Wednesday, December 18, 2013

How the Lily saved Christmas




Follow up to this post.

We haven't talked much about Christmas and/or Santa since the big interrogation over the weekend. The closest we came was when I was tucking Lily in for bed and I asked her if she was looking forward to Christmas. "Kinda." Is it because of the conversation we had? "Yeah."

Yesterday, she came into the kitchen and told us that when she has a kid, she's going to tell her the truth right away. I didn't tell her that this was always my intent as well, but that parents face peer pressure too.

I asked her what she would tell other kids about Santa. "I would say 'I don't know, ask your parents', because I don't know for sure." I was really pleased with her answer.So it seems that we're raising a teapot agnostic at this point, at least as far her belief in Santa goes. (That is, she's given herself a fig leaf to say she doesn't know, but hasn't reasoned things out to the extent to understand that claims about Santa are essentially unfalsifiable.)

I didn't want to give her instructions to go in and lie to her friends, particularly when she'd been so upset with being on the receiving end of that lie. However, we'd thought for a long time that she'd be the one who ruined Santa for the other kids. We never thought she'd do it out of spite, but, like me, she sometimes lacks patience with people who are slow to reach conclusions, and I could see getting frustrated and blurting it out in a moment of pique, entirely without malice.

I think is the best resolution we could have expected for the holidays.

3 comments:

  1. Don't you mean "her belief where there is a Santa or not goes"? ;-P

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bah! How about you save that kind of wordplay for Arthuriana, Dr. M?

      Delete