The Willow Glen Resident Explaining Santa clauses to the kids Deborah Taylor-Hollis I'm sure by now some of you are beginning to think that even Kathy Lee Gifford doesn't talk about her kids as much as I seem to lately, but the fact is that so many interesting conundrums come up when you have children, and I'm frequently amazed at the solutions we find. Take the Santa issues. Up until now, Santa's been a pretty easy guy to explain, and we've had no real disasters. We've been lucky that older children (and a few grinch-like adults) haven't made any nasty revelations, and I'm always on guard for anything in the media that might cause questions. We've gone with the traditional party line about his adult helpers showing up at malls to assist with the childhood requests for lap time, and we've been able to navigate the waters of where he lives easily enough. With the new email addresses and the traditional mailing locations for him to collect his requests, my son is very happy with the status quo. Then we got the computer, and I inadvertently told him Santa would bring us software. I had made a major faux pas in logic. I was told in no uncertain terms that Santa and the elvi (that's a plural for elf, not a collection of Vegas lounge singers) make toys for kids, and he wouldn't be bringing us anything else. I was rather stumped. Children have a special logic, and one of the cornerstones that all child psychologists agree on is that kids need solid rules. They will even create rules themselves, such as bedtime rituals that are more rigid than an IRS audit and food lists narrower than the eye of a needle. My son was adamant that he knew what went on up at the North Pole, and anything else I happened to suggest was not only wrong but heresy against the great bearded one. I knew I had to come up with something to explain other items. After all, the odds are getting greater every year that Santa will send clothing, books or software. Maybe something even more un-Santa-like, such as gilded fruit baskets or floral arrangements. Our friends are far-flung and get very creative around the season. And my son has made himself absolute arbitrator and sole owner of any package that comes into our house, reading carefully to see who it is for and who it is from. I can see awkward moments occurring come Dec. 25, which looms like a calculus exam. I must have an explanation for everything. Elves are easy to explain, as they don't like to live in warm climates and are very similar to dwarves and "little people," ordinary citizens that show up frequently on television programs. The entire lifestyle of living with a group of people faraway from society is also simple--after all, once you have the wherewithal to build a private family compound for yourself and your close friends, the location is pretty immaterial. Between the Kennedys and Marlon Brando, we have lots of good examples of social withdrawal syndrome. The whole-world-in-one-night idea got a bit dicier, but luckily he still doesn't grasp the concepts of time and distance too well. In a couple of years, if no one else has destroyed our family belief system and peer pressure doesn't get to him, I'm going with the concept of Cray Supercomputer Interactive Time/Locations Displacement Systems incorporated into the sled about 1950 by German scientists working for NASA in exchange for immunity from prosecution for certain actions taken during the '40s. Considering how much Star Trek we watch, I think I can pull it off. But the idea that Santa might bring something other than toys? Well, I found the answer. I just explained the idea of companies doing "free product testing." You may know that most software companies send out samples of future items to computer users and hackers all over the world to find bugs and give feedback for marketing and research. Well, I just announced that Santa is the sole distributor of all this free stuff for every manufacturer in the world. Any company that wants to see how well their product does, or make sure people are happy with it, provides Santa with hundreds of items to give to people all over the world to make sure we like their products. So, when Dec. 25 comes, the elves load up not only all the exact replicas of toys that they have made in their workshop (frequently complete with the batteries they get for free from Ever-Ready and Ray-O-Vac), but they also throw in all the shirts, sox, hats, bowling balls, picture frames, reading lamps and, yes, even computer software, that came up to them with the weekly shipment of mail from boys and girls all over the world. Necessity is the mother of invention, and Santa Claus is its distributor. It's a synergy thing. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, November 25, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.