Uh-oh, it's another holiday thing...

Okay, so we've already covered (twice) that we trick-or-treat on October 31.  We dress up, we beg my sister's neighbors for candy. ;)   So, now let's just get it all out there -  We. Do. "The Santa Thing" (as if it's the spawn of Satan..."Oh, we don't do the Santa thing")  Three children have already shared with my almost-six-year-old that there's no such thing as Santa.  Thanks for reigning in your kids.  Thanks for telling your children that "While we don't do the Santa thing there are some people who do and so you don't need to tell other children."  But nooooo - we want to instill this "we are above that" thing in our children that drives me up. the. wall.  This would be exactly why I don't talk about holidays with certain people.  The legalism about how one celebrates any given holiday is so incredibly intense, I just can't stand it.  There are some things that in the grand scheme of things really don't matter! This would be one of them. 


We've never made Santa "omnipresent" or "omniscient" - and when relatives would say "Santa is watching you" I was always quick to say to my children, "No, Santa isn't watching; God is watching and that's much more important."  The whole "Santa is watching" thing does get under my skin.  Santa is just a guy for whom we leave cookies and Dr. Pepper on Christmas Eve (milk?  Blech!), hang a special key on our front door for him to use to get into the house and who fills our stockings.  Not a huge ordeal and certainly not the big ordeal that some people make the Santa thing out to be (as if Santa is the end-all-be-all of Christmas).  My children know that the most important thing about Christmas is that is when we celebrate the birth of our Savior.  They know that we give each other gifts because God gave the First Gift. 

So, last week I got to have The Santa Talk with my two oldest, thanks to something said to one of my children.  My four-year-old asked out-right, "Is Santa real?"  That's a yes or no question.  I'm not going to lie to my children.  So I didn't.  I sat down and talked with them (the older two) about Santa, why we chose to make it a part of our Christmas celebration, who the original St. Nicholas was and the stories that were told about him. I also threatened them within an inch of their lives if they said ANYTHING to anyone else about what they'd been told. 

And yeah, we do Easter baskets, too - but we don't get them from the Easter Bunny.  I'm a rebel. 

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