“My moma [sic] said the chimney was blocked.” Thus reads the letter from a 10-year-old girl in Wisconsin who was told by her mother that Santa Claus would not be dropping off gifts that year. The real reason? The Great Depression, a decade-long economic downturn that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash. The Roaring Twenties gave way to bleakness, and as Jack Hogdson reports in hisĚýĚýon the politicization of Father Christmas during the depression, “many children’s faith in Santa Claus ended well before adults wanted it to.”Ěý
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The transition between believing in Santa and being told he was never realĚýhas become a rite of passage. We go through it ourselves and, with some exceptions, we want our children to experience the same. But there are Ebenezer Scrooges among us who argue that this pretense is ultimately harmful. Infamously—in academic circles, anyway—Renzo Sereno wrote in a 1951ĚýĚýpublished in the journalĚýPsychiatryĚýthat “Santa Claus is a harrowing experience,”Ěýharrowing!Ěý“to which children are submitted for reasons which are quite confused and unclear to the adults.” Later, he writes—and I had to double-check because his conception of Christmas seemed alien to me—that children experience “acute misery,” only relieved once Santa is out of the picture. “Santa—not unlike an ogre or a warlock […]—is away for another year. The constant feeling of being swindled, or cheated, or lied to by the parents is finally abated.” It may be too late, but I hope Sereno finally saw a therapist about this.
Here and there, in the very narrow literature on the Santa Claus myth, I read of researchers who eventually found out that some people had a really bad time—not when they believed in Santa, like Sereno, butĚýwhen theyĚýlearned that Santa had been their parents all along. These scientists thought everyone let go of that belief healthily; turns out, some were scarred by it.
So, what can research teach us about how children deal with the great Santa lie? And should we even be lying to children about the way in which gifts end up finding themselves at the foot of our Christmas trees?
Doubt arises between 7 and 9
Children are exposed to a number of figures, real and imaginary, and must organize them in a sort of pantheon inside their head. Some, like Princess Elsa from the Disney movieĚýFrozen, are usually known to be fictional by the child; others, like dragons and aliens, are more ambiguous; and then we get the Easter bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus, which academics have calledĚýĚýThese cultural figures have interesting properties. Elsa, a fictional figure, is typically presented to the child as coming out of a bit of storytelling, but Santa, a cultural figure, is introduced as real. And unlike mythical unicorns, there are very specific cultural and social norms wrapped up in the Santa story. Santa is at the mall. He asks you if you’ve been naughty or nice. He wants to know what you desire. On Christmas Eve, he drops off gifts and partakes in the cookies and milk left for him. These rules and rituals are important and they distinguish him from other made-up characters.
On average, a child will stop believing in Santa Claus somewhere between the ages of 7 and 9. AĚýĚýconducted in the late 1970s in a Texan university town found that belief in Santa went from 85% among four-year-olds to 65% among six-year-olds to 25% among eight-year-olds; belief in the Tooth Fairy meanwhile, increased dramatically between the ages of 4 and 6. Four-year-olds, it turns out, don’t usually know about the Fairy. They need to lose a tooth first, which starts happening aroundĚý.
AĚýĚýconducted online in the United States and published last year reported that children start to doubt the existence of Santa Claus close to seven years of age, although the full range was between three and a half years andĚýeleven and a half.ĚýDoubt often came about from multiple avenues: asking the people around them, witnessing something incongruous, and even sometimes through logical reasoning. One child who was interviewed for thisĚýĚýthat they and their cousins put their heads together to try to prove or disprove the existence of Santa by pouring flour at the foot of the chimney to catch footprints. The parents worked around the trap, but the kids eventually spotted them filling the stockings late at night. Another child wrote a letter to Santa signed with their nickname, but Santa (AKA mom) addressed them back with their full name; yet another couldn’t figure out how Father Christmas would come down the chimney given that their house had none.
Once the illusion was broken, kids did not always react well. A third of children told the researchers they had felt sad, while one in six said they had been angry. Some of these emotional reactions lasted for weeks, sometimes up to a year. One child tells a particularly heartbreaking story of how they felt after their mom revealed that Santa was made up: they remember “feeling devastated to feel like there really was no magic anywhere.” Their mom subsequently changed her stance on making children believe in imaginary characters.
These testimonials would certainly rejoice folks who have historically argued that making children believe in Santa Claus is a net negative. They have insisted that the lie is unjustified, encouraging credulity in tomorrow’s citizens while potentially damaging the trust they have in their parents. Revisiting the Great Depression, I learned of anti-Christmas gatherings that were held by affiliates of the Communist Party in the United States, whereby young children were encouraged toĚýĚýat a man dressed as Kris Kringle, since he had become the personification of capitalism, an economic system which had backfired so spectacularly in 1929.
One argument in favour of lying to children about Santa is that it teaches them critical thinking, like how the aforementioned cousins decided to put their belief to the test and look for evidence. I’m not sure that this argument really holds up to scrutiny, however. AĚýĚýonce made up creatures called surnits, trags, and kimps. They told groups of children about them. One group received a scientific description of them: surnits were collected by scientists. The other group got a much more fantastical explanation, that it’s dragons that actually collect them. That second group believed in fewer of these made-up creatures than the first. They were able to use context clues to determine if a new concept is likely to be real or imaginary. Children don’t believe in Santa because they are credulous and in need of some critical thinking; they believe in him because they are the victim of an elaborate deception.
We go out of our way to maintain the illusion that Santa Claus is real. We plaster his face everywhere, we dress like him, we reserve a mailing address for letters addressed to him, we even track his progress on Christmas Eve using the North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD. This is someĚýTruman Show-level deception!
Santa is fake, but my horoscope is real
If the lesson to the child is that adults lie and that the critical appraisal of claims is necessary as we go through life, I will argue that the Santa myth has been an utter failure. Critical thinking is in short supply. AĚýĚýin 2018 reported that well over half of Americans believe that places can be haunted by spirits, while a quarter—a quarter!—think that some people can move objects with their minds. Ten thousand undergraduate students at the University of Arizona were polled over a 20-year period, andĚýĚýsaid that astrology was “very” or “sort of” scientific. I hate to break it to them, but astrology isĚýwithout a doubtĚýa pseudoscience. Children move on from the Santa myth, but most continue to embrace astrology for the rest of their lives.
Far from me, though, to end by saying “Bah! Humbug!”ĚýĚýYes, some children have a hard time coming to terms with the mundane reality that Santa Claus is a florid fraud, but most do not. In that recent survey on Santa beliefs in which a third of children reported sadness upon learning the truth, close to half of the kids actually said they were happy in that moment. They knew they would still get presents, and those that had figured out the deception were proud they were proven right. The researchers wondered if there were any differences between the children who reacted well to the news versus those who reacted poorly. The only one they found is that the latter tended to have parents who said they had done more to promote Santa Claus—a slight difference that deserves to be replicated before we jump to any conclusion about it.
One child interviewed for this survey was asked how they felt when they learned that Santa had been a lie. “Proud that I knew but my younger siblings didn’t,” they said. “I was trusted enough to keep a secret.” They were now in on the conspiracy.
Some children react well; others don’t. New parents should keep this in mind when deciding whether to engage in the Santa Claus myth-making with their own brood. It might all work out in the end, but they shouldn’t be surprised if their child grows up to write a scathing article forĚýPsychiatryĚýin which he confesses that this whole Santa thing had been a “harrowing experience.”
Take-home message:
- On average, children begin questioning the existence of Santa Claus between the ages of 7 and 9
- Some react well to the news while others don’t, and so far we do not know for sure if we can predict how a particular child will respond to finding out the truth
