I realize that it is February and no one wants to think about Christmas again until several weeks after all the stores start playing Christmas music on Halloween, but we had something of a holiday-related parenting fiasco back in December and I have been meaning to write about it ever since. If you can stand to transport your mind back to the mother of all holidays I think you might enjoy the story. This also gives me an opportunity to belatedly show off more of the photos my brother-in-law extraordinaire, Daniel Meigs, took on Christmas morning. All of the images below are his work.

Kate on Christmas morning with her new tricycle. Which most definitely did not come from Santa.

In retrospect, I can see that it was naive of me to think that we were going to get through Kate's third Christmas without deciding whether or not to tell her about Santa. I should have realized that since this was the first year she understood what Christmas was and noticed things like decorations, it would probably also be the year she started wondering who in the heck all the jolly fat men in red suits were. But as I may have mentioned a few thousand times, it's been kind of a hectic year for us and as the holidays rolled around I was pretty much in survival mode.

I realize that Santa is one of those parenting issues you're supposed to have strong feelings about, especially if you go to church. My own parents told us Santa wasn't real and while I don't feel traumatized about it, I'm pretty sure my cousins do. That's because one year my brother took it upon himself to inform them that Santa Claus was a figment of their imaginations. He argued with our cousin Shelley about it until she got exasperated and ended the fight with "Well, if you keep talking about Santa like that, he isn't going to bring you any presents!" Which was pretty hard to argue with, really.

Kate in the awesome pajamas my Aunt Emily sent to her from Shanghai, where my aunt and uncle are living right now. Thanks, Aunt Emily and Uncle Gil!

But somehow I can't get too worked up about the Santa issue. I don't want to dress Dan up in a suit and wig to perpetuate the myth, but I also don't feel the need to carry on as if Santa is evil and in direct competition with Baby Jesus. Sometime in December I did read an article that summarized what I thought would be a reasonable approach for talking about Santa in the future. I shared it with Dan, and you can go here to read it. The basic idea is that you tell your kids the historical truth -- that today's Santa story started with the life of Saint Nicholas, who was a man famous in the early church for his generosity. For the record, what I like about this approach is that it avoids the Santa-is-evil extreme on the one hand but also allows for a clear distinction between the harmless cultural fun of Santa and the true purpose of Christmas, the celebration of Christ's birth.

For this year, the idea of a past person who once gave people presents and whose memory was later edited to include flying reindeer and red velvet seemed a little complicated for Kate, who still divides her life into things that will happen "before my nap" and "after my nap." And I really thought "If we just don't make a big deal about it this year, it probably won't even come up. I mean, it's not like anyone is going to sit her down and tell her about Santa."

Then one day at preschool, they sat her down and told her about Santa.

Well, technically I don't know who brought Santa up. It could have been another kid rather than the school staff. All I know is that on the last day of preschool before Christmas break, I dropped Kate off for her Christmas party and was halfway home when I realized she had left her jacket in the car. Since it was pretty cold, I turned around to drop it off, thinking I would just slip into the classroom, put the jacket in her cubby and leave. But when I got into the classroom, Kate's teacher said "Oh, it's actually a good thing you're here. We were talking about Santa and Kate says she doesn't want him to come down the chimney to her house."

"Well ... is she upset about it?" I asked.
"A little," said her teacher.

I didn't really know how to respond to this. It didn't seem like a great moment to reassure Kate that Santa is totally imaginary and is under no circumstances going to come to her house, what with 8 other kids sitting there who probably believe in Santa. This was the moment when I saw the giant hole in my logic up to that point. In the back of my mind I had assumed that if Kate did somehow hear about Santa, we would just roll with it and she would have one of two reactions: Either she would think it was great and be happy (normal kid reaction to news of loot brought by a magical man on a sleigh) or she wouldn't care too much (normal three-year-old reaction to ideas that do not have immediate physical consequences). What I completely failed to anticipate was a third reaction -- anxiety over the idea of a strange man who comes into your house uninvited in the middle of the night. If you think about it, this is actually the rational reaction. I mean, we don't let other people in the house at night. It doesn't matter if they have a sack.

At the moment, Kate seemed fairly absorbed in her finger painting, so I just left and went on with the morning. But when I picked her up from school, the first thing she said was "Mom, I don't want Santa to come to my house!"

I had to decide right there in the car what in the world to tell her about that. This was bad, mostly because I am a horrible verbal ad-libber. When required to answer a question I am unprepared for I ramble, wander and just generally babble in a completely unorganized way, all while hearing a voice in my mind screaming "Stop talking now before you say something really dumb! Too late!" I think one reason I like to write so much is because of the beauty of the backspace key -- the ability to just delete all the crazy and sound concise and well-spoken.

So, reverting back to the last organized thought I had on the Santa topic, I started trying to tell her about Saint Nicholas.

"Well, sweetie, a long time ago there was a man named Nicholas who gave people gifts because he loved Jesus, and Santa Clause is kind of a pretend story about him."
"Today?"
"No, not today, baby. A long time ago."
"After my nap?"
"Umm. Not really. Anyway, people pretend that he brings their presents, and that's fun."
"He will come to our house? No! I don't want him to come to my house!"

This is when I saw the other thing I hadn't factored in -- Kate has no idea what pretend means. This is one of the funny things about kids at this age. They pretend things all the time, but they don't have a word for what they're doing, so when you try to explain that something is "pretend," they don't know what you're talking about. About 10 minutes into our increasingly circular conversation, realizing I needed to back up and define my terminology, I got the great idea to try to explain the concept of pretend by bringing up various cartoon characters Kate is familiar with.

"OK, Kate, it's like when you watch Curious George on television. He's not real, right?"
"Yes, he is. He talks."
"But he only talks on the TV. You've never met him. He's just fun pretend. Like Santa."
"But he moves his head."

Yes, clearly if something talks and moves its head, it is real.

By the time we got home, I had given up trying to explain the historical intricacies and had started doing exactly what I had wanted to avoid doing - telling her emphatically that Santa wasn't real and was definitely not going to come to our house -- not because I really want her to reject the whole idea, but because I don't want her to be scared about it. But I think my inability to stick with a story convinced Kate that I had no idea what I was talking about at all and that it was her job to set me straight.

So in the week leading up to Christmas, every time we saw a Santa, which was about every ten minutes, Kate would point and tell me, "Look Mom, he's real. He moves his head," like that proved everything.

Santa would be on TV. "Look Mom, he talks. He's real."
Santa was on a billboard we drove past every day. "Look Mom, he has a nose. He's real."

Eventually I stopped arguing with her, which I hadn't wanted to do anyway, and she seemed to talk herself into being OK with the idea that Santa might be real and might come to the house, which may be all she needed to do in the first place. I'm hoping that by next Christmas, she will have forgotten this little incident and we can start over on the Santa issue. In the meantime, preschool is apparently going to give me lots of opportunities to practice how I discuss mythical characters who come to your house in the middle of the night. This month, they are having Dental Hygiene Month. As a special treat for the kids, the Tooth Fairy is coming for a visit. Kate has already started telling me she doesn't want the Tooth Fairy to take her teeth "when they fall out after my nap."

That's my girl.

Kate trying on the helmet we got to go with her trike, which totally did not fit because of her exceptional noggin girth.

I love this shot. It's of Kate listening to my dad read the Christmas story from the Bible before we open gifts, like he has done every Christmas morning that in my memory. I can't look directly at this photo for very long without getting choked up.