend were talking about this exactly. You made everything so clear man, I feel like an idiot for not seeing this before. Thanks so much! Happy New Year too!
This is the rare take that understands myth without infantilizing it. Santa isn’t a fact claim. He’s a practice. A pattern you step into, not a coordinate you verify with Google Maps. Treating that as a “lie” says more about modern materialist anxiety than about children. Belief here isn’t delusion. It’s participation. And yeah, that should make adults a little uncomfortable. It means we’re already living off things we didn’t personally invent but are still very real.
This is exactly my view on Santa. I almost wrote the same thing a week ago after reading all the "I won't like to my kid, Santa is evil" nonsense. Excellent piece.
Terry Pratchett would have agreed with you ❤️ it is his The Hogfather that really made me understand this
I remember my daughter crying in Germany when she found out “Santa Claus is not real”. At the time, I felt deeply sad in my own heart that he “wasn’t real”. It was a sense of emptiness of the universe, an existential aloneness.
I have learned since then that Santa is very real, and that he must be invoked and brought to life in the Spirit of Christmas.
Great article!
Such a great essay, my fav part: “If I told you that I know my wife loves me in my heart and pointed to my chest, would you try to convince me that my brain cells are actually in my head? Or would you just know that what I’m saying is truer than any facts about anatomy and that probably “symbolism” around the heart is so deep in the human psyche as to mean a multitude of things we can’t quite bring words to bear on but we know by intuition is more meaningful than a technical definition could ever be?”
Fun fact: belief is an instrument to do things; I loathe the silly definition of belief whereby we reduce it to literal belief. Belief comes from Middle English bileve / beleve, which in turn comes from Old English belȳfan, meaning “to hold dear, to trust, to have confidence in.” To believe originally meant to love something enough to trust it. What we now call “literal belief” (accepting a statement as fact) is a later, narrowed meaning. The older sense is closer to faith, loyalty, and trust, not evidence-based certainty. Even in Latin: Originally, credere / meant trust, commitment, entrusting oneself, giving one’s heart, rather than mentally assenting to a claim.
Well said. Frustratingly difficult to talk about in modern parlance.
Pageau ftw
This is what I’ve been trying to explain for years
Anyone who gives the gifts they were meant to give has embodied the Santa spirit with integrity. So I am witness to the fact of your becoming Santa. The heart of that generosity beats here on your page and in all the rest of what you write.
You are a gift to the world my brother
I loved this! My ten year old wants me to tell him this year whether he is real or not, and my thoughts ran very parallel to yours and Miracle on 34th Street. :)
When I was parenting my eldest, and a much younger mom, I was more anti-Santa because the commercialism and surveillance state the cultural paradigm put forth (Elf on the Shelf wasn't a thing yet as far as I knew, THAT would have put me into a total tizzy) but I was, and remain, pro magic, myth, shared reality/fantasy. As long as we believe he's real, he's real- not as a lie, but as a piece of magic and spirit. By the time my younger two learned "the truth" they were also old enough to be interested in other traditions and they all went through a bit of an existential whollop, but it was *discussed* with philosophical rigor, not some vapid nihilistic critique of the human spirit but rather an invitation to animism and whatever magic they wanted to conjure and bring into our family traditions.
Learning that everything is "made up" and we get to create our realities is the ultimate anti-consumer move come to find out. Finding the sweet spot between the imposed cynical "real world truth" and holding on to the magic of festivity is where I tend the hearth of our mythos. And there's stockings, and some purchased gifts and way more shared experiences, silliness, sweets, candles and embrace of hunkering down to be, to reflect and to imagine the next turn of the wheel; greasing our gears for spring and beyond.
Thanks for this essay..I needed to know others think along these wavy lines ✨
https://substack.com/@bnonn/note/c-184326443?r=7gp0g&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
“But if I literally went to the North Pole…”
You can literally go to North Pole, Alaska where they “are become Santa” with gusto. You can also mail them an envelop with a self addressed envelop with a letter back to your kids inside, and they post mark it and turn it around for you. Their mayor legally changed his name to Santa Claus.
Perfectly encapsulates my thoughts. The best I’ve ever come to expressing the sentiment is to point out that the North Pole sits on the border of our world and fairyland, and Santa’s village lies on the side of the fae folk, and anyone who would say Santa is not real might as well go trampling through fairy rings to show that fairies don’t exist, but those of us who have read our fairy stories know a fairy ring doesn’t always take you to fairyland and is even less likely to do so under coercion.