The boys have been talking about him a lot this season. You know, the larger-than-life figure who was probably once a real flesh and blood person, but whose mythology has blossomed into something so wide-reaching and so integral to our culture that you simply can’t avoid him. He’s so central to this particular season that he regularly makes an appearance in conversations at the family dinner table, and I feel like I have to bite back my own cynicism to support the boys’ unquestioning faith for at least a couple more years.<\/p>\n
Oh no, not that <\/em>guy. Not Santa. I’m talking about Jesus.<\/p>\n It’s just been in the last month or so, juggling the various seasonal mythologies, that I realized I feel more or less the same way about supporting my children’s belief in Santa as I do about supporting their belief in Jesus. The similarities are striking: I believe both are lovely concepts at the core and I have no issue with how other people choose to venerate the central figure – or not; I think the values and ideals engendered by each of the central figures are far more important than the figures themselves; both figures have reached a status of epic mythological proportions based on some granule of (often debated and misrepresented) fact; and, at one point in my own childhood I had complete faith in each of them, and managed to survive the transition from faith to skepticism intact. So while I think it’s important for the boys to have some sort of belief in the central mythology in each case, I’m having a hard time counterbalancing that with a vague sense of guilt in being disingenous with them. <\/p>\n (Hoo boy, if the circumcision post <\/a>didn’t generate enough controversy, this one sure will!)<\/p>\n For as long as I can remember, I’ve believed more or less that Jesus was a great and influential man, but I haven’t been able to give myself over to the kind of faith that can accept he was God incarnate. In choosing to send the boys to a Catholic school, I realized I’d have to subjugate my own beliefs and let the boys learn a more traditional religious view – just like I did when I was their age. When they’re older, we can have righteous religious debates and they’ll be free to choose whatever belief system works for them, be it fundamentalist Christianity or Hinduism or something else – or nothing.<\/p>\n Tristan talks a lot about Jesus because that’s what he’s learning in school, and Simon picks right up on it. We entertain lots of questions along the lines of “Why did Jesus make snow?” and “Why did Jesus make spaghetti?” (I had a hard time not seizing that opportunity to indoctrinate him with a little Flying Spaghetti Monsterism<\/a>, but I restrained myself.) I try to answer him in ways that contradict neither the official Catholic perspective he’ll be learning nor my own muddled beliefs, and while we’re philosophizing at a first-grade level, I think it’s working.<\/p>\n But I can’t help but feel a little hypocritical sometimes as I support and affirm what they’re learning to believe when it’s in direct contravention to my personal beliefs — in much the same way it’s hard for me to give myself (and them) entirely over to the Santa mythology. I feel like I’m being duplicitous and dishonest, even if it’s for a good cause. <\/p>\n Building up their belief in Santa is full of the same traps and pitfalls: I feel hypocritical setting the boys up to believe in something I know is false, and I feel bad knowing one day I’ll have to reconcile that faith with reality. One of these days, they’re going to realize it’s Daddy who took a bite out of the cookie and left it on the plate by the fireplace, and it’s us who stuffs the stockings and leaves the present under the tree on Christmas morning, and it bothers me on a fundamental level to deceive them. Not enough to do anything but muse about it here, mind you.<\/p>\n I don’t plan to deprive them of the joy of believing in Santa any more than I plan to contradict the teachings of the Catholic system. In time, they’ll be old enough to make their own choices, and find their own belief system. I hope they’ll always have the same love of the magic of Christmas that is deeply ingrained in me, whatever mythology they choose to believe. I think I’d best be getting my story straight pretty soon, though. I suspect their days of blind faith are numbered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The boys have been talking about him a lot this season. You know, the larger-than-life figure who was probably once a real flesh and blood person, but whose mythology has blossomed into something so wide-reaching and so integral to our culture that you simply can’t avoid him. He’s so central to this particular season that … Continue reading “The twin mythologies of Christmas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mothering-without-a-licence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}