{"id":154,"date":"2008-01-11T08:45:14","date_gmt":"2008-01-11T13:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/angel\/blog\/?p=154"},"modified":"2008-03-16T14:38:54","modified_gmt":"2008-03-16T19:38:54","slug":"my-beef-with-santa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/?p=154","title":{"rendered":"My beef with Santa"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nLily asked Santa for a Cinderella dress this year.
\n27 December 2007<\/p>\n

Even before I had children — even before I was pregnant and children were just a longing hope in my\u00c2\u00a0 heart\u00c2\u00a0— I was looking forward to playing Santa with my kids.\u00c2\u00a0 I was looking forward to the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa… all the childhood magical fantasies.<\/p>\n

My mom didn’t like the idea of Santa because of the materialistic aspect of that fantasy, so we always knew that Santa wasn’t real.\u00c2\u00a0 As I grew older, I felt cheated.\u00c2\u00a0 Everyone else had these magical childhood\u00c2\u00a0memories of Santa, and all I had was cold, impersonal\u00c2\u00a0reality.\u00c2\u00a0 So I told myself that I would let my children participate in the fantasy.<\/p>\n

This year was the first year that Lily really understood who Santa was, so we really played it up.\u00c2\u00a0 We talked about him a lot, and we wrote him a letter.\u00c2\u00a0 And, as the season wore on, I became more and more disenchanted with this particular childhood illusion, for two very distinct reasons actually.<\/p>\n

First, I constantly lied to my child.\u00c2\u00a0 I made an oath about six years ago to not lie.\u00c2\u00a0 When I made the oath, I thought it would be very easy to keep because I didn’t consider myself\u00c2\u00a0a liar.\u00c2\u00a0 Turns out, I lied all the time and it has been much harder to keep than I anticipated.\u00c2\u00a0 I lied to get out of social engagements; I lied so I wouldn’t hurt people’s feelings; I lied to get what I wanted.\u00c2\u00a0 I had no idea I lied as much as I did until I made that oath.\u00c2\u00a0 Try not lieing for a month or so… it’s quite hard.<\/p>\n

Anyways, I lied up a storm during the month of December.\u00c2\u00a0 Lied lied lied to my precious daughter with whom I would like to only share truth.\u00c2\u00a0 So I’m having a real problem with that.<\/p>\n

And secondly, just like my mom said, Santa is<\/em> really materialistic.\u00c2\u00a0 I love the idea<\/em> of Santa, but the actual practice is making me cringe.\u00c2\u00a0 In the Christmas movies, Santa is more than a\u00c2\u00a0shill for corporate America.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The movies are full of Christmas sentiment.\u00c2\u00a0 But, in actual practice, all that gets shoved aside, and we write our letters that say, “I would like x for Christmas.”\u00c2\u00a0 No love, no goodwill towards men, no charity… only “I want.”<\/p>\n

Since this was my first year to work with the Santa mythos, we went the “I want” route, but that really<\/em> didn’t work for me.\u00c2\u00a0 It went against every liberal lefty bone in my body.\u00c2\u00a0 Matt and I have to tweak Santa to fit him into our family’s value system.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m sure we can somehow make the magic of Santa fit into the magic of the Woodings household. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lily asked Santa for a Cinderella dress this year. 27 December 2007 Even before I had children — even before I was pregnant and children were just a longing hope in my\u00c2\u00a0 heart\u00c2\u00a0— I was looking forward to playing Santa with my kids.\u00c2\u00a0 I was looking forward to the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa… […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-surburbia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angelsdesk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}