So we’ve got a little bit of a family tradition. Sometime around Christmas Eve, we cuddle up on the couch and watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (And, no, it’s not a tale of Bill O’Reilly. After all, in this one the Grinch is redeemable.)
A good time is not, alas, had by all. Because The Boy doesn’t like television much. At least, he doesn’t like kiddie shows. All he likes are The West Wing, Signing Time and live concert DVDs. He’s…interesting.
Since the Grinch is animated, The Boy's got little interest. But he gets pissed that he’s left out of the fun, even though he doesn’t want to actually partake in the fun, so he just bitches until Top Management takes him into another room. So she misses most of it. Which sucks for her. But it’s for the best. Because the rest of us are happy. And isn’t that what counts at Christmas? And, for that matter, the rest of the year? Of course it is.
Actually, I grok where The Boy is coming from. That’s sorta been the story of my life. I don’t want to go to Place X or Event Y but when everyone else goes, I stay by myself feeling lonely. Waaah. Poor pitiful me. And, yes, The Boy really does enjoy curling up with us and watching The West Wing. Whenever we first put the DVD on, as the show’s menu pops up and the music’s playing in the background, he comes running in and just watches the stills slowly fading in and out on the screen. And he can watch the credits run over and over. He’s a freak.
So. Curling up and watching together’s one of our traditions and I realize it’s not exactly a unique one. But the girls love it and so do I. So naturally we’d like to keep it going, maybe extend it a bit. Top Management suggests Miracle on 34th Street, a film which I’ve never actually seen all the way through. But I’ve seen more than enough pieces of it here and there to know that much of the point is that no one believes Santa Claus is real. And since I don’t feel like introducing that doubt into our kids, I nix the idea for this year.
I should take this moment to say there are some spoilers coming up. So if you don’t want to talk about The Secret of Santa Claus, skip today’s edition of Left of the Dial.
Okay. All gone? All here? Good. Let’s proceed.
The one piece of advice my dad gave me upon the birth of our first kid was, he said, the one piece of advice he’d been given by my Uncle Roy when he, my dad, first became a father. And that advice was this: no matter how smart you think your kids are, they’re always way smarter.
Good advice and oh so true. Which isn’t to say they can’t be idiots and boneheads sometimes, of course. Because they can. After all, in our specific case, they’ve got 51% of my genetic material, so how could they not? But still and all, kids are goofy smart. Which is something that gets overlooked way too often.
But even more than it gets overlooked, it gets confused. Because just because kids are smart doesn’t mean they’re hip. Yet commercials and television shows and movies and books and so on don’t seem to get the difference.
When Top Management was expecting The Rose, we got a ton of books as presents. The books were intended to help Max deal with the arrival of a rival, someone with whom she would vie for her parents, their love and their affection for the rest of her life. The books explained that babies were noisy and smelly and fussy and turned life upside-down but that it’d get better eventually and that despite all the horror involved with a new baby, they, on balance, were a good thing. Or at least not an entirely terrible thing.
We thanked the people for the books and buried them on bookshelves in the closet. And when The Rose came along, Max loved her to pieces and never had any idea that she was supposed to be possessed by the green-eyed monster. The only sibling rivalry she ever showed was when Grandma came to visit. That was maybe a little tricky for the first few minutes. But Mom and Dad? Feh. More than enough to go around.
When The Rose was somewhere around three months old, she was laying on a blanket and Max was stretched out next to her, playing with The Rose’s toes. Top Management was in the next room and, unbeknownst to the girls, was watching. The Rose reached over and grabbed Max’s hand and tried to stick it in her mouth. Max laughed and the two of them lay there, holding hands, looking at each other. Max then said very quietly, "Friends forever."
What brings this all up? Just that a few nights after watching the Grinch we watched Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. That’s the one narrated by Fred Astaire and with Mickey Rooney as Kris Kringle. Great stuff. Jessica Claus nee The Schoolteacher is so smokin’ly hot it’s bizarre; even Top Management gasped the first time young Jessica appears in profile. And the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Claus have been living in sin all this time—they say in the cartoon that they weren’t able to get married officially, so they just held an impromptu ceremony themselves, with only the animals as witnesses; I believe that their sham "marriage" is one of the things the Defense of Marriage Act is supposed to protect us good ‘Muricans against—is a bit of a mindblower. Oh, and Santa’s a felon. Which is weird. Actually, it’s even more than that. But whatever.
So far, so good. By and large. But then a few nights after that we decided to watch A Year Without a Santa Claus.
Now, the drop in quality is most noticeable. I loooooooved this show as a kid—it’s the one with Heat Miser and Snow Miser and Santa deciding to take a holiday (which seems to ignore the fact that he only works one damn night the entire year and he can’t even be arsed to show up for that?) and "Blue Christmas" and all that. But watching with adult eyes you realize that the story’s all over the place. It’s not well-paced and the acting’s awful—yes, even by puppet standards; there’s this one sequence where Santa just makes these utterly bizarre grunting noises for about a minute and a half with no explanation. Oh, and everyone lies all the time. Santa fibs to his wife, who then fibs right back. Then she sends two moronic little elves off to do a job for which they’re woefully unqualified and then they have to fib in order to do it and…ugh.
[And, yes, I know you’re really only allowed to use the word "arsed" in that context if you’re actually British but there’s no truly equivalent expression in the US. So I make do and risk the disdain of millions worldwide. Just another Thursday afternoon. And since it is, I shall now put on the Brian Eno album of the same name. Thank you for reminding me. Is this another of those rambling tangents I’ve been informed make up the majority of blogs?]
But there’s a bigger problem with A Year Without a Santa Claus, as far as I’m concerned. And it’s the same problem I have with Miracle on 34th Street or the otherwise beautiful book The Polar Express (and, I’m sure, the film as well, but I’ve not seen it). And that problem is this: it takes for granted the idea that people don’t believe in Santa Claus. That believing in Santa Claus is absurd and only for the smallest of children.
In A Year Without a Santa Claus there’s a little boy who helps out the elves and Mrs. Claus. Just how he does this isn’t really clear—what he really does is simply tag along in dangerous situations but they say he’s helping them so even though he doesn’t do anything helpful I guess he must be. The kid seems to be in about fifth grade. He’s a really nice kid, friendly and polite, and when asked if he believes is Santa, his reply is, "Heck no! I’m too old for that stuff. That’s just for little kids." And his dad then explains that he too felt the same when he was a little boy.
So I’m watching this with the girls and The Bean sorta cocks her head at that part. She’s too caught up in the story to ask the question that’s clearly just popped up in her active little brain and, thankfully, she doesn’t remember to ask later why only little kids believe in Santa. But there it is. The seed’s been planted.
And here’s the thing: we’ve never told the kids there’s a Santa Claus. Society does that for us. We’ve never had to bring it up because it’s absolutely everywhere (meaning my Jihad Against Christmas clearly continues to be a miserable failure).
Top Management doesn’t believe in lying to kids, and we’ve both met a surprisingly number of adults who said they truly felt betrayed by their parents when they found out the truth. So we’ve never told the kids there is or isn’t a Santa…unless they’ve asked. So far the only one to do that was Max, in a very roundabout way.
She asked if the Tooth Fairy was real. Top Management reminded her that we always answer a question if it’s asked so was she sure she really wanted to know? Max assured her that she indeed did. So the news was broken. Max smiled and said she’d suspected—the difference in pay between what she got per tooth and what a good friend got per tooth had sent up little red flags since, clearly, the Tooth Fairy had some sort of sliding scale or was skimming off the top when it came to our household.
Max thanked Top Management and started to walk away. Then she turned back and said very seriously, "Mom, some day I might ask you about Santa Claus. And when I do, I want you to tell me. But only when I ask, okay? And I’m not asking now."
So I’m not some dude who’s all into the whole Santa thang; in fact, I’m about as far from it as it’s possible for a semi-normal semi-Christian dad to get. But that’s not the point. The point is that our society encourages kids to believe in Santa, and then they tell ‘em stories that are designed to inspire doubt in the very same thing—and both those happen in the exact same stories. The dissonance there is just bewildering to me. Why set it up in the first fifteen minutes of the story just to knock it down in the next fifteen…and then build it up again in the last fifteen? Pick a damn lane, man.
I think what it comes down to is that people think kids are hipper than they are. I don’t believe that’s true. Smarter, yes. Hipper, no. Or at least, not naturally. But I think they’re forced into a state of premature hipness by people who simply assume the kids are there already and thus prod them into it before they’re necessarily ready for it. And then the kids are hip so if someone raises this kind of objection, the rebuttal is, hey, my kid’s hip already. And they are. But maybe they weren’t ready to be. And it’s too late to do anything about it now.
And, hey, some kids are ready for it. Of course they are. But some aren’t. And the one-size-fits-all thing really takes away some of the magic of childhood, I think. And I really don’t think a five-year-old, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is. And since that’s pretty much right there in the target audience for these things I’m mentioning, we run into that cognitive dissonance. A sixth grader? Sure. A kindergartner? Not so much. As in, not at all. I just don’t get it.
I’ve always had a Holden Caufield thing, even when I was in high school, but this just seems a shame to me. That whole adulthood thing lasts for the overwhelming majority of a person’s life, and it’s a wonderful thing (for the most part). Childhood’s such a fleeting period and, as Mister Young put it, "once you’re gone, you can’t come back." So why rush it?
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