If You Don’t Let Your Kids Believe In Santa, You May Be A Jacobin

A growing number of parents are opting to exclude Santa Claus in children’s Christmas celebrations.

These people fear that convincing children of such a fantastical story and later revealing that it is, in a literal sense, false, will undermine trust between parents and children, cause children to doubt their faith, or even result in childhood trauma.

Of course, there are still plenty of people who hold that Santa Claus is a valuable part of an innocent, imaginative childhood. But the anti-Santa camp seemed especially vocal this year, particularly among religious conservatives.

Those people may be shocked to hear that they are on the same side as the radicals who perpetrated the French Revolution.

Consider the revolutionary: one who believes that individual reason is supreme, that tradition is questionable at best, and that beauty, mystique, and ceremony have no place in a rational society.

During the French Revolution, these radicals spurned their nation’s political, religious, and cultural history as impediments to man’s liberty. They tried to eradicate French Catholicism, abolished France’s ancient regional borders, and even created a new calendar. Devoted to their own individual “Reason,” they disregarded all ancestral wisdom and attempted to create a new France. Unfortunately, these cool, rational, dispassionate men succeeded only in unleashing decades of brutal war first upon France and then upon the rest of Europe.

How does Santa Claus fit into this? It’s all in the ideology. Many Santa objectors reduce a familial, cultural, and (if properly understood) religious symbol to a “lie.” In so doing, they implicitly align themselves with the rationalistic French philosophes and their Marxist successors, who held that truth must be observable, quantifiable, and physical. No poetic beauty, no metaphors, no affinity for man’s soul.

On the other hand, we have the Claus partisans. Like the great Irish statesman and opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, they recognize the power of tradition, reverence, and beauty to shape a society. They recognize that man is spirit, not just intellect, and that to reduce him to his intellect is to dehumanize him. They recognize, in Burke’s words, that if “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off” and “the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination…are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion,” man will be reduced to a barbarian. Like all good conservatives, these Claus partisans recognize that human beings are passionate creatures who need to be trained, not only in their reason but in their affections, to be virtuous.

In a certain sense, those who object to Santa Claus are right: the historical Saint Nicholas notwithstanding, Santa isn’t real.

But nor are characters in poetry, folklore, or literature “real.” However, as Russell Kirk wrote in his masterpiece The Conservative Mind, “great myths are true in essence, however fanciful in detail.” G.K. Chesterton, too, was fond of arguing that fairy tales are, in a sense, truer than bald facts. They instill in children a sense of wonder, an appreciation for miracles, and a firm sense of morality.

The Santa Claus story is true in its essence of gratitude, wonder, and joy in the miraculous. It is merely presented to small children in an allegorical way, which they can understand. It was this manner of oral tradition and mythmaking that held together the societies of Ancient Greece and Rome and laid the foundation for Western culture. We would abandon it at our peril.

In this sense, is it not insulting to our children to think that they are capable of understanding only the most literal, mathematical truths? Is it not far-fetched to imagine that a fairytale, lovingly passed on from generation to generation, will undermine a parent-child relationship?

Not all Santa objectors are morally deficient successors of the Jacobins. Some parents believe that if they reveal the Santa secret to their children, the children will no longer trust what they have learned about Christ. And indeed, if Santa has managed to supersede discussions about Jesus in a Christian household, it may be best to discontinue the tradition.

But this is not an inevitability. If Santa is a fun addition for a few weeks every year, and Jesus is the center of family life throughout the year, there shouldn’t be any confusion between them.

Emily Claire Boulet is a student at the University of Dallas.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.