So much of my parenting style centers on a delicate balance of fact versus fiction when explaining concepts, ideas, thoughts, feelings – just about anything – to my children.

Example 1: “Dad, why is Mommy sad?” 

Fact: Daddy was a big jerk to Mommy after she had a tough day at the office.

Fiction: “Mommy’s not sad, sweetie, just tired today.”

Example 2: “Dad, why is my teacher so mean?” 

Fact: Ms. Smith is a lonely, unhappy soul whose only friends are her 12 cats.

Fiction: “Ms. Smith isn’t mean. Like her or not, she’s the boss in class so you must figure out how to work with her.”

And the ultimate, fact/fiction question parents will face during the holidays:

Example 3: “Dad, is Santa real?”

When answering these questions from my kids, fact and fiction are never at an equilibrium – EVER. Some situations require more facts, some none.  With Example 1 above, I’d err on the side of fact. On Number 2, I’d go with a more fictional slant on the truth.

The Santa questions? I go with HEAVY fiction at varying levels based on age of child. The younger the kid, the higher chance of nonsensical fiction.

Just when I think I have this fact versus fiction concept mastered, a global pandemic has me fielding queries from my children that I never could have dreamed of. I have to find answers to questions that I do not know, have not thought about, and, worse, provide responses that do not adversely impact their health.

The COVID-related issues they worry about lie in the new realities they are facing. They wonder about important, deep COVID-related issues like why a friend’s grandparent has passed. I field questions about why they can’t have a birthday party this year. My youngest kids actively wonder what their teacher’s face looks like.

Suddenly, I find myself struggling with my fact/fiction balance. How many facts do my kids require about COVID and their relative safety from it? These questions, in fact, have not taken a holiday break. They’ve actually gotten even more intricate.

My daughter’s latest query: Will Santa get COVID?

She was genuinely worried, so my fact versus fiction had to be on point. I called in the big guy himself to deliver the facts – thinking the jolliest of all holiday season characters might be able to take the edge off sobering realities of Christmas 2020:

Dear Emersyn,

Thank you for writing me. Like many other good boys and girls around the world, your concern for my health during this unsettling year warms my heart. There is no greater display of the Christmas Spirit than caring for the people you love. 

I’m happy to report that Mrs. Claus, the elves, the reindeer, and I are healthy and safely readying for Christmas. This year, in fact, shows me just how very important Christmas is. 

At the North Pole, we feel the energy of the world – your happiness and, yes, sorrow, too. During most years, the smiles and good cheer sent our way is as plentiful as the marshmallows in my hot cocoa, or as the cookie crumbs stuck to my red suit on Christmas Eve (don’t tell Mrs. Claus – I’m supposed to be on a diet).

This year is different. There is more sadness now. But that does not mean there is not as much happiness.

You and I are healthy, but some of our neighbors are not. My elves and I still have our important jobs to tend to, but many workers around you have fallen on hard times. You’ve noticed that seeing your friend’s smile is difficult behind masks. You may have relatives who did not survive a tussle with this awful COVID virus. 

These are the people I think about as I prepare to take flight with my reindeer in a few days. There are no more powerful forces than hope, spirit and faith – and no better symbol of them than Christmas. 

Rest safely knowing that I am well and ready to deliver the best Christmas EVER. Maybe it is time for the North Pole to share some of the emboldening Christmas spirit that we’ve enjoyed taking in for so many years from you.

See you very soon.

Love,

Santa Claus

PS: Please leave cookies for me and celery for the reindeer (but, if Mrs. Claus asks, we’ll say the opposite)

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This exercise has reintroduced me to something I’d forgotten – talking to my kids is not about the quality of content I present or the fidelity of the stories I tell them. It is about the comfort they feel with my answer. My mastery of the fact versus fiction of parenting explanations, alas, pales in comparison to the smile I can earn from the use of either.

Photo: © Brastock Images / Adobe Stock.

Editor’s Note: Last week’s guest column about teaching faith to children sparked a great response, in agreement and opposition. NYC Dads Group member Josh Kross offers his take on his parenting without God.

I teach my children to be grateful for the world without needing to find responsibility for it. We have a tremendous gift in the universe, and it doesn’t matter why. The universe is not for us or by us. The universe just is, and that is all the explanation we need.

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When he was 7, my oldest child walked out of his room and said, “You know those books I read? The ones with the Egyptian and Greek and other myths? How come so many of the stories are the same?”

“Why do you think?” I asked.

“Either all the different stories are by the same people, or they are just the kind of stories people like to hear,” he said.

The discussion went on. My son asked questions about why and how things are and I answered about the Big Bang, evolution and so on, trying to keep it simple and yet still challenge his mind to ask more questions — to challenge assumptions. Soon it became apparent this would be one of the prouder moments of my fatherhood experience.

He concluded right then, on his own, something that took me about 15 years longer to decide. My son became an atheist.

We are not a family without tradition. We are Jewish by ethnicity, and our family practices ritual and does certain things we believe bind us to our heritage. We talk about what stories mean and how it is important to remember where and who you come from. My children will have bar and bat mitzvahs as a sign of respect to this, but with an understanding that being grateful is enough in and of itself — knowing the world and the universe are a gift to us all without needing a reason for its existence.

A few years later, my son came home from public school with a story, one I frankly wouldn’t have believed had it not been corroborated. A child asked him if he believed in Jesus. My son said nope. When told that he would go to hell and meet the devil if he didn’t, my son replied “that’s OK, I don’t believe in him either.” I told my son he did well defending himself without denigrating the other child’s stance. He handled it with the skill of someone who respects others because they deserve respect even if they disagree.

My atheism does not mean I raise my kids without wonder, without respect for things greater than we are, or without morals. Heck, it doesn’t even mean I raise them with atheism. It means I raise my children to question how things work. To know that even if they don’t understand things, that things work how they work for a reason, even if it is a reason not evident to them. Not a reason that necessarily has thoughtful design in it, but that things happen and we can be happy or sad or angry or scared or anything else and that all of those are OK, regardless of why things happen.

A previous post on the City Dads Group blog posed the following question to the “unfaithed” like me and my son: “To whom do you give thanks?” I would like to answer that as follows.

I teach my children to be grateful for the world without needing to find responsibility. We have a tremendous gift in the universe, and it doesn’t matter why. The universe is not for us or by us. The universe just is, and that is all the explanation we need.

I teach my children to appreciate the beauty and magic that 14 billion years or so of post-Big Bang history has brought us to this point.

I teach my children they should be good, kind, sharing and loving (and almost all of the rest of the Boy Scout law) because those things are objectively positive.

I teach my children that all people need to be respected and have their place in the world. That the Golden Rule, Karma, Hammurabi’s code, or You Get What You Give, and everything else essentially get at one simple truth that no one needs god(s) to see:

If you want to be loved and cared for, if you know how you’d like the world to be and you act toward that outcome, and everyone wants and acts the same, we’ll all be better off regardless of what you do or don’t believe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Josh Kross, an NYC Dads Group member, is an at-home dad to his three kids. He engineers and produces The Modern Dads Podcast and the critically acclaimed hip-hop podcast, The Cipher. Photo for Parenting without God: Cross in pieces via photopin (license)

It came from nothing. Moments like these are typically brutal in their efficacy.

She’d lost it at school and I’m guessing that ignited conversations which, following the usual path, stoked 5th grade doubts. It’s only natural and I’m not upset. I will not, however, seek confirmation of my theories here. Not now. I’m not prepared to know about or, worse, engage in similar discussions. Not yet. Not weeks before a fat man in a red suit is scheduled to wiggle his way down our chimney, likely his final pilgrimage for her. Saying goodbye to the tooth fairy is enough for today.

There is nothing at all we can do but let time pass us on the sidewalk, side step its ghost, listen to the little hand tick and tock along, the metronome of childhood and of our lives together, and brace for sudden, inevitable, natural, and beautiful-in-its-own-right change. That’s the arrangement we agreed upon when all of this began. It was a good run. We can file no complaints.

In the end, she (as all kids will) became to clever for us and she, at least in some small crevasse of her curious mind, decided it was high time to know the facts, to pull back the curtain on a myth, a puff of smoke as white as the fallen snow, she no longer wished to hold dear. It is, in most cases, their choice whether to propagate the fictional aspects of their own lives. It is, in most cases, their desire to know or not know that forces our hand. We’re no longer in possession of those keys, but walk through the doors they elect to open we might, holding their still small hands as we enter into something new, side by side. Not better, not worse, but new and with just as much potential for magic.

A version of this first appeared on Out with the Kids.

Santa Claus guilt. I never thought I’d have it. Santa is fun and we believe that fantasy is good for children and, Lord knows, everyone lies to their kids at some point, even if they don’t think they’re doing it. I have guilt because the following is Peanut’s belief system, and the responsibility for it rests on my wife and me.

“Marina and I were at school today.” Marina is her best friend at school. They talk a lot. “Marina and I were at school today and we were talking about what happens when you die –“

“You were talking about when you die?”

“Yeah, and we think that when you die that’s it. You’re just dead and there is just nothing.”

“What? You guys were talking about death and you think when you die there’s nothing?”

“Yup, that’s what I think. I think you die and then *shrug*, that’s it.”

“Oh.”

Whoa.

This is pretty much verbatim the conversation I had with the Peanut as we took advantage of a particularly sun-splashed afternoon to make a stop at the playground on the way home from school. Certain and unfazed by the absolute end, the Peanut hangs lightly by her legs from the monkey bars.

At first, I allowed myself to wonder whose ideas these were. Is my little fairy princess the existential boogeyman of kindergarten room 8 or was it her friend Marina?

That question was answered for me a few days later when she told me that in school that day during recess she had been spreading her secular gospel of the damned throughout her class. She had told Alexis and Velma about the end of existence. The lack of eternity. And, she said, “We all agreed.”

And, lo, the Peanut spoke from the monkey bars on high and proclaimed that death is final, and saw that it was good. And the people followed.

Meanwhile, the existence of Santa has been confirmed.

“Sometimes Marina and I talk about the Grinch and we wonder if he’s real.”

I shrug. “Oh yeah?”

She grins. “Yeah. Nobody knows. But Santa is real, though.”

So there you have it. The afterlife is a dream, but Santa is definitely coming and, in the Peanut’s head, he’s probably part fairy.

And I feel guilty about this in part, at least, because I’m an atheist. Let me qualify that a little. I’m not anti-God or even anti-religion. How can I be? I’m an atheist. I can’t be anti-something I don’t believe in. I mean I could, but what’s the point? Religion isn’t evil and it isn’t divine, it’s human.

And that belief, along with our willingness to talk about God in an objective way, to sing prayers during Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah, to answer “we don’t know, nobody really does,” when the kids ask what happens when you die, to believe in Santa and fairies right along with them, says to me that we leave room for faith, we don’t deny them it. Nor would we. If they do end up atheists (Deniers of Gawd!), I’d rather it was something they came to themselves rather than for the reason most people have a given religion … because their parents do.

Yet, there it is. Faith Denied.

So it really feels like lying when I play up Santa Claus. Really, really. Who am I to derail my tiny philosopher from her search for truth with my silly mythical bullshit?

I’m her dad, that’s who. And I guess if I’ve thus far failed her in terms of allowing her the room to experience religious faith, the least I can do is give her the space and encouragement to believe in a magical fat guy with genius Elven slaves and a sleigh that travels at near light speed solely through the power of reindeer farts.

And also, fairies are real. And the Glass Ceiling isn’t.

A version of this first appeared on Musings from The Big Pink. 

Santa Claus death photo: flickr.com/Steve Jurvetson