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illustration by Kari Kroll

Go to any mall this season and you'll hear "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." It's music to children's ears, but after our first son was born, it became unwelcome noise to my wife and me. We wanted our family to celebrate Christmas for what it really is: Jesus' birthday.

We soon learned that good intentions go only so far. It seemed that everyone was asking our son, "What did you ask Santa for?" And from mid-November on, every store we visited had a costumed Santa (or two or three) on hand. We couldn't just ignore this guy: He was everywhere!

My own childhood memories include Santa: I can remember going into the woods to cut our Christmas tree, decorating it with tinsel and then waiting impatiently for Santa to arrive. So many of the Christmas memories that I wanted to share involved Santa. It became clear that we needed to deal with Santa before we could help our son learn the true meaning of Christmas. But how could we talk about Santa and still give Christ his rightful place?

Even though for some, Santa symbolizes the commercialism that taints the Christmas season, we knew that stern lectures about consumerism or materialism would make no sense to a child. After all, how can a jolly, generous guy who loves children and gives them presents be bad? Instead we opted for a nonconfrontational approach. We decided to gently but firmly undermine Santa whenever the opportunity arose, while focusing most of our efforts and excitement on celebrating the birth of the Christ child. That way, we hoped, it would be clear to our son that Jesus really is the center of our family's Christmas celebration.

By the time he was 5, our son started noticing that there were Santas at every store, and he began to ask questions: "Which one is the real Santa, Daddy?"

I took advantage of the opportunity by asking him: "What do you think? A real person can't be in a lot of different places at the same time, can he? And how can Santa visit all the houses of all the children in the world in just one night? A real person couldn't do that, but a pretend person could, couldn't he?"

Children have a marvelous ability to believe in magical behavior. But by the time they're 5 or 6, they begin to separate fact from fantasy. When reading fairy tales to my son, I would stress that Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk or Paul Bunyan were able to do things that real people couldn't. With carefully worded questions, I knew I could encourage his developing ability to understand that not every person we talk about is real; some "people" are just pretend.

When your child begins to ask questions about how Santa can enter a house that doesn't have a fireplace, help her understand that Santa is a pretend person, like a cartoon character. You can even make a game of it. When reading a favorite children's book with her, ask, "Is Curious George real or pretend? Are Mom and Dad real or pretend?"

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