My parents always told us that Santa was pretend. Same with the Easter Bunny. They wanted our holy days to be about real miracles rather than fairy magic, a decision they made despite a host of unpleasant social consequences. Our society may embrace multiculturalism in other areas, but NOT in Santa.
Given their frank honesty about jolly Old Saint Nick, my childish self credited my parents with unimpeachable veracity about supernatural creatures. I saw a world of parents who told made-up stories for unfathomable reasons, while my parents were the cool-eyed skeptics, investigative reporters in a world of storytellers.
Or so I assumed.
But my mother, while she was utterly unmoved by Christmas and Easter fairy tales, did indulge in one bit of magical chicanery. She loved the Tooth Fairy.
I’m really not sure why. Perhaps it seemed a safely secular myth to her. Perhaps it was a remnant from her childhood that she simply didn’t have any particular theological objections to. In any case, the Tooth Fairy featured largely in our house.
My mother is a nurse, and like all nurses, she knows dozens of stories about freak accidents resulting in emergency room visits. Filed away in her brain are a few horrible stories about the randomly tragic things that can happen if a loose tooth is not promptly removed (choking! infection! trapped in the ear while sleeping!), so frequently she offered us a choice: let her pull the tooth now in exchange for a coin, or wait until it fell out and gamble on the effects of inflation on a capricious Tooth Fairy.
I usually chose the Tooth Fairy.
Sometimes she was distressed at this choice. If my tooth was very loose, she worried. She would ask to feel how loose the tooth was. I would ask her to promise not to pull it. With eyes full of sincerity, she would promise that she would “only feel it.”
She lied every time.
It was so distressing to me, this realization that my mother lied. She was so honest in all other respects. Over the tooth-losing years, I gradually learned that in this one thing, she was utterly untrustworthy. If I let her touch that tooth, she was going to yank it out. Like the discovery that she would kick us if we tickled her feet and she would not be sorry afterward, part of coming to terms with the world as a hard and cold place was the knowledge that my mother could and would lie.
Years later, far past the customary age of my peers, I found out that the Tooth Fairy was not real. My younger sister, always quicker than I was at picking up on such things, made some comment about the fictional nature of the Tooth Fairy, and a light went on in my brain. Of course the Tooth Fairy couldn’t be real. What was I thinking?
Discovering that my mother had been storytelling all along had no effect on me. I had already lost my innocence with that deceitfully yanked tooth.
(I was out of post ideas until I read Madmarriage’s recent post about her son’s discovery of the Tooth Fairy conspiracy. My mother reads my blog regularly, and this post will have her vociferously hooting objections, arguing facts, and challenging my recollections. The entire family will be drawn into the debate. There will be phone calls crisscrossing the country, as my sisters and brother argue for or against the accuracy of my memory. My mother will adamantly defend her own honor to family, and tell all of her friends about it. This post will, in short, absolutely make her day.)
I have no memory of believing in any fairy, santa claus, the Easter bunny, nothing. I am assuming my older sisters ruined it for me early on.
Now you have another post idea, because you can update us on who prevailed in the retelling of your memories. I’m always having mine corrected, anyway. Comes from being the baby, I always thought.
Wow – what a story! I felt so much anxiety just reading it, knowing that your Mom was going to yank out your teeth. AWWW! That would scar me for life, too. This is a great topic, because I remember feeling so “duped” when I found out about all the fake holiday characters – I even thought it must apply to God and Jesus – more “characters” we are supposed to believe in, even though we can’t see them.
Glad to have provided some blogging fodder…hope the phones are ringing. It’s always nice to hear from loved ones even if they are adamantly defending themselves against your latest blog posting.
I have always told my kids that Santa Claus, etc., are “just stories” because I feel that four-year-olds have a hard enough time as it is distinguishing fact from fantasy. The idea that adults would try to convince children that a fairy story is *true* — when it can perfectly well be appreciated *as a story* — drives me up the wall.
As far as the Tooth Fairy goes, I’ve never pushed that story either. My 12yo thinks he’s too cool to receive a gift when he loses a tooth but my 9yo sometimes finds a paperback book under her pillow in the morning.
Oh, and my 4yo? Despite my best efforts, he totally believes in Santa. Go figure.
Your mom sounds like a riot!
My parents never did Santa, or the Easter Bunny (or the tooth fairy, but we did get quarters for our teeth) Now that I have my own daughter, I have enjoyed people’s protests that I’m somehow punishing my daughter by not lying to her.
“She’ll resent it and you! Just you watch!” I’ve been told more than once.
I just smile and say “I didn’t resent it as a child. I’m sure she’ll be fine.” They don’t know where to go with it.
This is such a wonderful, rich post. I think each one of us mothers has an area where we are not to be trusted. Perhaps it is a case of the exception that proves the rule of our honesty.
The parenthetical part of this post was my favorite.
My mom told wonderful tales about how our teeth were used as bricks in tooth fairy castles and cities.
I think that your mother and mine were in the same parenting class or something…..while every other fictional elfin creature was treated with mistrust in our household, the tooth fairy was still held up as a real being that presented us with money (which was very rare in our house.) Why is that? Is the tooth fairy more believable? Does she possess some redeeming quality that the other make-believe do-gooders do not possess?
But I am sure MY children will also lie awake at night, hoping to glimpse the magical wings bringing a coin…..while Santa and the Easter Bunny, along with leprechauns, are not given a second thought.
We have been honest with our children about the easter bunny, santa, the tooth fairy and such. Some people are very supportive and give me a big eye roll followed by the comment- I have never figured out why people lie to their kids. Others act like we are denying our children food or something. Yeesh!
I am careful to make sure that our children do not go around popping other parents’ bubbles by enlightening their kids to the truth. I tell mine that it is the parents job to clear up these matters with their children when it is time.
How many phone calls have you received so far?
We have absolutely no issues – obviously – with any number of imaginary personages inhabiting our children’s lives. They’ll figure it out when they need to, I think.
Ah, mothers. I can’t write about mine.
This is too funny … I didn’t think my aunt would EVER forgive me for telling my cousin Santa wasn’t real. Hey, we were four and both very interested in having “information”. The toothfairy in our house was dad. We left the tooth under our pillow, but I only remember one time that it was removed during the night. Usually within the hour there was a quarter where the tooth had been. I also remember the pliers and wrenches he would “brandish” when one was getting loose. **Shudder** Not that he ever used them. Dental floss was our method of choice.
Have you ever considered that allowing children to believe in Santa Claus until they are mature enough to understand that the “reality” of Santa Claus consists not in a jolly red-coated man who lives at the North Pole, but in love and generosity and joy may, in fact, be one way of teaching your children to have faith? And, perhaps even more importantly, to grow and mature in faith?
As adults, our understandings of God, I think, grow and mature in similar ways. We all (hopefully) encounter points in our lives where we must shed old notions and answer the call to deeper understanding and deeper faith.
For me, the day I found out Santa wasn’t real in the way I’d thought was my first such experience. Interestingly, when my mother pointed it out, it was something I realized I’d already known for some time. I accepted this truth with joy, not anger, because I knew I hadn’t been lied to, but that an important truth had been clothed in an image to which I could relate. The loss of that image was not a sadness, but a sense of growing up, understanding and being responsible to something greater. It’s been the paradigm for my own spiritual journey for my entire adult life.
That’s an interesting choice–no Santa, but yes Tooth Fairy. We’ve already made a decision on the Santa/Easter Bunny deal, but I guess I hadn’t thought as far ahead as the TF yet…
That’s pretty much how we’ve done–mythical characters coinciding with religious holidays: no. Any others are completely fine! And oh yes–mothers lie. My mom went through our trick-or-treat bags every Halloween and got out all the Hersheys and Hersheys w/ almonds so that she could “cook with them.” Needless to say, we never got anything she cooked with them. But they were always gone.
My grandmother did the same “No I won’t pull it, just let me touch it and see how loose it is. I promise Sarah…. yank”
We don’t do Santa or the Easter Bunny either, but somehow the Tooth Fairy managed to slip past our defense system against imaginary characters that magically bestow secret gifts. With mom and dad’s money.
Even more distressing, we have the Eyebrow Fairy, which is a naughty little creature that comes and plucks out eyebrow hairs of little ones who didn’t shut their eyes and close their mouths by 9 o’clock, when they were put to bed at 8. We have no idea how HE got in.
You made my day with your last line!
Well, that and the “trapped in the ear while sleeping” bit.
We don’t do Santa or the Easter Bunny either, and we’ve warned our kids not to spill the beans to other children. The tooth fairy, though, slipped by. Not really because we told our son about her, but because he lost his first tooth at my mom’s house, and she (who holds fast to all mystical creatures) wove the tale and slipped a $5 under his pillow. (That, she said, was a premium for a first tooth lost.) We just ignored the matter at the time, but we’re going to clear things up with the next tooth that falls out.
Your mom must like you. Some mothers do all that you mention at the end of this post for no other reason than simple destruction.
Anywho…this was a fun post.