Santa Isn’t Real—but These Families Are Stuck Pretending He Is, Lest the Christmas People Revolt
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Christmas magic met its match in the town of Brantford, Ontario, this year. As the annual Santa Claus Parade prepared to make its way down the main drag on Nov. 30, attendees were disturbed to read four confrontational signs plastered in the window of one home on the parade route. “Santa is fake,” one said. “Santa isn’t real,” repeated another. “Your parents are Santa.” “Your family buys the presents.”
Shocked that a fellow Brantfordite would attempt to dampen the joy of Christmas for believers, Canadian observers posted enraged screeds on social media, calling the poster-maker a “psycho” who deserved a rock through their window. After receiving several direct complaints, police officers made contact with the resident, who voluntarily removed the signs. “While it isn’t illegal to be a ‘Grinch,’ we do encourage everyone to embrace the spirit of the season,” read a lightly menacing statement from the Brantford Police Service.
That a series of factual posters about a storybook character would provoke state intervention illustrates the fierce protective instinct some adults maintain about Santa Claus. No matter their own traditions, every member of society is expected to abet the ruse in public, lest children who celebrate Christmas be prematurely disabused of their beliefs. Those who do not comply are branded as Scrooges, Grinches, or worse—party poopers indifferent to the suffering children their honesty may leave in its wake.
For the most part, this is a small and unobjectionable ask. It’s fun to lie to children about something that makes them happy! But for parents raising kids who are Jewish, Muslim, or in any other religious or secular tradition that doesn’t incorporate Santa Claus, it presents a dilemma: Do they tell their own children to lie to kids who believe?
Baltimore-area journalist Rona Kobell grew up in a largely Jewish community where believing in Santa was not the norm. Though she was living in a Christian-dominated area by the time she and her husband had children of their own, she said, “I kind of just thought we would ignore it, like my parents did.”
But their eldest daughter, Maya, was the kind of kid who would have taken great pride in revealing the truth about Santa to her unsuspecting peers. (Once, when a friend came home from a Disney trip gushing about the princesses she’d met, Maya dutifully informed her that the women were actors. The friend broke down in tears.) So when Maya transferred from a Jewish preschool to a school at the YMCA, upping the chances of a disastrous spilling of beans, Kobell and her husband told their daughter that while Santa wasn’t real, it was a “Jewish secret” that no one else could know.
Characterizing the secret as uniquely Semitic was an impulse decision, Kobell said. Missing out on the whole Santa thing can make a non-Christian kid feel left out, but spinning it as a special in-born privilege can make that same kid feel like a big shot. Kobell also wanted to impress upon Maya that it was very important for her to refrain from blabbing. “This isn’t just ‘Mom doesn’t want you to tell,’ ” Kobell said. “This is something we pass down, this secret—like it’s part of our heritage to keep the secret.”
Lauren Ben-Shoshan, a rabbi in California, saw the Santa talk as a teachable moment about secrets themselves. When she sat each of her four children down around kindergarten age to clarify that Santa was a parental invention, she spoke about the difference between “good secrets and bad secrets”—a kid-friendly discussion about reporting abuse or dangerous behavior, even if an adult says to keep quiet.
A classic example of a good secret, one that’s OK to keep, is a surprise party. It makes you feel warm inside, and makes everyone involved happy. “A lot of 5- and 6-year-olds, they’ve never been to a surprise party, and they don’t understand how a surprise party works,” Ben-Shoshan said. “But they do understand how Santa works, because they’re watching it with their friends.”
Not all Jewish families tell their kids this ancient ancestral truth. In an effort to include their children in the fun of wintertime Christian hegemony, some parents raising their children in a non-Christian faith tradition (or no faith at all) have adopted Santa as an à la carte addition to their holiday celebrations. Holiday mashups like these are understandably common in interfaith families. One Protestant dad, bringing up Jewish daughters with his Jewish wife, needed to explain to his kids where the presents came from when they celebrated Christmas morning at their Christian grandparents’ house. Santa was real, the dad told them, and he “brings you Hanukkah presents on Christmas, because he knows you’re Jewish.” It stood to reason that if Santa watched them sleep, he also watched them at Hebrew school.
Growing up Muslim in the U.K., Sumaya Teli heard about Jesus and the Virgin Mary from her mother, as part of her religious education. (The Christmas story is told in the Quran as the miraculous birth of a prophet.) But she only learned about Santa from kids at school. Though Teli didn’t celebrate Christmas, she heard that Santa loved children and allegedly visited every kid’s house on his big night. “I had a tinge of belief in him somehow,” Teli said. “I was like, ‘Oh, maybe he will come!’ ”
One December, when she was around 9 years old, she hung up socks around her house, hoping to wake up on Christmas morning to find them filled with goodies. When they remained empty, “it was like, womp womp, OK, no, he doesn’t exist,” Teli said. Her sister, meanwhile, spilled the tea to her first-grade class, resulting in “pandemonium.”
Now a mother of four in Boston, Teli knows other Muslim parents who give their children the Santa experience. But when her children got old enough to start learning about Santa, she wanted to stay true to her family’s own traditions. She was also influenced by the Montessori philosophy, which emphasizes teaching children the truth about the world. So she told her kids the real story of St. Nicholas, the fourth-century man who secretly gave of his wealth and became known as a protector of children. He was a man to admire, Teli told them, and his works aligned with the third pillar of Islam, which mandates donating to charity. St. Nicholas didn’t make a fuss about his generosity, either, just as the prophet Muhammad encouraged the pious to give humbly, such that their left hand wouldn’t know what their right hand had done. For Teli’s kids, “that really played into the whole ‘secret Santa’ and all this stuff.”
Whether or not it’s a child’s responsibility to safeguard the fantasies of their peers is a matter of much disagreement, and for good reason. Adults charge Santa with all their concerns about parenting, childhood innocence, and family traditions. Whatever decision they’ve made about how to include or omit Santa from their holiday celebrations, parents want to be in control. They know that for a child who celebrates Christmas, discovering the truth about Santa can be a formative coming-of-age moment: One study found that the average kid learns the painful truth at age 8, in second or third grade. Some kids gamely play along with the story for as long as possible, hoping to prolong the stream of gifts from the North Pole. Some, like me, confront their parents and come away low-key traumatized. (For more on my sting operation that exposed Santa as a fraud, head to the 11-minute mark of this episode of Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast.)
This explains why an entire genre of cultural output has been created to help kids accept Santa as an undisputed truth. Christmas movies always seem to incorporate at least one jerk of a character who insists that Santa isn’t real, only to be schooled in the end by a stubborn, bought-in child. There’s Miracle on 34th Street, and Elf, and The Santa Clause. In one kids book published last year, Oy, Santa!: Or, There’s a Latke to Learn about Hanukkah, a Jewish boy emails with St. Nick, never questioning the man’s existence. The earnest queries he does produce—“Speaking of miracles, how do you get your reindeer to fly?”—sound ripped from the script of a Christmas movie.
Some parents are sick of perpetuating the ruse, though. “By demanding that everyone participate in making Christmas magic for their kids, Christian parents teach their children that they have the right to live in a homogeneous bubble where absolutely everyone observes Christian traditions,” wrote attorney Mirah Curzer in a 2019 essay titled “Our Jewish Kids Shouldn’t Have to Lie About Santa.” There are some unpleasant historical echoes in teaching religious minorities to lie about their beliefs for the comfort of the majority and their own social safety. “History has not been kind to Jews who anger their Christian neighbors—especially by upsetting their children,” Curzer wrote.
Last month, in an Instagram reel, Melbourne-based parenting influencer Elli Tamar explained that her Jewish kids know Santa as a character who is important to the story of Christmas, but that she “can’t really tell my 5-year-old what to say and not say in the schoolyard.” While several commenters applauded her honesty, one started a heated back-and-forth about the responsibility of nonbelievers “to be kind and considerate of others’ beliefs” because “it’s not your place to ruin it for others.” A similar sentiment was shared by Caitlin Flanagan, the Atlantic writer and provocateur, in a post on X earlier this month, which stated, “if your kid tells my kid there’s no Santa, it’s going to be you, me and some very complicated and unresolved emotional issues.”
Tamar told me in an email that she teaches her kids to be forthcoming and honest in all situations, rather than keep secrets from people. While she wants them to be respectful of other cultures and would never encourage them to proactively unmask Santa at school, “I do not think that my children should carry the burden of protecting other people’s holidays,” she said. “I believe it is the responsibility of the other parents to have those conversations with their children about what to do when other children say ‘But Santa isn’t real.’ ”
There is an easy analogy here to the way parents might talk about another omniscient, unseen, hotly debated figure whose presence is invoked around the holidays: God. Parents can tell their kids that some people believe in Santa, while others don’t. They can say that whether or not Santa is an actual man who flies around in a sleigh, there is comfort and meaning in the story that is worth cherishing. They say that in some houses, Santa doesn’t surveil kids throughout the year and punish them with fossil fuels for hitting their siblings. None of these explanations would place Santa at risk of being traumatically debunked by a loose-lipped friend.
Afroz Khan never gave much thought to how she would explain Santa to her Muslim daughters. Growing up with Indian immigrant parents who loved watching Christmas specials on TV, she knew Santa as a character, like Scooby-Doo—a fun American creation that didn’t have much to do with her own life. She already felt different from other kids at school, so she never questioned why she didn’t get presents from a man who slid down the chimney. She thought her daughters would have a similarly blasé attitude toward the topic. So when her oldest child began coming home from preschool with Christmas-themed crafts, asking whether Santa would be visiting their home in Newburyport, Massachusetts (did he know they were Muslim?), Khan gave her a simple, levelheaded explanation: No, Santa would not be coming, because Santa was an act played out by Christian parents.
A year or two later, Khan’s husband got a phone call at his gastroenterology practice. “I think you need to know what your daughter is doing,” said the voice on the other line. It was an aggrieved parent, who revealed that Khan’s daughter had shared her Santa intel with all the kids on her school bus. “It was almost—I hate to say it, but it was kind of accusatory,” Khan said of the phone call. “I was a little surprised by the magnitude of how severe of an issue it was.”
Khan realized then that although she knew the truth about Santa, she didn’t truly get him. She had no sense of why the story was so precious to the Christmas tradition. “I remember being a little flippant about it, until one of my friends explained it to me in a way that made me understand,” Khan said. For some people, the friend said, the end of believing in Santa marks the end of childhood innocence. Once kids stop buying into the magic, they are visibly touched by the outside world—no longer pure reflections of their parents’ influence, but individual reflections of society.
At the time, Khan and her family members were the only the only Muslims she knew of in an almost entirely white, heavily Christian community. (When they first moved to Newburyport, the girls were called the N-word on the bus, and people assumed the family owned the new Indian restaurant in town.) Word got around about the Santa incident, and Jewish residents started contacting Khan to commiserate. Recognizing that the town was in desperate need of some cross-cultural education, Khan and her husband decided to become ambassadors. They opened their home during Newburyport’s annual holiday house tour, welcoming guests to learn about Islam while the other homes were decked out for Christmas. Khan started visiting local schools to read books about Eid celebrations and make samosas for the students during Ramadan. When the mayor reached out, seeking a representative for the town’s human rights commission, Khan’s husband volunteered.
Now, Khan is serving her third term as a member of city council. She still thinks of her daughter’s Santa moment as a turning point that urged her to civic participation. “My husband and I turned a situation that could have been hard, and we didn’t leave Newburyport,” she said. “We could have gone anywhere, but we stayed. And instead, we stepped up.”
After Khan’s older daughter blabbed about Santa, Khan wanted to keep her younger daughter from provoking similar opprobrium. “We really pleaded and pleaded, ‘Do not say anything,’ ” Khan said. “But that one is a spitfire.” One January a few years later, the kids in the lunchroom were comparing notes on what they’d received from Santa over Christmas break. Khan’s daughter got jealous, and, well …
“I got a call from the lunch monitor. She said, ‘I have a bunch of kids here crying,’ ” Khan said. If there’s one thing kids love even more than magical characters who bring presents, it’s doing the opposite of what their parents say.
