Santa, his reindeer…and a lion

Can I admit to you all that I’ve got some ambivalence about the whole Santa thing? I grew up believing in Santa, so I have fond and happy memories of that tradition and don’t feel scarred in any way. But the way Santa is so wrapped up in want and consumerism and making Christmas all about Things, the way his story is centered not in Bethlehem, the locus of the Christmas story, but the North Pole, which has nothing to do with anything– it all seems to indicate to me that we’ve gotten a little off track about the whole Santa story.

So, I admit, I’ve kind of been deferring the decision of how Santa would figure in our family’s Christmas traditions. Last year, my kids basically had no idea it was Christmas, though they did enjoy opening presents, and the year before they were infant blobs. I haven’t had to really decide until now. Even this year felt kind of like another year in which I could wait to see how I felt about the whole thing. I figured we’d decorate the tree, make cookies, listen to Christmas music, go look at Christmas lights, play with our little Nativity, read Christmas stories, do our Advent calendar, and just generally live in a Santa-free bubble for one more year. And we’ve been doing all those things (minus the Advent calendar, which I still haven’t finished making).

But it turns out, I can’t live in a Santa-free bubble anymore..

Claire learned about Santa at preschool, and he even visited her class. Apparently many of the other kids were afraid of him (after all, he’s “SO BIG” as Claire reported), but Claire reassured them that Santa is not scary, after all, her daddy has a beard too. And when he asked her what she wants for Christmas, she said, “A present for my mom.” She’s on the nice list for sure! After that, she started asking us all the time, “Can we go see Santa?”

So now I felt like we not only had to figure out where Santa would figure in our holiday traditions, but we had to make a pilgrimage to see the guy, as well. Here’s where I’m at: Santa is a lovely story of an early church father who believed in showing others the love of Jesus through giving. His love and his gifts are supposed to point us back to the ultimate Giver. So I think we will be celebrating Santa as a fun way to participate in the joy of giving and showing our love, but ultimately a type of pretend play. We will visit him, we will get stockings full of gifts “from” him, and we may well even leave out cookies. Whether or not he is “real” will be avoided until directly asked, but I’m not going to make some sort of elaborate effort to convince my kids that a mythical red-suited figure is real. And I certainly won’t use him as a good behavior tool– no “Santa’s watching” from us– because Santa’s love is like God’s: for all of the children in the world, regardless of the things they do.

So, now that you know about all of my holiday angst, you may be asking, yeah, but what about the lions you mentioned in the headline, here?

Well, yesterday, we had planned to finally fulfill Claire’s dream to see Santa. We wanted to go see the Santa in the lobby of the lovely Capital Hotel, but he was only there until 3:00 and Etta’s nap went long. That left us with the mall (kill me now) or Bass Pro Shops. If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you may be unsurprised to learn I have never set foot in such a place. But they offered a free picture with their Santa, so we decided to check it out.

Because we’ve learned a few things about toddlers in our 2.5 years, all the way there, we tried to help the girls prepare for what we were about to do. “We’re going to go see Santa! There will probably be a lot of kids there to see him, so there will probably be a line. He’s going to be in a big chair, and we’ll go up and say hi, and you can sit on his lap if you want. He will probably ask you what you want for Christmas. What are you going to tell him that you want? Do you think you could tell him Merry Christmas? Someone will probably take our picture, so we will smile and say CHEESE!”

Guess what part of that Claire keyed into: “a line.” Only she heard “a lion.” “I wanna see the lion first, ok? Can we go see the lion?” There had been a miscommunication. This place being Bass Pro Shops, there were all manner of taxidermic things, including reindeer (sorry, Blitzen, guess you got blitzed…), turkeys, ducks, and even a bear, but no lion. As we stood in line, Claire asked, “but where’s the lion?” We tried to explain, “This is the LINE, baby. We said LINE, not LION.”

After about 20 minutes of standing in line, the whole time discussing exactly what was about to go down, we got to the front. I don’t know if it was the flipped out infant who went right ahead of us and was forced to sit on Santa’s lap despite her tears and wails, but Claire suddenly decided she wasn’t so into Santa, after all, and she certainly didn’t want to sit on his lap. Etta ran right up and hopped on his lap, and was ready to go, but Claire clung to her daddy with a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face. In retrospect, she looked an awful lot like the taxidermied reindeer off to our left. So, her daddy held her, we snapped a quick photo, and then we made a quick lap around the store.

We saw a giant fish tank, and we petted the stuffed bear. I think they liked that just as much as Santa, really. It turns out, I didn’t really need to figure out my whole philosophy of Santa before we made our big visit. If I had known, though, I would have been clearer about the lions!