Please, keep Santa alive; fool me

Dec 07, 2008 Features / Columnists, My Column

---

Just this past week I read a letter by a man who appeared to be angry because as he put it, adults are fooling children.

He claims that they have no right to tell children about Santa Claus because according to him, there are no Santa Clauses and that children should be made aware of this fact.

I rarely read the letter pages because of some of the things that appear there and I have always told myself that I cannot afford to get angry when there is really no need to do so.

However, the headline caught my eye because I have a vested interest in children, if only because they seem in increasing numbers to be doing worse and worse at the external examinations.

I know that the Education Ministry keeps saying that the last results were better that the previous ones and that the government is spending money to ensure that there is a turnaround in the quality of education.

Well, if every succeeding results are better than the previous ones, I shudder to think what some of them might have been. The corollary is that by now the results should have been the best there ever was, given the constant improvements.

But that is not the issue here. The issue is with that letter writer who spoke about fooling children. He surely could not have been an educator because were he one, he would know that children have flights of fancy, perhaps more so than adults. It is this flight of fancy that eventually makes them the ‘A’ class students they eventually become.

In the first instance, children use their imagination to fashion things. I surely would not consider it stupid that a child who has a block of wood and believes that it is a doll is losing touch with reality.

As a parent I have known my daughters to come up to me with some bundle of cloth, asking me to feed the baby.

These girls have also made me drink imaginary tea from teacups that were so small that had I opened my big mouth I would have swallowed the things with near fatal consequences.

Was I wrong to allow them to pretend? When I fed that imaginary baby or took that sip of imaginary tea, was I lying to them?

As a boy I had toy guns and I shot my enemies who would collapse and play dead. Of course they were fooling me and themselves but was someone committing a crime?

Children grew up hearing about Hansel and Gretel, about the Dog and the Bone, about Sleeping Beauty, about Red Riding Hood, about King Arthur and Robin Hood and Batman and Superman.

The fact is that children love to escape into a fantasy world that is so beautiful that if left to themselves they would create their own. Santa Claus and his elves and Rudolph are just another in the long list of fantasy characters.

As old as I am, at Christmastime I get lost in the world of Santa Claus and his climbing down the chimney. There are adults who long for the so-called white Christmas. As children, we were fed a diet of snow on the ground and Frosty the Snowman (made everlasting by the late Nat King Cole).

Some of us who went overseas got a harsh reality of what a white Christmas really is—cold – so cold that your nose, ears and hands hurt.

Your nose runs and you are glad to be indoors, something that we in this corner of the world hate to do at Christmastime.

But we endure the cold until the first snow comes and we become ‘nevah see come fuh see’; glad to see the snow that we once dreamt about.

To tell a child about Santa Claus is to make that child look forward to something, to help that child think of pleasant things; to help that child understand that there is a world better than this harsh place where people kill each other just to take what they have; where men beat women because they could; where food is never enough because parents are too poor to afford.

Even the street children, who have been forced to grow up before their time, enjoy Santa Claus. They know that he does not exist but they also know that there is a good person who for a moment could take them out of their misery.

They look forward to this mythical man every year. Of course there are countries where children have other pleasant characters to look forward to.

And in the same way we fool (I hate that word) children about Santa Claus, we scare the hell out of them about the dark. In my day, the old folks told some tall horror tales and today I long for them.

The letter writer should ask some people why they fool themselves about obeah and about a religion that tells them that if they are good, they will go to heaven and if bad, to hell.

He should criticize those parents who allow their children to get lost in the world of Pokemon and Barney and the Flintstones and the Simpsons and the lot.

To be honest, that writer must have had a miserable childhood and wants to deprive the children of today of theirs.

---

---