The Christmas Conundrum

Last December I started worrying about whether or not I would tell Quinn the Santa lie. I was able to put off the decision, temporarily, because at just over two years old, she wasn’t really ready anyway. This year she was more cognitively prepared and I was still ethically unprepared. 

With Thanksgiving just past, and Quinn reminding me daily that we had to do something to make the world more beautiful, we entered into the Christmas season. One weekend, earlier this month, we made our world more beautiful by hanging colored lights on a small spruce tree in our front yard. Quinn loved the process and many nights this month she’s gone out on the front porch in her slippers to admire our “beautiful” tree, lighting up our dark little corner of woods. Soon after hanging the outdoor lights, we put some decorations up inside the house, and started a countdown calendar so Quinn could count the days until Christmas. We hung a green ribbon from the railing next to the stairs in the hopes of receiving holiday cards in the mail, and had a great time each day when they did. Eventually, the weekend before Christmas, we hiked out into our woods to find and cut down a tree.

Through it all, I was testing out the Santa Claus idea with her. “Hey Quinn...have you heard anything about this Santa Claus guy?” I was awkward about it, I knew, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t make it feel natural. I’ve always been terrible at lying--I’m incapable of it really. Quinn had heard of Santa from school, but I could tell she didn’t really get the myth, so I thought if I danced around it, I might have still another year to postpone this difficult decision. And yet even in my talk of “postponing” the decision, I felt more and more sure that I would not actually try to convince her that a man in a red suit would come into her house and leave her presents on Christmas Eve. It’s actually kind of creepy, when you think about it in a certain way.

I started preparing Sam for my decision not to lie to Quinn. I think he understood my desire to be truthful with our daughter but, unlike me, he was very concerned about other people’s kids--worried that Quinn would be the kid who would ruin it all for everyone else. I suggested we find a way to talk about “the magic of Christmas” without Santa being expected to actually arrive. But, before I could fully frame the story, I stumbled on a game changer: an article on the New York Times homepage titled, “Santa on the Brain.” I clicked the link, eagerly looking for something to justify my refusal to participate in the Santa lie, but found instead a thought-provoking argument for making the lie as big and fanciful as possible. 

The author, a neuroscientist and mom named Kelly Lambert, explained some brain-development basics:

Although children are born with a full set of 86 billion brain cells, or neurons, the connections between these neurons are relatively sparse during these early years. As their brains develop — as more and more micro-thread extensions form between neurons, and neurochemicals zap across the tiny gaps — children slowly learn about the rules of the physical world, and the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Eventually, they learn that reindeer can’t fly, that Santa can’t visit every child’s home in one single night and, even if he could make such a trip, there’s no way he could eat all those cookies. Magical beliefs are pruned away as mature neural circuits reflecting real-world contingencies become solidified.

Lambert goes on to explain that even though children outgrow their early fictional beliefs, the presence of those early fictions might provide benefits to them in adulthood:

...The brain appears to retain a mechanism for neural time travel. By this, I don’t simply mean that adults have warm memories of having believed in Santa Claus. [They may also have developed] mental time travel memories, or M.T.T. These [memories] come closer to re-experiencing a remembered event...Neuroimaging evidence indicates that, when certain events are recalled — presumably after being triggered by familiar sights, smells or sounds — emotional brain areas are activated as well as visceral responses. You relive the feelings you experienced in the past.

Reading this forced me to think about my own Christmas memories. When I was little, Christmas was, truly, the most wonderful time of the year. When the Christmas decorations came out, my parents let me hang a string of colored lights around my bedroom doorframe and I would fall asleep happily every night in that soft glow. We left notes for Santa every year, and cookies we’d find mostly gone, save for a few evidential crumbs, by Christmas morning. My sister and I were literally giddy with excitement for days, if not weeks. And, when the day finally arrived, my father would torture us with further ploys to prolong the anticipation. He would have to go to the living room first to confirm that Santa had actually come, while we waited impatiently at the end of the hall, or upstairs. He would have to make the coffee, put Elvis’s Blue Christmas album on the stereo, and light up the tree before we came down. And for the whole long journey, we’d have a camera pointed in our faces, recording the hope and excitement and finally the confirmation, by virtue of the pile of presents wrapped in paper unlike all the others, that Santa had in fact remembered to include us in the Christmas joy.

To this day, in spite of my desire to avoid the excessive consumerism of the holiday, I love listening to Christmas songs, I love signing, addressing and sending Christmas cards, and I love baking Christmas treats and decorating the house or the tree with our small but growing collection of Christmas ornaments with stories. I still get excited. And I still remember, every year, the time I woke up in the middle of the night and was certain I saw a reindeer leg pumping air outside my second story bedroom window.

My reluctance to tell Quinn the lie, I realized, was not a desire to deny her these Christmas joys, but rather a desire to help her avoid the disappointment of finding out that Santa isn’t actually real. That’s why I’ve been trying to imagine a way to preserve the Christmas spirit, without the lie. But when I reached the conclusion of the neuroscience article, I started to realize the necessity of the fiction. The author herself realized, “For every year I layered another set of Christmas memories into [my girls’] brains, the easier it would be for them to relive those feelings.”  And so, if Quinn is to be able to call up that magic in the future, if she is to have an opportunity to relive the joy in her adulthood around the holidays, it seems I have to lie to her right now. I want Quinn’s experiences of magic to be real, and tangible, rather than just conceptual...rather than just lore.

And so, when Quinn told me one night recently, “I hope Santa will bring me a new baby doll for Christmas,” even though I had already bought her presents, and even though I hate baby dolls, I went out and got her a new one. And when I absentmindedly let her play with the roll of wrapping paper that was going to be just for the Santa presents, I went out and spent another $7 dollars on a different roll, so the Santa presents would stand out as unique and exotic under the tree. On Christmas Eve, I asked Quinn if she wanted to leave Santa some of the peppermint brownies we’d made for friends and family, so he could have a snack if he stopped at our house, and I even wrote a note for her, based on what she wanted to write: “Dear Santa, Cookies are for you.” After that, she signed her own Q.

She went to bed without complaint, understanding that Santa doesn’t stop if you’re still awake. Sam and I stayed up late prepping appetizers and dinner for Christmas day, and wrapping presents, and we were woken up early the next morning by our three year old who was eager to see if Santa had come. She was hard to contain upstairs while I went downstairs to get things ready, and she graciously arrived with a look of surprise when she saw the small pile of Santa presents set aside from the rest. 

It didn’t all go exactly as planned. When I showed Quinn the crumbs left on the plate, certain she would be excited that Santa had eaten and enjoyed the treat she left for him, she burst into tears and stormed away. I followed her to ask what was the matter. “I wanted those!” she screamed, and she continued crying for at least five minutes. Seems we still have some work to do on just how this whole Santa thing works. In the meantime, it was a good start, and it felt okay, for now, to tell this white Christmas lie.

As for me, I worked hard to do my Christmas part. I got the granddaughter to Massachusetts to see her Nonna and Poppa, Aunt Amy, Uncle Scott and her boy cousins, and I got her home in time to host her Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Josh and Aunt Geraldine and cousin Olivier, as well as her Aunt Becs and cousins Tyrus and Cameron just back from California. Everyone had presents under the tree and was hopefully well fed through the holiday. I made cranberry orange scones for breakfast (reminiscent of my grandmother’s cranberry bread she used to make for me), and Louise's egg and sausage casserole. We had bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with blue cheese in the afternoon with shrimp cocktail and champagne, and a smoked ham for dinner with sautéed green beans and a rosemary potato galette. Everyone seemed content: reading books, playing with toys, video-chatting with the one missing Jackson sibling and her family in Spain.

By Christmas evening, as the last of the presents were opened, I was exhausted and felt a cold coming on, as well as a bit of anti-climax. That’s when I was forced to assess what Christmas means to me now. It’s not the presents that matter, but the anticipation of it all and the rituals. I love receiving Christmas cards in the mail from friends and family all around. 

And I love that students come back home to Vermont and want to see us. Since we said goodbye to the family on the 27th, we’ve been welcoming a rotating series of former students - now friends, to hear their latest stories. I love the surprise phone call from an old friend far away. That’s what’s wonderful to me now about Christmastime: people remembering other people, making time to say hello. That and my memories of childhood Christmases with my family. Not remembered magic, but magic re-experienced.

The day after Christmas I put the leftover hambone in a stock pot on the stove. I’d never bought a ham before, and hadn’t had a spiral sliced ham in many years--since we used to celebrate Easter at my grandmother’s. Every year, after Easter, my grandmother made split pea soup and it was one of the things I most loved. I’d never made split pea soup with ham before. It simmered on the stove for hours, and when I finally tasted a spoonful, the sweet smokiness transported me back to her dining room, on a day when we would have tea, just the two of us. I’m convinced the time travel is real. Magic, done right, can be relived. 

For me, 2013 has been a magical year and I'm grateful for every minute of it.

Here’s hoping 2014 is a magical year for everyone. 

Happy Holidays.