Tonight I have to go to an open house for a local Montessori school. Want to? Am about to? I don’t know how to phrase it. Certainly no one is making me go; I think my main objection right now is that I don’t want to be old enough to have to be thinking about this right now. Pay no attention, by the way, to the fact that most parents my age are worrying about high school and not kindergarten. It’s not even that I want him to stay a baby forever or anything like that; as I’ve said on several occasions before, the older he gets the more I like him, so I suspect I’ll like kindergarten-kid more than I like three-year-old kid right now.
I will admit that I’m liking three. It’s a good age. It’s too bad that he had to go through the three years to get to three, where I liked him less, but three is okay.
So, yeah. Point is, I gotta go to an open house for a school I don’t know anything about, so that I can learn things about it, because maybe I’ll want to send my kid there soon, because he’s old enough that I need to worry about that. Blech.
So speaking of parenting: he noticed Halloween, right? We’ve talked about that. Which means he’s gonna notice Christmas this year for the first time, too. Which means that the wife and I have to make a decision about Santa Claus. I am, in general, against lying to my kid, and somewhat generically temperamentally against suggesting that he should adjust his behavior in order to receive rewards from supernatural beings.
I also don’t want to be the parent of the asshole kid who ruins Christmas for the other kids, and “let them believe what they want to believe and don’t worry about it” seems like kinda complicated advice for a three-year-old. My wife has suggested that we simply don’t bring it up and see what he brings to the table, and that seems like good advice.
An anecdote: We are at Meijer. We need to buy the boy a coat. As we pass the coat rack, an idle thought floats into my head: What if he decides he wants the pink one?
I, progressive Dad that I am, decide that I don’t really give a damn if he wants the pink coat. He picks out a dark blue one and tries it on and has a fit about the length of the sleeves. (Note: this is an ongoing thing. M’boy has issues with sleeves.) We try on an orange one. Same thing, only now the fit has a bit of a head of steam behind it and is getting a bit more obnoxious. We get him calmed down and my wife tries one more time to see if he’s interested in trying on a coat.
“The light blue one,” he says. I look. There’s a light blue one. With polka dots. It’s one of the girl coats.
You deserve this, I thought to myself. And the wife and I just sorta looked at each other. Looked at the coat. Neither of us really wanted to be the one to say no, because he’s fucking three, and who cares what coat he wears. At the same time, I noticed quickly that color wasn’t the only thing differentiating the coats. It turns out that girls’ winter coats from the exact same company– coats for three-year-olds, mind you– are actually cut different. They have froofy fur around the hoods, and– and this is the ridiculous part– they’re fitted. They have elastic on them, for the hips that three-year-old girls do not have. Which I suspect actually makes them less effective as winter coats.
Color? Wear whatever you want. My parental liberalism apparently ends at the point where my son wants to wear a coat that is fitted to show off his hips. I suspect he’s not about to start developing an interest in wearing girls’ clothing all the time, because I think we’d probably have seen that by now; he just likes the color light blue.
I shoulda just put it on him. He’d have had another fit about the sleeves and we’d have been done. Instead, my wife sucked it up and told him it was a girl coat and he couldn’t wear it. I’ve got a tiny bit of a dirty feeling in my mouth about it, but only a tiny bit.
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But now you’ve started the for boys ok/for girls not ok. Maybe the sleeves are also cut proportionally shorter, or the elastic would solve the fit issue. Who knows? What does it hurt? I wore boy clothes all the time until I got TOO girl-shaped, and no one said boo. But I have no kids so what do I know.
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We probably should just have let him try it on and reject it. In the mood he was in, nothing was going to satisfy him. And as far as “What does it hurt?” Well, nothing, right up until it does. And I go to jail for murdering some fucking fool while I’m trying to shop:
http://www.amotherthing.com/2013/07/getting-political/
(Note that I first read this story close to when it came out over a year ago, and haven’t revisited it since, and I’m STILL choking on rage right now.)
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If it’s of any use to you, my parents did no real Santa stuff with my brother and me, and everything was fine. My parents are very deeply Christian, and they see Santa and all of that stuff as being a distraction from the real point of Christmas (of course, everything about Christmas is really just a holdover from pagan holidays, so Christians shouldn’t celebrate it all, but that’s beside the point).
They gave us gifts on Christmas (and some of them said “Santa” on them, but that’s just because my mom felt guilty about buying us so many, and we always knew who it was from), but they didn’t actively do anything to tell us about Santa or try to get us to believe in him. I never believed in him (didn’t really think much about him at all), but I also never had a need to spoil it for others (I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I could). We did plenty of Christmas things (religious and non-religious), so I never felt like anything was missing.
So it can be done!
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Other than the “very deeply Christian” part (I am biologically, but not otherwise, Catholic, and my family is not terribly religious at all) this is actually a pretty close description of how my parents handled Christmas.
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Regarding the school thing, wait till they ask “Is he your grandson?”
“Biologically a catholic” ? I like that.
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I would have treated Santa as a fun thing we can all pretend to believe in together (but which, when it comes down to it, isn’t technically true), but Rob wanted Belief, with a capital letter. I always just let the culture around us handle it, because they pick up so much without the parents saying a thing, and when I got questions I’d just say “what do you think?” and put on my listening face, no matter what they said. That way I wasn’t ever the one doing the lying, which somehow felt better–I was letting them use their imaginations and failing to contradict. Then when Dorothy was in 2nd grade she figured it out (or had very significant doubts) and I came clean. Once she was old enough for it to really be a lie, I wasn’t going there. I told her I like to play that he’s real, because it’s a fun, magical tradition, but that I’m the one who brings the presents. I didn’t equivocate or talk down to her. We also have one of those freaky elf things that moves (ours doesn’t do anything special–just moves) because my kids were hurt a few years ago after realizing Santa had “sent” elves to several of their closest friends but not to them, so I let Dorothy start helping me move it so she would enjoy playing along. Now, for better or worse, she champions her brother’s belief much more aggressively than I ever would have! Good luck…
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I have a 3 year old and was wondering what to do about Santa as well – I don’t like to lie. I wasn’t raised with Santa and it wasn’t a problem. But my son’s father decided to go all out telling him every Santa detail including naughty and nice without discussing it with me at all. So decision made… I guess. I don’t think I’ll play into it but I won’t “correct” it either.
And my son likes pink and polka dots – and tractors and monster trucks. They are very pure at this age and unaffected by “culture” until we decide to lay it on them. If I had a girl I would object to the fitted clothes too.
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