Lie to kids about Santa?

2

Comments

  • Reply 21 of 43
    OK, you do have a point there, but make sure to finish that coffee

    Meanwhile, I'm off into town to have a couple of beers.





    Oh, and I'm lying about "a couple"



    /OT
  • Reply 22 of 43
    so lying to kids is fine as long as it's fun?
  • Reply 23 of 43
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by alcimedes

    so lying to kids is fine as long as it's fun?



  • Reply 24 of 43
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    Christmas lost all meaning to me ever since I found out there was no Santa. I knew from other kids before my parents ever told me. There are 2 types of kids in the 2nd grade. The ones that believe in Santa and the ones that don't.



    To this day I don't set up a tree, exchange presents or share in the 'holiday spirit.
  • Reply 25 of 43
    i was the six year old that ruined my entire pre-school class' perception of reality by clearly and resolutely suggesting that santa clause was made up by parents to control children. Yeah. Dont lie to your children. While my parents never told me that santa clause was real or not real (not the right religion you see), most very young children should be able to figure out reality by the time they are six if parents dont insist there is a santa clause. i mean isnt it better to tell you kid that you wont get them a gift if they are bad, that whole "he knows when you are sleeping etc" cannot be a clearer sign that parents have some say... That said I had christian friends who up until late middle school still recieved gifts from mom, dad, and santa...



    ah well. do what you want.
  • Reply 26 of 43
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Childhood: Santa brings toys to all the good boys and girls, and lumps of coal to those who don't behave.



    Adulthood: God grants eternal paradise to good boys and girls who accept Jesus as their Personal Savior, and eternal torment in The Lake of Fire forever to those who don't Believe.



    No matter what we're told as children, it's a good thing that eventually we grow up to learn how to distinguish fantasy from reality.
  • Reply 27 of 43
    Quote:

    Originally posted by alcimedes

    so lying to kids is fine as long as it's fun?



    I'd be lying if that weren't true..



  • Reply 28 of 43
    trumptmantrumptman Posts: 16,464member
    Well we have a four year old as well. My wife and I swore up and down that we weren't going to teach him about Santa or anything else.



    However this year he decided himself and declared that Santa was coming. We didn't encourage it at all (no notes, cookies and milk, etc.) but we didn't discourage his thinking or conclusions either.



    Nick
  • Reply 29 of 43
    dmzdmz Posts: 5,775member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by bunge

    Lying and hitting is good.







    (fair enough) But---Good grief!



    "LYING"---about Santa, GASP!! ARGG!! is the least of your worries---as Def Kopf kinda/sorta said, let them have a little magic before life kicks the shit out of them.



    And another thing (and this may go WAY over the top....) But you guys on this forum (and I'm WILDLY generalizing here) are confusing the heck out me:



    You guys are moralizing about the Santa thing---but---isn't this the same crowd that has no problem with free love, dope smoking, and among other things, lesbian porn? When are you going to take your daughter to a XXX taping audition? When are you going to let her 13-year old boyfriend go down on her at the roller rink? When are we going to sit down and fire up the bhang with your 8-year old son? Maybe a three-way with your fifteen-year old's new girlfriend?



    But "LYING" about Santa's a bad thing? This sort of "moral" discussion is kinda like polishing brass on the Titantic.



    No offense guys! but this was getting a little strange, I've seen some of the naughty content on these forums (and you know who you are).







  • Reply 30 of 43
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by dmz

    You guys are moralizing about the Santa thing---but---isn't this the same crowd that has no problem with free love, dope smoking, and among other things, lesbian porn?



    You had a few s in here, so I hope I'm not taking the wrong part of what you said seriously...



    There's a BIG difference between misrepresenting reality, and overexposure to every aspect of reality at a young age. You can certainly introduce a child to the "real world" (provided that you have some notion of what that is yourself) slowly without lying about the parts you haven't gotten around to talking about yet.
  • Reply 31 of 43
    moogsmoogs Posts: 4,296member
    I kind of figured out at a very young age that there was no Santa. It just seemed ridiculous to me that one guy could be in so many places during the course of one night. I think kids are intuitively smarter about these kinds of things than we give them credit for...



    ... so in my book I would choose to neither perpetuate the myth, nor lie about it. I would simply let my kid figure it out, and as soon as they asked me, I'd tell them the truth.



    "Santa is a lie kid; it's all a big LIE! Just another way for the man to keep our heads in the sand while he bleeds us dry with taxes and spirit-killing regulations!"



  • Reply 32 of 43
    i don't think you should lie to your kids about santa. my reason being: i was very angry at my mom when she told me. [anger]How come Santa can get (all) the other kids powerwheels and not me!? i was extra fvcking good this year. (note: i still have not gotten a pow-pow-powerwheels.)[/anger] i still don't believe everything she tells me (and by that i mean, i believe pretty much nothing of what she says; but this is for reasons extending beyond to more flagrant lies, like the tooth fairy). What is the harm in telling the truth? cut it out quick, before they build it up too much. i dont remember how old i was, but i had suspicions (stories from the school yard). i wanted to believe in Santa though, and i was very upset when mom said he wasn't real. (actually, she didn't say he isn't real, only that he doesn't come around anymore. apparently she believes, and this may be true, that St. Nick was an actual person in europe [holland?], who gave presents to the needy in late december many years ago [i think 17th or 18th century]. my suspicions about his non-reality were partially held in that he was known sometimes as "St. Nick", and, iirc, as part of my catechism they told me that saints were people who were superlatively good in life, but canonized post mortem.)



    [any one else find it funny how the atheists and agnostics of ao attacked god on a discussion of santa? i mean, i'm an atheist, but i recognize that theists believe in god, so they differentiate between stories about "him" and Santa.]
  • Reply 33 of 43
    groveratgroverat Posts: 10,872member
    You depressing freaks have convinced me that my kid will believe in Santa and I will lie to him/her/them. I like the footprints idea.



    Kids are not small adults, they are kids. Let them have some magic and wonder in their lives.



    How boring is it to know that your parents buy shit and wrap it up when you could believe that some big fat jolly guy with cute reindeer brings it while you sleep?



    When he was six he believed that the moon overhead followed him.

    By nine he had deciphered the illusion, trading magic for fact.

    No tradebacks.

    So this is what it's like to be an adult.

    If he only knew now what he knew then.




    I do not have a zero-tolerance stance on lying.
  • Reply 34 of 43
    Quote:

    Originally posted by groverat

    Kids are not small adults, they are kids. Let them have some magic and wonder in their lives.



    Yes! Thank you.



    I don't remember my parents ever telling me that Santa didn't exist. And even after I figured it out, and they knew I figured it out, it was still a wink-wink kind of thing where we kept up appearances just for fun. But I still have fond memories of that sense of anticipation going to bed on Christmas Eve when I was very little. I'm glad my parents didn't take that away from me.



    Give kids a little credit, and don't make them grow up too fast. Intelligence and imagination are not mutually exclusive.
  • Reply 35 of 43
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    But it pisses you off that you've been sucking up to some imaginary person when you should have been sucking up to the true bringers of presents: your PARENTS!



    What a waste!
  • Reply 36 of 43
    I'm an agnostic who loves Xmas and Santa.



    My 4 yr old has never asked if Santa is real outright, but when she asks how Santa does what he does, I tell her it's magic. I have told her repeatedly that magic is when someone has figured out how to do something that no one else knows how to do.



    Am I lying? I don't think so. Santa does exist, just not as a single man. Also, I think it is a valuable life lesson for my kids to figure that out for themselves.
  • Reply 37 of 43
    Don't let your kids see this!



    Quote:

    Originally posted by some other person other than me



    In attempt to demonstrate, by scientific evidence, whether or not Santa Claus indeed exists, the following points should be kept in mind.



    1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer, which only Santa has ever seen.



    2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18 ) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't appear to sever the Muslim, Hindu,Jewish, and Buddhist children, that reduces his workload to 15% of the total, 378 million accoring to the Popularion Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per houseold, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.



    3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west. This works out at 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill up the stockings, tdistribute the remaining presents around the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.



    4. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth, we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.7 million miles not counting stops.



    5. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving around at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run (tops) 15 miles per hour.



    6. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "Flying Reindeer" could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight. (Or even nine.)



    7. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload (not even counting the weight of the sleigh) to 353,430 tons. Again, for this comparison, this is four times the weight of the QE2 yacht.



    8. 353,430 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates an enourmous air resistance. This will heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy each, per second. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.6 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.



    If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve... he's dead now.



    Happy Holidays!



  • Reply 38 of 43
    I am not gonna tell my kids about santa when I have them.

    its a lie, it also throws away the real reason for christmas
  • Reply 39 of 43
    groveratgroverat Posts: 10,872member
    What is the real reason for Christmas?
  • Reply 40 of 43
    murbotmurbot Posts: 5,262member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Nordstrodamus

    I'm an agnostic who loves Xmas and Santa.



    My 4 yr old has never asked if Santa is real outright, but when she asks how Santa does what he does, I tell her it's magic. I have told her repeatedly that magic is when someone has figured out how to do something that no one else knows how to do.



    Am I lying? I don't think so. Santa does exist, just not as a single man. Also, I think it is a valuable life lesson for my kids to figure that out for themselves.




    Good post.



    My 2 year old asked me how Santa got through the glass of our gas fireplace. I said it was magic.



    I don't think there is anything wrong with doing the whole Santa thing. Hell, I dressed up like the fat guy this year and completely had my kids, hook, line, and sinker. Does that make me evil? Well, my daughter had the time of her life, spent the whole day laughing and playing, left Santa milk and cookies, and while I was laying with her in bed on Christmas Eve, she hugged me and said that it was "the best day I ever had in my whole life". (it was, until the next day, I guess)



    I can't remember when I figured out Santa wasn't real. I don't think it's the traumatic "oh my god you LIED!!" kind of event some people think it is. It's fun, the kids like it, so what the hell.



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