When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, I was a student at Saint Michael's Choir School in Toronto. The all-boys school was founded in the 1930s to provide choral music for St Michael's cathedral, which is the flagship Church of the Archdiocese of Toronto.
There were two really busy times of year. One was Easter, but of course the other one was Christmas starting in Advent and preparing for Carol services and the big Christmas concert that the school put on at Massey Hall, and then a flurry of high masses at the regular Sunday times, but then also late into the evening, with the peak solemnities taking place at midnight on Christmas Eve and also New Year's Eve.
That was my reality, that was the world. My sense of time and daily routine revolved around the ritual year, and every year told a mythic but also human story that went from a humble birth on the darkest night of the year to a bloody and lonely but somehow redemptive sacrifice in the spring.
Summer and fall were the off-season I guess. The empty time. Time to pause and prepare for the next whirlwind cycle. Baseball was in the summer, and unlike the liturgical drama, that seemed timeless. Anything could happen in the 9th inning. You might die and stay dead. You might rise again.
Setting aside the stories and beliefs: all those bodily feelings of time are now gone for me. Liturgical seasonality has blurred and blended into an endless scrolling present.
Our sons are 8 and 12, and they have never known this rhythm or its inexorable, inarguable commitments. The difference is as stark as the difference between my predigital life and their digital immersion from birth. But this is not any point of regret or concern for me: they find their own liturgies in everything they do.
The 12 year-old waits for the next episode of Arcane to find out whether the revolution will succeed. The 8 year-old has committed the scriptures of the Clone Wars to memory. The advent calendar is marked not by readings but by a particular sequence of movies, starting with Smallfoot.
Is this different from incense-filled spaces ringing with organ music? Yes, but it’s no less real, no more imaginary. This is part of why I’m allergic to the reactionary Jonathan Haidt-type pearl-clutching about technology, which never seems to truly engage what’s happening for kids in their own terms.
The tendency is, I think, to stand above and beyond and worry about that difference more than examine it, much less lean into it. The tendency is to think: my world was the real one, but what is this now? How can I enter in?
It’s easy, old man. Pick up an XBox controller. It’s not going to hurt you. You’ll be okay.
The childhood I had spent tethered to a Cathedral is also dream-like. It’s was a fiction, and we were all meant to buy into it. In youth, many people do. But most see behind the veil at some point, I believe. But when they do, they know that if they are planning on staying, they’ll keep quiet about it. They’ll preserve the mirage.
It’s like kayfabe in pro wrestling. Many people sitting in that church have the sense that this could all be made up. But no one says it aloud. And if you’re one of the priests or nuns or choirboys, you definitely keep your mouth shut.
That’s why Santa Claus is so interesting.
Santa invokes strong faith in the child, up until the moment that everyone knows he’s just a story. It’s actually remarkable that Christianity promotes this myth for children that will inevitably be deconstructed in a way that could threaten a broader belief in dogma. It’s like a cognitive Trojan Horse.
Is the transformation of Santa from real to imaginary transitive to God? Or is it a bait and switch? If we give you Santa to debunk, you won’t touch the Trinity?
For years, our kids believed in Santa, and we supported that the best we could. My partner worked harder at it than I did. She didn’t grow up religious and so this is where the Christmas energy concentrated: such care and excitement with planning, surprises, such attention to both fairness and generosity.
When I think about how much love she has always poured into this I am reminded of her deep yearning for justice in all things. And to the unconditional love for the child’s experience, and her willingness to fiercely protect it. And how that love is not part of the normal world, but by conjuring it with careful planning we show how it could be.
One of my favourite political writers, McKenzie Wark, captured a part of what my partner does in this piece from 9 years ago. Wark is talking about how this boundless generosity and care actually strikes a blow to the armor of capitalism.
Let’s start with a defense of Xmas, or of what is essential to it: that there is a tree, and a gift for a child under a tree, that is “from Santa.” It is a way to enact for a child the opposite of Nietzsche's theory of universal debt. An adult, usually a parent, enacts the possibility that the child owes the world nothing. On the contrary the world can make for the child at least one moment of joy. Something will come from the world for the child.
For the child, Xmas has nothing to do with 'consumerism'. The gift just appears. It's a bit of what the surrealists called the marvelous. For the adult, it is a way to give to the child without expecting the child to be grateful to the parent. Rather, it is so the child can know that the world itself could be generous. Nothing is owed in return. At least not yet. Later, the child can be let in on the secret: that we are staging a marvelous ritual about how the world itself could be experienced as bounty and plentitude, but we do so in a long loop through the generations. The gift the child will owe does not come until much later, when the child grows up, and owes a gift in turn to another child. Such long loops are what constitute the plural subject ‘we.’
(BTW: I dig that out every year and read it and it fills me with a kind of relief I cannot explain.)
Today, both of our children are in on the secret. I can’t remember the exact moments it happened, but I can remember the feeling of having to tell the truth about something vast. The younger one asking, very frankly, “is Santa Claus real?” gave very much the same feeling as when he asked: “is my grandmother dying?”
Everything in my body stops. This is it, this is the moment why you’re in a family. Someone needs an answer you don’t quite have.
My instinct is: never lie, but do not force the truth.
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