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Original poster

How do you all keep father christmas alive

81 replies

happycat · 23/10/2003 10:50

The other thread about christmas has got me thinking just how do you keep father christmas alive.Has any of you got any tips on how you can prolong this magical time.Anything different.Also how do you cope when you have an older one and they start to work it out,it hasn't happened yet.Saw my first christmas advert on t.v last night so its here.

OP posts:
dadslib · 23/10/2003 14:20

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happycat · 23/10/2003 14:26

poor twinkie that orrible .how old were you?I think i must have been about 8 I reckon when I found the truth out.My dad put the pressies in my bedroom and tripped over he was pissed we had all been out that night so i was half asleep anyway.My 5 year old has been learning about money this year and saving up for his own things and at the w/end he said "I like santa mum"I said ahh why is that darling,he said "because he bring's you loads of toys and you don't even have to pay for them".Kids of today.

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mears · 23/10/2003 15:25

dadslib - did you look at the link?

You are right about green - you are not right about coca-cola making him red. Coca-cola capitalised on him being red. You and I are both right to some degree. Agreed ?

dadslib · 23/10/2003 15:31

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mears · 23/10/2003 15:58

What are you right about again? I have agreed with you on the colouring. You are bl**dy well not right about piggin' coca-cola. Nothing to do with you being a man!!!!

dadslib · 23/10/2003 16:25

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happycat · 23/10/2003 16:51

santa is a woman how else would he be able to multi task and do all those jobs on the one night.

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Rhubarb · 23/10/2003 16:52

I have to agree I'm afraid, the Father Christmas that we now see is Coca Cola's invention, the original was green.
Also, at the cost of being called a killjoy, I'm not going to tell dd about FC. Partly because of his links with Coca Cola, also because to me he represents capitalism (I want, I want, I want), partly because I don't want her to think that Christmas is just about FC and partly because I felt so betrayed by my mum when she eventually revealed to me that there were no such things as FC or fairies. My wonderful make-believe world that I had been sheltering in fell apart and I never trusted her again.

Also, if you tell your kids that FC gives presents to good children, how do you explain the other children who don't get any presents? Are they bad children? I just don't like this 'if you're good Santa will visit' notion. I dunno, it just doesn't sit well with me!

Having said all this, I would not condemn those who do tell their kids about FC - just don't mention him to my dd!

Twinkie · 23/10/2003 16:56

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Rhubarb · 23/10/2003 17:04

No, just a pretty bleak and lonely childhood in which my world of fairies and FC was my escape from the reality. I blamed my mum for a long time in forcing me to wake up to the real world!

We still celebrate Christmas in the traditional way, I love putting up the decorations and getting a tree. I think it can be magical without FC. As a Christian, for me the birth of Jesus is pretty magical, and I do believe in Angels and the magic that is goodness. So I don't feel that dd is missing out. I just don't like to concentrate too much on the present side of it all. I'd like to think that if she didn't get any presents at all, Christmas would still be a magical occassion for her.

mears · 23/10/2003 21:15

Since no-one is reading the links, here is the info about when Santa turned red.

It wasn't until 1866 that Santa Claus wore red : an illustration for "Santa Claus And His Works" drawn by Thomas Nast gave him a reddish brown outfit, trimmed with white fur, but his image remained variable right through the 19th century and into the 20th, sometimes wearing red but sometimes in green or blue.

So it was red before coca-cola got their hands on him.

mears · 23/10/2003 21:18

And another thing

A Boston printer named Louis Prang introduced the English custom of Christmas cards to America, and in 1885 he issued a card featuring a red-suited Santa. The chubby Santa with a red suit (like an "overweight superhero" began to replace the fur-dressed Belsnickle image and the multicolored Santas.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the burgeoning Coca-Cola company was still looking for ways to increase sales of their product during winter, then a slow time of year for the soft drink market. They turned to a talented commercial illustrator named Haddon Sundblom, who created a series of memorable drawings that associated the figure of a larger than life, red-and-white garbed Santa Claus with Coca-Cola. Coke's annual advertisements ? featuring Sundblom-drawn Santas holding bottles of Coca-Cola, drinking Coca-Cola, receiving Coca-Cola as gifts, and especially enjoying Coca-Cola ? became a perennial Christmastime feature which helped spur Coca-Cola sales throughout the winter (and produced the bonus effect of appealing quite strongly to children, an important segment of the soft drink market). The success of this advertising campaign has helped fuel the legend that Coca-Cola actually invented the image of the modern Santa Claus, decking him out in a red-and-white suit to promote the company colors ? or that at the very least, Coca-Cola chose to promote the red-and-white version of Santa Claus over a variety of competing Santa figures in order to establish it as the accepted image of Santa Claus.

Sorry - I seem to have got obsessed by this. Now, if Santa had breastfed.....

mears · 23/10/2003 21:18

Don't know how that winky face got there

mears · 23/10/2003 21:28

Rhubarb - I can understand where you are coming from about Santa regarding presents for children who don't get them etc. Children don't think like that though - they concentrate on themselves at that age. I certainly don't allow them to get extravagant at Christmas - they never get the really expensive things they want and that we can't afford. However, they always got so excited thinking a magical thing had happened at Christmas when their stockings appeared. When they discovered the truth they were amazed at how we had managed to do it without them knowing. My elder children were so excited at their young sisters reaction thinking that Santa had been that it was worth the fairytale. I think it depends what your relationship with your children is. I actually told my eldest son that Santa didn't exist when he was 11 years old because he would be ridiculed by his peers. I did it by making him think about it and how it owrked. He was disappointed but not disappointed in us. He thought we were very clever in keeping the magic alive for so long.

Eowyn · 23/10/2003 21:30

I don't recall ever believing in FC & assume my dd 3.5 knows it's just made up, how else do you explain all the ones hanging rounds shops.

I really would hate to insist to her that it is true when it isn't, goes so against the grain, and trying to encourage her to be truthful nowadays when her fantasy world is going full throttle, then again I wouldn't make a big deal of it either way, will just react to what she says as & when, i think....
Hope you don;t think that's too mean, seems a lot easier than trying to explain the logistics of how he delivers everything etc

soyabean · 23/10/2003 22:14

FC visits children who believe in him, and not those who dont, so the parents of those children make up for it by providing stuff for those children. IME older kids dont let on to the younger ones or to parents as they think they wont then get anything. When mine have asked directly whether he's real I sit on the fence and say what do you think? I certainly wouldnt insist that hes real but remember the excitement and enjoy them experiencing the same. I felt quite proud of the responsibility of keeping the secret from my younger siblings.

GeorginaA · 23/10/2003 22:30

Of course for a modern christmas, you can always sit up with your kids to track santa via NORAD

dadslib · 24/10/2003 09:27

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mears · 24/10/2003 09:30

A Boston printer named Louis Prang introduced the English custom of Christmas cards to America, and in 1885 he issued a card featuring a RED-SUITED Santa. The chubby Santa with a red suit (like an "overweight superhero" began to replace the fur-dressed Belsnickle image and the multicolored Santas.

Dadslib - read the above!!!!!!

And yes I am murder to live with when I KNOW I am right

mears · 24/10/2003 09:32

Coca-cola - 1930. I rest my case

Ghosty · 24/10/2003 09:50

Well, I have said this before and I will say it again ... I love the way my son really believes in Santa Christmas (as he calls him) and Fairies and all the things that we know don't really exist ... In fact, when I tell him that monsters aren't real when he thinks there is one in him bedroom at night he doesn't believe me ...
Come on ... Fantasy is such a huge PART of CHILDHOOD ... it is what its all about. Children are the only beings on the planet who are truly able to 'suspend belief' ... they have a lifetime of real life (warts and all) ahead of them, why not let them believe in fantasy like that for the short time that they are children??
I believed in Father Christmas, the tooth fairy, Tinkerbell, Peter Pan, that my toys woke up at night ... and I wish I still did ... there is so much death and destruction in the world that we need to have fantasy ...
Perhaps if we encouraged people to imagine more we wouldn't have such a drug problem ... i.e help to escape reality ... I certainly never needed drugs (grew up in Holland so they were readily available to me) to escape ... I had my own imagination thanks to my childhood ...
So ... put that in yer pipe and smoke it ...

PS ... Father Christmas made a right mess of my mum's house last year ... crumbs and snow ... and he kicked over Grandad's coal bucket and never cleaned it up when he left ... but I suppose he was in a bit of a hurry

dadslib · 24/10/2003 09:58

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Northerner · 24/10/2003 10:04

Ghosty I totally agree with you. My ds is only 18 months but I will encourage him to be a believer as I was when I was a kid. I too believed in tooth fairies/peter pan etc and didn't feel betrayed when I found it was all a myth. What's the harm in seeing our childrens delighted little faces when they believe something magical has happenned? I think the world is a tough cynical place to be, and do not want my ds to be too cynical too soon.

BTW I'm 27 and I still get a pressie from FC every year. But perhaps that because I'm a good girl.

WideWebWitch · 24/10/2003 10:17

I know it's not a popular view but I don't particularly like the lie that is Father Christmas. I know some people object to the word 'lie' but technically telling kids about FC is (IMO etc) lying since he doesn't exist. In case anyone's interested there was an interesting and stimulating debate about this last year here . I'm not saying it can't be discussed again btw (she said defensively!), just linking to it in case anyone wants to read it)

Twinkie · 24/10/2003 10:25

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