(How) we don’t do Santa

When my husband and I were celebrating our first Christmas with our oldest, we were in agreement that we didn’t want to do the whole Santa thing.

Lots of love and zero judgment for those of you who do Santa with your kids! It just wasn’t for us.

We didn’t know that our son would turn out to be a brilliant logistician, an absolute master of reasonableness and rationality, relentless in his curiosity and search for truth and balance in the world. So thank goodness we decided on this No Santa thing early on in his life because no human would be able to sell the irrationality of Santa to this child.

But more than not being able to outsmart him, it was important for us to be honest with him. Christmas is still a wonderful and magical time of year for us, but not because he feels like an imaginary stranger is constantly tallying up his good deeds.

So how do we explain it to our kids?

We get this question often. We tell our kids (7 & 4 years old) that Santa Claus is an imaginary character based on a real person named St. Nicholas, a very generous person from long ago. We say that most kids who celebrate Christmas believe that Santa is real and brings them gifts at Christmas.

As for gifts, they get presents because they are loved by their family members, not because they are on their best behavior.

How do you keep them from not spoiling it for other kids?

This one I can’t take credit for. A friend with older kids told us how she does it, and we’ve adopted this because it’s brilliant. We say, “Most kids play the Santa game - they really believe Santa is really, really real! If they’re playing the Santa game, do we ruin it for them?” No! “Right. We don’t ruin the game for them. So when kids are talking about Santa, you guys pretend that Santa is—” REAL!

Then we go over some practice scenarios and ask them what they would say to make sure they really get it.

So how do we make Christmas magical for our kids?

Magical is a…loaded word. I feel like trying to make it a magical season for kids is just setting us all up for failure. How do you even define it, what expectations do we really have?

Our kids love Christmas because we have special times and events at our lovely church, we get to spend time together, and we listen to awesome music. We bake together, we sing together, we play with new toys together.

We also have one special tradition that I really love, that I describe in this Instagram reel that involves new custom ornaments each year.

We expect tantrums, we expect sibling spats, for the kids to get bored, disappointed in their presents, for them to get sick over the holiday. None of that changes because of Christmas, right?

Wishing everyone a beautiful holiday season!