Don't Tell the Children the Truth.

I’m still languishing in the dark place to which I consigned myself after the events of three weeks ago, but since we’re approaching Christmas and I promised myself that I would make at least 200 posts this year, I thought I should mention something which caught my eye a couple of days ago.

It seems there was a vicar somewhere in this green and pleasant land who gave a talk to a group of 11/12-year-old children on the subject of the Nativity. During the course of his address he mentioned that Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist, whereupon a cataclysm ensued. Several of the audience burst into tears, and many parents subsequently took to social media to express their outrage and denounce him in somewhat exaggerated terms. The shockwave was so great that he felt forced to make an apology.

My first thought was that 11/12 is the age at which kids in the UK transfer from primary school to high school and effectively become adolescents. By that age I’d known for some time that the whole Santa Claus thing was just a story. I’d always had doubts because of the sheer implausibility of the yarn, and by the age of 11 it was common knowledge among children of my generation that it was just a tale for kiddies. My question is, therefore: to what extent were the parents culpable in the sad episode of the vicar’s revelation? That’s the first irony, but it goes a little deeper.

A vicar can talk to children about the Nativity in terms which plant into impressionable young minds the notion that it’s all historical fact, when modern considered opinion realises that the whole story – or at least most of it – was created to serve the veracity of biblical prophecy and vindicate what was later purported to be Jesus’s ministry. (I once heard it claimed that archaeological investigation reveals that the Bethlehem to which modern ‘pilgrims’ travel was not even occupied at the time indicated in the gospels. And further, that there was no Roman census around that time. And all the supernatural stuff is, let’s face it, a bit far-fetched.)

It seems to me, therefore, that a vicar’s re-telling of the Nativity story amounts to little short of legitimised lying. And yet he can tell a simple, incontestable truth – that Santa Claus isn’t real – and be rained upon with enough bananas to make Central America one of the world’s economic hotspots. That strikes me as a further irony and one of rather greater substance.)

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I had more to say, but I’m tired of typing so I’m off to get my coffee and toast. (I had my first Christmas mince pie after my solstice fire yesterday. The burgeoning gale just about allowed me to do it.)