Isn't it kind of fucked up to teach your kids about Santa. Like you're basically telling them that family didn't do much gifting for them it was all Santa. Its better for the kid to know you love them and thought about them rather than lie to them and subvert your relationship
Anyways I'm going to the local mall to debate a phony Santa
Teaching your children about Santa is good because it makes them learn that figures of authority lie just for the hell of it and they should never be trusted
I do think about that a lot, and how not receiving gifts is explained as a consequence for bad behavior. As a kid, if you notice all the poor kids aren't getting gifts, isn't the obvious implication that they're all naughty?
Santa is just another part of the American Civic Religion that reinforces prosperity gospel. The rich children are rewarded by gifts from Santa while the poor are punished by being ignored.
Naughty kids get clean-burning coal, the backbone of our Nation's energy supply. If the poor kids would just save up their coal and start a Koch competitor, they wouldn't be poor.
My kid is 4 and Santa is hitting hard this year even though we don't play up the Santa stuff. The level of pervasiveness of Santa in American culture is huge. What I've started saying to her is: "did you know that anyone can be Santa? Sometimes mom is Santa, sometimes Dad is Santa, or grandma and grampa, and one day you'll get to be Santa too."
She gets all her ideas about Santa from media and other people. It feels almost impossible to avoid.
Current parenting best practice is to have Santa bring one gift that's not the penultimate best gift of the day. Helps prevent kids from realizing too early that Santa tends to favor the rich kids.
That way the rich parents can still spoil their little shit but it wasn't Santa that brought them the ps5 pro and little Billy the knock off retro console
At our house the big gifts under the tree is from family and loved ones. But each of the four Sundays of advent Santa puts small gifts in the children's rooms at night and on Christmas eve he knocks on our door and leaves a bag of small gifts after they've opened the ones under the tree.
There's also a Christmas fox who hides treats in their rooms in the afternoon on the 24th, which helps pass the time until Christmas eve and the big gifts.
That way we get both things. The kids know they are getting gifts from the people who loves them and they get the excitement of Santa visiting them.