And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part III)

In the Bleak Midwinter - Beth Whitney (mp3)
Where Are You Christmas? - Faith Hill (mp3)

Part One -- "The Origin of Laura Jane," wherein I mention our transgendered hero/heroine, Nicole Kidman, late night elf pornography, and Gmail

Part Two - "Bad Dad," wherein I experience the stages of grief, emotionally abuse my daughter, and am reminded why the Christmas season is so despicable

My second daughter continues to write to Laura Jane, our transgendered Elf on the Shelf and the ever-present reminder of a failure of my fatherhood.

She wrote that damn elf five times in November, each time desperately (but as patiently as her little heart would allow) anticipating Laura Jane’s response. My eldest hasn’t mentioned Laura Jane. We’re fairly certain she’s aware that the elf has no clothes, so to speak, and she's hinted as much, but we can’t be sure, and there’s no easy way to ask that question without giving it away.

And this story, split into three lengthy parts, sums up why I tend to despise “special” days, most especially Christmastime. We create these days where things have to be more. They have to be bigger, and better, and greater, and more important. Why? Because people need bigger, and better, and greater, and more important. Because normal isn't good enough.

This is proof that too many people allow their everyday to slip into something bad, something negative and undesirable. They then look to Special Days to rescue them from their monotony and boredom. It's like the abusive spouse who justifies his daily cruelties by being super-sweet on birthdays and anniversaries. I prefer trying, sometimes feebly, to value each day and to not save up my happy karma for Special Days, but rather to celebrate my joys whenever I can find them.

Wednesday, Bob wrote about being sick of winning. But isn’t Christmas, like, the World Heavyweight Champion of Days? Haven't we manufactured Christmas into nothing more than winning? Our entire fucking economy depends on it, fer cryin' out loud. Families depend on it to spend time together, to invest in one another, to think of one another first for a change. Moms (and some dads) need it to get out of the house at midnight on Thanksgiving as some sad proof that they must really really love their families.*

[* -- On the day after Thanksgiving, one of my friends had written on Facebook, “I’m in Target at 3:42 a.m. I can’t believe HOW MUCH I LOVE MY CHILDREN!” If you aren’t bothered by this leap in logic, I pity you. Fortunately for him, some 30 people responded that they, too, were out and about, and that they, too, desperately loved their children enough to invest in Black Friday.]

Christmas has become some maniacal race. It’s become competitive. It's become about winning.

How we got from the story of a family who couldn’t afford a room in an inn and had to sleep in a barn, to elves on shelves made in China but born in the North Pole and who mess up houses and hide and write emails that make children cry is truly beyond my grasp, but almost nothing about this holiday makes me feel one bit more religious.

My goal isn't to sap your joy, dear reader. If you find Christmas in Walmart, bully for you. I'm actually a bit jealous.

For me, however, the only times in this month-long stretch when I feel closer to God, or like a somewhat better version of myself, is at the dinner table with my family and in church singing hymns... and neither of these are seasonal.

And then, finally, at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, we get our service when I finally get the chance to feel undistracted, undiluted joy. Our standing room only church of people raise candlelights above their heads as they sing “Silent Night.”

That service is the very opposite of Black Friday. We pause. We reflect. We listen. And we do it all together in the middle of the night as a way of finally -- one hour before the Most Important Day of the Year -- clarifying for ourselves what the whole damn day is really supposed to inspire in the first place.

Not iPads, not a Lexus in the driveway, and not something from Jared.
Families. Huddled together.
Candlelight.
The acknowledgement of a world in desperate need of hope and meaning.
A communal feeling of love surging through people like a strong gust of wind, carried through them from the notes of a pipe organ or a hammer dulcimer or the sound of a choir.

Christmas finally arrives, deux ex machina, and rescues us from the previous 30 days of misguided obsessions and pepper-spraying our fellow consumers. And nothing, no matter how much bile and bitterness and anger they invoke in me leading up to that evening, can shake the power of the Day itself. It's bigger than we are, and we can't ever completely screw it up.

For that, I am eternally thankful.

And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part II)

You Gotta Get Up - Five Iron Frenzy (mp3)
Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas) - John Denver (mp3)

Part One -- "The Origin of Laura Jane," wherein I mention our transgendered hero/heroine, Nicole Kidman, late night elf pornography, and Gmail)

November 29, 2010. My elder daughter -- let's name her Billie Jr. -- writes a letter to Santa and places it under our Christmas tree. In it, she requests a new Elf on the Shelf of her own so that she doesn’t have to share Laura Jane (our gender-transformed female elf who looks like all the other male elves) with her sister.

You see, my second daughter was always far more obsessed with Laura Jane writing her emails almost every month... and we didn’t know it because we didn’t check Laura Jane’s email account until Thanksgiving Perhaps because Billie Jr. was resigned to never be capable of loving Laura Jane quite as ardently as her sister, she was hoping to start over with a new elf.

And this is where I morph into the bad guy. Here comes my Tragic Flaw.

I crafted an email from Laura Jane that started something like this:

My Dearest Billie Jr.,

I read your note to Santa because I thought it was for me.

Have I done something wrong? I am feeling quite awful about this and wonder how I have failed you. Just this morning you want to know about my life at the North Pole, and then this evening you are asking for a different elf. I am trying not to cry, because I must have done something awful or mean for you to want another elf.

The email went another two paragraphs. Laura Jane was heartbroken. Santa can’t send multiple elves to households. It’s one or none. She might lose her job. The sky is falling, and the Pole with her.

We have struggled with Billie Jr.’s increasing inability to attune to the aches and needs of others, to empathize and to grasp the depth of The Golden Rule. What better way to address that level of selfishness, I thought, than to let the voice of absolute North Pole innocence address it?

Her mother and I had sat her down on numerous occasions to discuss this matter with her, but we had gotten nowhere. Perhaps Laura Jane could accomplish what we could not.

If results can be measured by the level of psychological and emotional distress inflicted, then I earned a gold medal. My daughter looked like death warmed over for two days. She lost the ability to speak in complete sentences, and it was obvious that every time she emerged from a moment of privacy that she’d spent her alone time crying.

Her first email to Laura Jane first thing in the morning was a panicked apology. Her second reply, later that evening, was this:

you have made me cry even more.now i am very sad.I am so so so so sorry!i wrote that note because (my sister) & i argue about who has you and so on,but i am truely sorry.My thoughts have changed so much and thank you for reading the note. it has made me relize christmas even more.

You'll need to trust me on this: Billie Jr.'s apology was more about the fear of losing everything than about an appreciation for what she had. Her concluding sentence was more platitude than truth... although I think she really wanted to believe it.

The 72 hours after Laura Jane’s heartbroken email involved a gradual evolution of personal assessment for me. At first I was proud. Laura Jane’s email had worked. The message had penetrated. The seed would grow into something good.

Then I was defensive. My daughter needed to be taught a lesson, dammit, and some lessons are hard. But sometimes you can’t learn about a stove eye being hot unless you touch it and burn your hand, and human emotions are the same way, and she needed to learn about selfishness.

Then I was panicked. Had I just embodied the persona of one of Santa’s elves and crafted a note intended to stab a psychological knife into my own daughter’s heart? Nooo, of course not... no. Not quite. No no, nothing that awful.....

Then I was horrified. What kind of father does something like this? Isn’t what I did, in some way, even more dangerous and harmful than if I’d pulled out my belt and lashed her a few dozen times, something I would never in a million years do? Isn’t inflicting emotional scars far more cruel and dangerous?

Not to mention the hypocrisy of me -- ME -- having the gall to try and teach someone else about being self-centered or selfish. Who the frick was I to go judging my daughter so much more harshly than I’ve ever been willing to judge myself??

Suddenly I was eyeball-deep into a state of despondency not unlike that which had overtaken my daughter the first day of Laura Jane's “lesson” to her. Except as the puppet-master and supposed adult, my sadness went deeper, and my self-evaluation was unflinchingly brutal. Everytime I heard or thought “Merry Christmas,” I cringed. The season was suddenly a symbol of deception, heartbreak, manipulation... nothing good.

A week later, Laura Jane was dead to me. My wife didn’t handle my resignation very well. I have little doubt that I failed to share in any adequate way my internal nuclear chain reaction with her. I probably mentioned to her once or twice that I was bothered by what had transpired, and the next thing she knew, I was quitting, and it was non-negotiable. That jump from "bothered" to "done" seemed extreme and unfair, I'm sure. (Like many men, I'm not fond of breaking down in the presence of others.)

She begrudgingly and angrily took over Laura Jane duty and carried that seething frustration with her like a sack of coal, thus adding one more body to the list of Christmas casualties, all borne from my single heartbroken manipulative scheming late-night email.

Now it's the 2011 Holiday Season. Daughter Number Two has continued her pen pal devotion to Laura Jane...

Part Three - "The Night Before," Wherein at last shines a faint glimmer of hope.

And the Shelf He Rode In On (Part I)

We Wish You a Merry Christmas - Shonen Knife (mp3)


A f*#king elf might be the death of me.

Have you seen the Nicole Kidman movie “The Others”? In it, she’s the mother of two special-needs children whose skin is hyper-sensitive to light, and they have become recluses and shut-ins in a mansion/castle in the UK.

(SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT... although if giving away the surprise ending to a decade-old movie is a spoiler, it means you didn’t plan on seeing it...)

The big catch of the movie, and one I failed to properly appreciate the first time around, is that the terrible mean ol’ servants aren’t the enemies in the film. They’re the heroes. The enemy in the film is their mom.

Back to the f*#king elf. Laura Jane arrived by box, purchased from a store by a relative seeking revenge on us for some previous crime, three years ago.

My children had many times over witnessed a box precisely like it in one store after another, constantly begging us for one, a special elf for our house. We’d heard of these damn things, and we were certain it was a terrible idea. But now one was in our house, wrapped up without our knowledge or approval. We had been infiltrated.

My daughters unwrapped the package. They shrieked and screamed. They opened the box. Inside the box was, encased in mixed paper and plastic, an Elf on the Shelf. Much like Stormtroopers, all these elves look exactly alike. Which is to say nothing like any other elves on any other Christmas shows. They look like Justin fucking Bieber.

My daughters opened the box. They removed the Elf from his bondage. They hugged him and tested to see if he had any special features, sounds, or moving parts. They then, right there at that moment, mutually agreed that this Elf was female, and that her name was Laura Jane.

How, you ask? How can children of relative intelligence and sanity open a box “Made in China,” pull out a cloth mass-produced creature, and convince themselves that this thing came from the North Pole? I do not know. I only know it happened, and I didn’t have the courage or the cruelness to crush their enthusiasm like a grape.

From that day to Christmas, we became a predictable stupid American family. Laura Jane hid at night. She messed shit up. She ate cookies and spilled milk and snuck into the computer room and watched porn late at night. She was a cute adorable deviant menace.

She disappeared to the North Pole after Christmas, and we thought that was the end of Laura Jane, the transgendered fabric elf from China. But no, the next Thanksgiving, the girls were literally frothing at the mouth for Laura Jane’s return.

Although I’m not competitive about most things in life, I can’t say that about creativity. In my mind, I am hands-down the single most creative living mind not currently working in Hollywood, the book publishing industry, the comedy circuit, the newspaper-column industry or the big-time blogosphere.

So if regular normal boring parents could make their elves hide and mess shit up and be all playful, then I would by God kick it up a notch.

Therefore I created a Gmail account for Laura Jane, and she started sending nightly emails to the girls. Probably after she was done watching all that elf porn, but how would I know, right? Laura Jane even stole our camera and took a few pictures (clean, safe) and attached them to her emails. Ours was a technologically savvy elf.

The season was fun. Everyone enjoyed playing with the elf. I was super-cool creative, and we were awesome parents. Yada yada.

But something happened on the way to heaven.

(You can read my post foreshadowing all of this, from November 2008, here.) 

Part Two - "Bad Dad," wherein I experience the stages of grief, emotionally abuse my daughter, and am reminded why the Christmas season is so despicable

Part Three - "The Night Before," Wherein at last shines a faint glimmer of hope.

'Tis the Season

The Holidays Are Here (And We’re Still at War) - Brett Dennen (mp3)
Who Took the Merry Out of Christmas - The Staple Singers (mp3)

My wife loves Christmas. She loves holidays in general. She’s a holiday person. But she loves loves loves Christmas.

I, on the other hand, am what people might call a Fuddy Duddy. I am generally opposed to the prejudice of treating one calendar day of the year differently than other days. While I happily grant exception to Christmas, I do so noting the exception. Birthdays don’t count, because those weren’t invented to honor some Pagan tradition or to generate higher sales returns in stores. Anniversaries, same deal. These are personal holidays and thus exempted.

(Note: I liked birthdays a lot more when 400 people didn’t wish other people a happy birthday by writing on a wall. Like I said. Fuddy Duddy.)

Seriously, I’m always twice as surprised and pleased by a gift or kindness done to me on a random and unpredictable day than one done to honor some Special Occasion that feels like part of the queue. The unexpected gift doesn’t get lost in the hubbub of the event.

When my father died, I sincerely appreciated every person who came to the visitation and shook my hand and hugged me. But the most salient memories of my friends and their support came during completely unexpected moments. A teacher and I left an evening meeting at the same time, and he asked how I was doing, and he shared his own struggles after the death of his father. An older man from church, a month or so later, came to me crying and saying he thought of my father every time he passed a certain area of our church sanctuary.

They were outlier moments. They stick. But I digress.

Back to my wife. She is miserable right now. Christmas means so much to her that she wants it to be everything. She wants everyone to be happy. She wants to see everyone as much as possible. Everything. Everyone. All. These are dangerous words. They are doomed to failure.

Every Christmas, she loses years of her stress life worrying about her family, worrying about our finances, worrying about the tree and the windows and the kids. For something she loves so much, it sure as heck creates a lot of worry and grief. I pick on my wife, but she’s in a very large boat with millions of people who seem to love these days so much yet find themselves miserable.

Perhaps this makes me a wee bit sociopathic. Don’t care too much, or you’ll be sad. This could be said of many things. Marriage. Children. Jobs. Hobbies. Dreams. But I guess I’m comfortable giving those things my emotions, risking my tears and blood pressure on them. Holidays, on the other hand, don’t feel worth it to me.

I don’t think this makes me a Scrooge or a Grinch, because I don’t hate Christmas. I love it. I love the midnight church service and the presents under the tree and Handel’s Messiah and cards with pictures of our friends and their children plastered all over our fridge and spilling over onto cabinets and other spaces.

But I don’t like piling it up with pressure and expectation. It would only take a couple of times of doing so for me to grow to hate Christmas.

So my wish to all of you this holiday season is to purge yourself of these silly stressors. In all the talk about “remembering the Reason for the Season,” most adults do really well with keeping perspective on the materialistic gobbledygook. But they seem to forget all that Reason for the Season crap when it comes to stress and misery and pressure.

As Sue Sylvester might say, were she portraying Mary in the school play, “You think hosting 30 members of your family for dinner and driving 20 hours to visit in-laws is hard?!? Try riding on a donkey five months pregnant and natural childbirthing into a bale of friggin' straw! THAT’S HARD!!”

Leaves You With Nuthin' Mister

"Where Do You Think You're Going?" - Christmas Vacation (mp3)
Mele Kalikimaka - Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters (mp3)

Here is the honest first-person account of one man’s attempt to do something amusing, fun, and mildly noble. And also just damned foolish.

Times like this ain’t easy for nobody. Not for people, not for businesses, and not for non-profits, which depend heavily on people and businesses doing well. In tough times, water cooler talk mutates. It used to be highlights from last week’s Saturday Night Live skits or Sunday’s best NFL games. More often lately, the talk is like those anvils in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, sort of darkly cartoonish, but heavy, burdensome.

Backseat driving other people’s jobs. Lamenting that too many people have grown too mentally slovenly, having dined too bountily on the fatted calf of the Good Times. Decrying all the ways we have lost our way as an institution. Twenty years of no job cuts and only the occasional year without any raises is pretty good stuff. Too good, really. It takes you off the edge, which is where Maverick swears one must be to survive.

Early in the year, the noble fisherman best known as “TroutKing” joked that it would be cool if we DJ’d the annual faculty Christmas party. He got the idea while driving from one fishing hole to another that summer while shuffling through his iPod.

Who knows why for sure? (Well, troutking does... but it doesn’t serve my narrative or deadline to ask him.) Further, who knows why he asked me to join his folly? Was it like Bill Murray dragging Harold Ramis into the Army in “Stripes”? Was it because I have some vague knowledge and appreciation for rap that evades him? The world may never know.

Regardless, I made note of the idea and in October mentioned it to the boss. He was foolish enough to accept.

Trout and I spent a decent amount of time trying to get things right, trying to satisfy the event’s theme -- “Caribbean Christmas” -- while also minimizing our own nausea (read: not too much Jimmy Buffet). Trying to structure 3 hours of dance-friendly music for a crowd with a 50-year age range and a strong majority of employees born prior to 1970 is a hopelessly-doomed task.

"Electric Slide"? No. "Cotton-Eyed Joe"? Noooo no no. "Cha-Cha Slide"? Aww helllll no. Love Train? They’re gonna demand it, I say. Over my deaf body, Trout says. It’s inevitable, like death, I say. Then kill me now!! Trout says.

Meanwhile, we’re both being bombarded with requests and suggestions from friends and enemies alike. For every one “you should play...” we receive 10 “please don’t play...” And then, early last week as we sit in Trout’s office sharing our concerns, fears and excitement, our boss walks in. He wants to make sure “Love Train” will make the list and that Trout won’t go off the rails playing too much Bob and Bruce.

It’s his party. He can train if he wants to.

The event itself went off as well as could have been expected. A tough grader like myself would give us a B. Dollar for dollar, getting a B-quality DJ experience was a damn good investment, so there’s no shame in our performance.

Yet, much like my experiences teaching classes almost a decade ago, I couldn’t help but feel this heavy weight of disappointment in all of it. Feeling like we did something “pretty well” and “OK” doesn’t make me proud. My expectations of myself are too high, perhaps too unrealistic. When we turned off those speakers after the party was over, the look of joy on my face was 3/4 a look of relief that it was over and done with.

When it became clear that our boss was regretting (or at least fearing) his decision to grant us DJ privileges, when everyone was spouting off divergent notions of great songs, when the “Love Train” drama came to a head, all these things piled into the clown car of melodrama and tension far surpassing anything that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with “Play That Funky Music” or “Mony Mony.”

We just wanted to have some fun, play some music, and get people to dance. That’s all.

During the party, the micromanagement continued. It wasn’t so much his wanting to stick his nose in that hurt, because as I said, it’s his party. Rather, it was the look of abject discomfort in his eyes, his lack of confidence in us. He wasn’t the conductor of the “Love Train”; he was the conductor of that runaway train in “Unstoppable.”

Our hopes of doing something nice and mostly harmless, that would save the school a few bucks (between $600-1,000, actually), was making the experience much less enjoyable for the boss. Not the goal I had in mind, not by a long shot.

There was a silver lining, however.

Many of our friends and colleagues wanted us to succeed. They wanted it almost as much as we did, maybe more for a few of them. Friends who just don’t dance, hardly ever, and rarely for more than a song, were out on that dance floor for almost the entire time. They dragged their spouses out there with them. They all cut rugs much longer and plusher than is their nature. They did this not for the music, and not for the party, but for us, the two nerds behind the mixing board, panicking over whether “Superstition” or “TikTok” would better serve the immediate needs of the dancing masses. (Important Side Note: “Funkytown” no longer holds sway over anyone, especially the syntho-’80s version.)

We the DJs were out on a limb. Our friends went out on a limbo. For us.

Then we had our own Norma Rae moment. The boss was calling it a night, but Trout wanted to play “Glory Days.” It was the one Bruce song he had insisted on including. The boss demurred. Strongly. Trout was stout. In bold defiance, he picked up the mike with a call of duty to his colleagues. Sing with him! Dance with him! Show Bruce the love and respect the REAL Boss deserved!!

And, by God, they did. One of our coworkers -- a guy who could hardly be considered a close friend -- even organized a “Soul Train line” and got people dancing down the middle. It was the damn coolest Last Song dance moment a dying dwindling crowd could have had.

With friends and coworkers like those, one hardly need ask why I’m still at the same place after 14 years. It was one of the best and most uplifting Christmas presents I’ve ever received.

The Cliche as Truth

Paul Westerberg--"First Glimmer" (mp3)

It is arguably the most cliched moment of the year: family buys Christmas tree, family puts up Christmas tree, family listens to Christmas music, perhaps in front of a roaring fire, as family decorates Christmas tree.

And yet, it is a powerful time, perhaps like no other. It transcends the cliche. So far, regardless of my age, my wife's age, or the age of our children, the ritual has lost none of its power. Even my jaded teenager, who often will spend entire evenings in her room away from us, not only pushes for decorating of the Christmas, often earlier than we can get our act together, but she also stays around the whole time,

There is something about bringing all of those boxes down from the attic, where they sat forgotten for 11 months. There is something about pulling out the strings of Christmas lights, wrapped carelessly all those months ago around rolled up pieces of newspaper and left alone to the mystery of whether the lights that lit up a year ago will light up again after a year of having done nothing but sit in an attic. There is something about wrapping those lights around a tree, everyone in the room offering an opinion about where they do or don't need to go. There is the turning out of all the lights in the room as the final test of whether those lights have been distributed properly.

And then there are the ornaments. I don't think anybody knows, most of the time, when or where nostalgia is going to surface from the depths of our consciousness. A random sight, smell, touch, sound, heck any sense we've got, can send us into the most profound feeling of memory and loss, because that's what nostalgia is--the reminder of something that once happened, or perhaps happened more than once, that we miss, that we regret the absence of. We know we can't get it back, but despite the sadness of the feeling that comes over us, when it does, we cling to the belief that we can return to the past.

Nothing does that like Christmas ornaments. When you open a box of ornaments, any number of things happen. You immediately see ornaments that you had forgotten about, which is all of them, because when you carry all of those boxes down the stairs from the attic, you know what's it them, but you don't think about it specifically. And then there they are--the ones your mother gave you, the ones your wife made, the ones you got when you were first married, the ones that were given to you upon the birth of your first child, the ones your children made at school, the ones you bought on trips to Maine or New Orleans or France or Hawaii. There are the ones that you can't remember where they came from, but they have been in your family so long that they have earned their own certain cache.

Proust's character may have bitten into a madeleine in order to trigger all kinds of childhood memories, but what would he have done with Christmas ornaments, for contained within that box or those boxes are so many layers of memory and family life. By the time you hang them all, you have written a personal narrative.

A Christmas tree becomes a history book.

If you add the music and the fire, once those songs kick in and the fire crackles in the background, you've created an evening that will practically have you weeping for your own childhood, even while you try to keep the focus on your children and their own memories.

I really can't even explain it. What a feast of pleasure and pain, of now and then, of future and past, of gain and loss. Maybe it isn't true at your house. But I'm guessing that it is.

There are any number of wonderful moments in any December, but I'm not sure that any of them top the time spent putting up, and then pondering, that tree. It's kind of like looking back at all of your years and then all of your family's years, or at least the best of those years, and then trying to come to terms with how those years have passed. And even after those initial family moments, the tree sits there. And some nights, later in December, you sneak back into the room alone and, in the most comfortable way possible, you confront time, mortality, and love.

Westerberg's song may have nothing to do with Christmas, but it has everything to do with nostalgia.

Believing in Make-Believe

Baby Learns to Crawl - Paul Westerberg (mp3)
And You Tell Me - Sugar (mp3)

My daughters came home from school last Tuesday and wrote letters to Santa requesting two of his elves to come live with them until Christmas. Have you heard of this? It's been on the periphery of our radar screen for a year or two now, but the girls only got sucked into the vortex last week, and it happened so fast we had little time to react. Here's one of about 100 blogs that chronicle the adventures of this nonsense.

The wife and I had to come to a quick decision: (a) run out in the dark of night and buy two of these bastards at Wal-Mart so that they were resting comfortably for the eager-eyed girls the next morning... or (b) do nothing.

Most anyone who knows me knows I was destined to choose (b) because it required less effort and offered me the opportunity for a "teaching moment" with the girls. That latter part helped excuse the former part. There's another reason for choosing not to do this. Just click on that link above and read some of it. That's a damn good reason, if you ask me.

Instead of just letting them wake up to utter disappointment, we wrote them a note back. The letter was from Tobias J. Elf, Director of Elf Resourses for the North Pole. He informed them that our house was so messy that they were under the impression elves were already stationed at our address, but if not, they could not dispatch elves to any house that had yet to put up a Christmas tree.

In the world of 21st Century parenting, the crossroads of make-believe and Christmas is a secret philosophical battleground. On one side, you have parents who don't even let their children believe in Santa. They believe it takes away a child's appreciation for their parents and endorses lying. They believe you can't teach your children about honesty if you spend time on the biggest holiday of the year aiding and abetting one of the greatest deceptions ever. On the other side, you have parents who look for more deceptions. They do Santa, but that's not enough. So they do the Tooth Fairy. And the Easter Bunny. They even do wilder stuff like these friggin' elves.

Our family falls closer on this side of the continuum. We deceive our children about tons of shit, enjoy it, and look forward to doing it for as long as they'll keep falling for it.

One of our closer friends falls on the other extreme, and at the heart of her concern is Jesus.

Seriously, her concern is that, if you spout all this nonsense about a fictional person you know doesn't exist, you're not only taking away the Christian part of the holiday, but you're also setting your children up to ask some of the same questions about God. If my parents gleefully misled me about the North Pole, why should I believe them about Heaven?

I never felt that kind of disillusionment with my parents. I was so proud of myself for having sleuthed my theories about Mom + Dad being responsible for those Christmas Morning presents that I spent nary a minute disliking them for deceiving me. I don't even think I ever really thought of it as deception so much as a game I hadn't realized I was playing. However, it's never wise to assume your own children will draw the same conclusions as you did when you were their age.

And I'm probably grateful I never saw the South Park pilot episode ("Santa v. Jesus" -- WARNING: it's even more vulgar than you might remember) as a kid, since there's no telling what that would have done to me.

So instead, my argument is this. I want my children asking questions. I want my children having doubts and exploring them, even actively investigating them. I want them to know that adults -- even their parents -- can sometimes be deceptive, sometimes misleading, and that trust and faith are priceless parts of our humanity, but not things that should be handed out freely without ever questioning. Doubt and healthy skepticism are not sins.

Fortunately, as with most things about parenting, how we choose to deal with our children and issues of Santa and make-believe isn't so much rocket-science as an exercise in knowing how you want to approach it and carrying it out, always placing the love of your children above the lesser considerations.

But... it sure is fun writing letters from the Tooth Fairy. Thank goodness Jesus is a pretty forgiving fella.

"And You Tell Me" is from Sugar's final album, Besides. "Baby Learns to Crawl" is from Stereo. Both are available on iTunes.