Quote Originally Posted by Aedilred View Post
I don't know - I think this may come back to what JeenLeen said. In my experience - albeit I am not a parent so that experience is limited - children are capable of being simultaneously quite gullible but also quite sceptical and perceptive. The classic "kids say the funniest things" routines are often founded in the ability of children to see things and make logical connections that adults have got into the habit of ignoring or overlooking. (The rest are usually just "child hasn't yet learned what it's not polite to say").

Maybe not at the age of three and a half but I think by age six the majority of children who believe in Santa do so by choice, albeit maybe not a conscious one. On some level they know it doesn't make sense, but they're willing to go along with it because they don't want to confront the alternative explanations. My parents went to absurd lengths to maintain the illusion, but they did so partly because they knew I was on some level looking for evidence of the lie.


Something I've found curious is the way that the American Santa, at least as portrayed in TV Christmas episodes and the like, differs from the Father Christmas of my youth. Both have similar characteristics but the way "Santa" is approached is somehow slightly less believable.

For instance, our Father Christmas lived in Lapland, as opposed to Santa living at the North Pole. To an alert child, "the North Pole" raises a lot of questions. Which pole, true north or magnetic north? Haven't people been to the north pole? Why didn't they see his house? Why doesn't it show up in photos of explorers there, or on Google Maps? There isn't even any land at the North Pole, just ice, etc. Lapland, by contrast, is big and vague and real enough that you can say "somewhere in Lapland, nobody knows where".

And then there's the diet. Santa - as I understand it - has milk and cookies left out for him, which is what a child would want. In our house at least, Father Christmas got a mince pie and a glass of sherry: what an adult would want. Part of that was probably for the benefit of my dad, but it also helped contribute to the image of an actual person with a mindset different to that of a child.

This is probably partly anti-American snobbery on my part, and probably also a slightt sadness at seeing my childhood traditions gradually eroded and homogenised by the flood of American media to the extent. But I do think that the modern/American Santa is a slightly more fantastic, less believable figure, less relatable and somehow less rooted in the real world. Or maybe that's just nostalgia on my part.
I don't think I knew magnetic north and true north were different until I was like 10, long after I'd accepted Santa as fiction.

As for the milk and cookie diet, it depends on the degree to which you think Santa is even human. I know that the "jolly old elf" line in The Night Before Christmas is meant pretty literally. I don't know if I really understood the distinction as a little kid, but you can get away with a lot of the Santa mythos by just saying "MAGIC!"