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ILOVEJESUS wrote
What about when you were a kid? Did you not believe in dragons and magic and silly things like that.
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I did, but I was explicitly never told by my parents or grandparents that dragons and magic were real.
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ILJ wrote
Its so light hearted as to be a waste of time not getting into its spirit in my opinion.
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I agree that the
stories are harmless, and I have no problem getting into the "spirit" of the season, as it were. The issue for me is going that extra step and telling children that the stories are more than stories: that the stories are true and real in the physical world. That an overweight man is running a sweatshop at the North Pole, and that he sees you when you sleep, and that he runs a physics-defying one-man Iditarod with a fleet of flying Caribou on December 24th/25th.
You're right in that the issues have little to do with the characters of Santa and Rudolf and Frosty,
et al. It's more the issues of deliberately blurring the line between reality and fantasy (not just allowing the child to do it on their own, but enabling, assisting, encouraging,
causing it), and of deliberately presenting falsehoods as truths (which, in turns, feeds into the line-blurring issue). Of course, after all of this is said, I believed in Santa until I was eleven or twelve, and I turned out fine, with no major lingering trust issues (stemming from that, anyway).
On the flipside, Santa can be used as a lesson for later undoctrination. "Hey, remember how that guy you were told was real turned out not to be real? Well there's this
other guy that people have told you is real..."
And on a related issue: I'm really surprised at how some adults, who are otherwise frugal throughout the year, can throw all of their financial sense away for one month and go into massive debt just because "it's Christmas." Like the word
Christmas is some Manchurian codeword that makes people spend money they don't have on stuff they don't need and that they wouldn't buy at any other time of the year.