Years before we moved into my high school ward the bishop there–the classic 1990s Utah conservative curmudgeon type–announced from the stand (I imagine as parents were quickly trying to shield their children’s ears) that Santa Clause was not real and that parents should not lie to their kids. The man has since passed away, but he is an absolute legend to this day. 

While I find acting as some kind of mythbuster holiday edition without parental permission problematic, we do not in fact do Santa Clause in our house. This is in no way to cast judgment on those who do do Santa Clause, just one perspective. 

Before my parents told me the truth, I often wondered how the Santa Clause world interfaced with the religious one. Did God give Santa his powers? There was clearly some connection since it was on  Christ’s birthday. When my parents told me the truth, I remember openly wondering what other supernatural things they were telling me that would later turn out to be well-curated myths designed to keep us well-behaved. My wife, having not been raised with Santa, didn’t have that experience (evidently her sister first heard of the man in a red suit who came down chimneys at her elementary school and told everybody that was the stupidest thing she ever heard), but she knows other people besides me who had the prepubescent Santa Clause-induced religious crisis. 

And then when I hit high school/college the New Atheists were in vogue, and the “Jesus is Santa Clause for adults” one liner became a favorite among the secular Bro types. So the Santa Clause/religion interrelation became complex enough that we thought it was simpler to simply have a rule of never intentionally telling our kids an untruth.   

So far it’s worked out for us. Maybe our kids have had less magic in their lives, I don’t know (as a fun aside, in a moment of four-year old rebellion, years ago my son defiantly told us that he didn’t believe in God but he did believe in the Santa we told him didn’t exist.), but the “Jesus is Santa Clause for grownups” is simple and superficially appealing enough that it just seems like a more even keel to always keep a fairly significant distance between the two.