Most people believe that teaching their kids about Santa is just good, clean fun and that there is no harm in it. I'm not sure I agree.
Roz and I did not teach our kids to believe in Santa. While I don't judge parents who do teach their kids about Santa, let me give you a few reasons why we chose not to.
- The thing that got us thinking about this was when I would run into skeptics on campus that made a connection between believing in Santa and believing in God. They would argue that they blindly believed in Santa because their parents told them to and then felt like a fool later on to discover he wasn't real. They determined they weren't going to make the same mistake by believing in God - someone there parents told them about but that they couldn't personally see.
- We believe that one of Satan's chief strategies is to separate kids from their parents by sowing seeds of distrust. Knowing this, we never wanted to give our kids even the slightest reason to ever distrust our word as they were growing up.
- The idea of Santa has grown wildly from a jolly old man who gave gifts to the less fortunate to a man who is omniscient ("he sees when you're sleeping; he knows when you're awake; he knows if you've been bad or good..."), our judge ("He's making a list; he's checking it twice; gonna find out whose naughty and nice...) and omnipotent (one who can travel the whole world and give presents to all the children of the world in just 24 hours).
