Easterjoy, perhaps you should take a step back for a minute. No-one is saying that its wrong to have playful santaclause/toothfairy traditions within a family, what they are saying is that they do not want to be complicit in lying and deceiving others. Now, to be honest, I find it very hard to understand why anyone wold have a problem with this.
I grew up knowing about the myths of santa and the tooth fairy, but that didn’t mean that we didn’t have a TON of fun with santa and toothfairy traditions. We all knew, but it was this “big secret” that we knew. Someone would let slip that it was ou mother getting up at night and the rest of us would shoot back, ‘don’t you mean santa?’ while giving each other knowing nods and glances. It was great!! But seriously, I would not have appreciated being lied to by my parents about this and then discovering later on that they had deceived me. Playing along with fun traditions is one thing, helping a parent deceive their children is another entirely. It is wrong to lie to/deceive anyone, but it is especially wrong for a parent to knowingly deceive their child, and no one should be called a spoilsport or a grinch for not wanting to be involved in this unacceptable act of deception. :nope:
You are saying that against all odds these kids really think there is no Santa Claus, but by the
deception of their parents–who, unlike our parents, presumably scotch-taped it into their children’s Catechism or something–the children went back to believing it. You’re saying that you know they’ve asked and that they’ve been lied to, and not that they are telling you that they want to be left to believe what they want to believe, which is what I think that little girl was telling the OP.
Sure, in the case that you think such a girl is gullible beyond her years because of the great trust she puts in her parents (which is not impossible), bluntly ask these parents if either one has ever lied to either of their kids when asked point blank if this family mythology was really true. They shouldn’t lie to their kids if they ask for the truth, and you should make it clear that you will not lie if you are
asked whether this is the truth, because it has to be presumed that the child who actually asks (rather than the child who declares) is the child who isn’t confident enough to make the leap past doubt herself and actually wants to be told.
I am saying, though, that this is one area where we have to assume that the child who does not ask
does not want to be told. If the child finds out when she is 14, like St. Thérèse did, it is entirely plausible to say, “I knew when you wondered, you’d ask, or when you wanted the pretending to end, you’d say so, because generally speaking, those who do not speak up do not want to have the fun spoiled.”
That is the absolute truth. I defend my stance because St. Thérèse thought it was her sisters who were being kind to her by extending her “belief” far into her adolescence, while it was her father who was being unkind to her by brusquely blurting out the baldfaced truth because,
for crying out loud she was 14 years old!! She’s been declared a Doctor of the Church and she was herself the “victim” of this “deception”, so I think she knew whereof she spoke in matters of the morals of how to handle the myths invented to delight children. (Have we mentioned that when the overly-sensitive little Thérèse first overheard her father’s impatient remark about being glad that he was seeing this quaint tradition for the last time, the
14 year old’s first reaction was to
burst into tears? She was not crying because she had been lied to, but because of her sensitivity about learning that her father thought her a baby for continuing to go along with this tradition.)
I don’t think my mother ever told me “there is no Santa Claus.” In our family, you came to realize that when the package said, “From Santa”, it meant that the giver wanted to remain anonymous, in the tradition of St. Nicholas. As for the Tooth Fairy, when a child first hears that they need to get to work because “the Dishwashing Fairy has quit”, I think they figure it out. The day the Tooth Fairy is uncovered is not a sad day because their trust is dashed, but because a shed tooth no longer turns their pillow into an ATM.
On the point about being asked…it is entirely possible that an older child will ask an adult other than their parent about this. You see, even if they are on the fence about whether this is the truth or a put-on for their benefit, they can sense that the parent is enjoying this whole thing. A lot of kids don’t want to disappoint a parent who is obviously enjoying their belief. It is not unusual for a parent and child to exchange gifts that say “from Santa” all the way into adulthood without either ever coming out and speaking The Truth! Sure, maybe you want to satisfy your own sense of the nature of things, but that doesn’t mean you want to spoil Mom and Dad’s fun.
