Hey adults, good on us for this whole Santa thing

A tiny, imperfect example of collective care that's still worth celebrating

Ok, ok, ok. Let’s begin with the caveats and warnings.

First off, if you are seven years old you should not be reading this essay. You should be busy hanging up your stockings by the chimney (with care!). Also, why are you reading newsletters anyway? You have an entire life ahead of you. There will be so many Words On The Internet for you to read when you become adults. Some will make you very angry. Others will validate your opinion. But they will be there, in good time. So to you, the precocious seven-year-old reading this newsletter: skedaddle, please, off to you your one wild and precious pre-adolescent life.

Now with that matter behind us, here’s some caveats for the adults still with us. There are so many critiques you could make of Santa Claus as an object of collective societal obsession. There is the capitalism of it all, of course, to say nothing of the mandatory Christianity and the gendered household labor gap. I deliberately didn’t research the history of the Santa Claus myth, because I’m sure if I did I’d find something unsavory, racist and weird. Does Santa Claus have anything to do with that whole Dutch blackface deal? I’m not going to find out!

That’s all to say, if you have a moral objection to Santa Claus, I bet that I agree with you. You are very correct and I am sorry.

AND ALSO…

I wasn’t planning on writing an essay today, but my children are currently occupied and I found myself temporarily between rounds of laundry and dishes and present-wrapping. It was a rare pre-holiday moment, where even though there were more tasks to complete, none were pressing. And in that moment, I was struck by an overwhelming (positive!) emotion that felt like it would be better shared than kept to myself.

I was pleased with us, is the thing. By “us” I mean the royal us– adults, generally, and adults in the United States of America specifically. I find it useful to pay attention to moments like this, where I’m grateful for some form of collectively decent behavior, both because those are few and far between and because we’re not going to build a more altruistic world if we don’t track and build off of them.

I am talking about Santa Claus, of course. More specifically, I am talking about the annual conspiracy of benevolence that we all participate in so that Christmas-celebrating kids get to experience a bit of magic and delight. I am talking about household theatrics, of course– about how tonight untold numbers of caregivers will be furtively wrapping a hidden trove of presents and then disguising their handwriting on the tags. I am talking about the lovably fussy business that so many of you will be doing with stockings. I am talking, of course, about the cookies, and the millions of plausibly deniable bites that will be taken out of them. I am a fan of all acts of care and love, but particularly ones like this– quirky and baroque and with extra flashes of family-specific choreography.

But there’s so much more to love than just excess acts of nuclear household labor. This is one of the few times that I feel, as a parent, as if I am part of a broader web that has my back. And sure, I’d much rather if all this effort went to, I don’t know, providing universal childcare, but again: It’s a start! And I appreciate that start– the weather people who will go on TV tonight with breaking reports of sleighs spotted in the sky, the NORAD employees who code an entire Santa tracking website (as I write this, I am informed that Santa is in Scandinavia and moving south), and the old men who spend the fall growing out beards such that they can play the part. We take for granted, for instance, that municipalities and businesses alike place mailboxes for Santa letters all around towns and cities. There’s no law that says they must do that. And yet!

We do this, all of us, just to delight children. And in a country that frequently does not love its children, nor the people who care for them, what a welcome exception to the rule.

It’s not surprising that older siblings, once they age out of Santa belief themselves, so often glide immediately into the conspiracy themselves. I’m sure there are plenty of spell ruiners out there. If I remember correctly, our President-elect is one of them (not his worst crime! but pretty bad!). But most of us do our best to stay on Team Protect The Myth. Older kids want to keep the magic going for younger kids. Adults take our childhood traditions and adapt them to younger generations. We all do our part.

Why do we do it? For many of us, because we once got to experience the benefit of older adults doing the same for us. Generational trauma is real, but that means that generational joy is no less real. If the body keeps the score, then so too does the soul.

Children deserve many things, but one of them is enchantment. It is profoundly cool that, in a small imperfect way, we all understand that. It is even cooler that we all do our best, together.

More of this, please, this wrapping our arms around both the children that we know and the children that we don’t. More of this wonder and magic and theatrical fussiness. More of this shared storytelling. More of teachers and grandparents and cool aunts being asked by trusting children, “have you ever met Santa?” and them responding, “I almost did, but then he disappeared… maybe this year you’ll see him though!”

Ho ho ho, you all. And thank you. In the next year, let this be just one of many things we do for each others' children.