Santa Claus: the ultimate Reagan-Thatcherite
What happens in your mind when you’re a small child and you notice that Santa brought the rich kids much nicer stuff than he brought the poor kids? I’ve always wondered about this. (I don’t know because I was never taught to believe in Santa.)
It seems to me there’s a potential for the whole Santa myth to reaffirm for kids the idea that rich people deserve better at such a young age the kids are mentally defenseless against it. Because here’s an outsider who’s not supposed to be an asshole bigot, who’s not constrained by financial limitations, and even he thinks the poor kids should be content with much-needed new underwear while the big kids get giant, flashy, expensive stuff that flaunts wealth through impracticality.
But I don’t know. Maybe for those of you raised to believe in Santa, there are enough suspicions and rumors abounding for you not to take it so seriously?
Jacqueline on 26 Nov 2007 at 10:47 pm #
Being that I am Jewish, the Santa thing didn’t affect me as much as it did for others. It would, however, stand to reason that poor children DO internalize unfairness. But regardless of the occasion where it is the custom to get goodies or showered with favors, children do suffer psychologically (I was good, why am I left out?)
From the Jewish perspective, it is very, very hard for a child who is lucky to get a cake and maybe a card for their bar/bat mitzvah when other kids from the same congregation are able to have lavish parties where they are showered with expensive gifts or money. Since Jewish life tends to be a bit more communal (synagogue dinners, etc), the poor kid’s family in the synagogue is constantly seeing what the other congregants have, how they live, etc.
I am sure that for the Christian children, for whom Christmas IS a very big deal, they have alot of questions and very real emotional pain. Especially since kids are taught that if they’re good, Santa will be good to them. When the child who has endeavored to be as good as the other kids gets the short end of the stick and they ask the adults why, the adults get uncomfortable and often answer: well, that’s becuase life isn’t fair. But even for the kids who get cast-off toys from some local charity, or through the Toys For Tots program, they rarely get anything they might have asked Santa for - and they wonder why they are so out of favor, what they did wrong. Furthermore, they often KNOW that the toys etc that they got were other people’s cast-offs. Kids aren’t stupid.
But the “life isn’t fair” answer doesn’t jive with most kids’ logic. They want to know WHY life is not fair, and why life should be unfair when it does not have to be, and why adults don’t make it fair.
Dunvi on 27 Nov 2007 at 6:05 am #
Hmm. Um. I grew out of Santa right around the same time I started to even recognize that I didn’t have the same types or amounts of stuff that all my classmates did. I was very much an oblivious kid for quite some time.
Now, though, I admittedly get pissed off pretty fast when they all talk normally about the super-expensive things they get (not necessarily for Christmas). I could easily see my parents getting me an iPod for Christmas, but that would be the only really expensive present, and the rest of the stuff would probably be DVDs, books, and clothes, and stuff like that. And it would be my first and only iPod.
Dunvi on 27 Nov 2007 at 6:09 am #
Actually, to directly address your question - I think (at least what happened in my family when I was young and stupid) was that my parents would go through plenty of trouble (and money) to get me stuff just as good as the rich kids - but only for a few things.
Jacqueline on 27 Nov 2007 at 3:13 pm #
To Dunvi: When you did realize that some kids had more and others had so much less, did you ever wonder why? If you did and you asked your parents, did they respond with the usual canard, “That’s just life and life’s not fair” and if so, did you wonder why life had to be unfair? Just curious…
Saiyne on 07 May 2008 at 5:19 pm #
Oddly enough, I never thought that. I never wanted all the “shinny, new stuff”.
I thought “Yay! A bucket of chalk!” And thought rich kids were impractical twats for wanting a new t.v. in their room when they could have CHALK!!!
Yes, I was a bit slow as a kid.