You know, it's about that time of year again for the Santa discourse to start. And every year, I'm seeing this on social media, you know, the great Santa debate. And it started again. I don't know who started. Probably not one person started it, but I'm seeing it pop up on my feet again. All the debating about Santa. Who the heck are you? What are you talking about? I'm Santa Claus. No, you're not.

Now, by the way, if you have little children in ear shot, you should turn this off. So they should be listening anyway. But if they are, you should turn off. Because I do want to chime in on this because it does annoy me. A lot of posts on X that have been popping up. Here's just one, for example, from an account I follow.

It says, if you tell your kids there's a Santa, you're lying to them.

They're going to later find out that you lied to them and realize that you may again lie to them in the future. I don't know why parents do this, although mine didn't, but it's a good indicator of bad parenting in my book. So there's a lot of stuff like that. You're lying to your kids about Santa, you're a bad parent. You're traumatizing them. They'll never trust you again. All this kind of stuff. And let me just say this. We are a Santa household. We are Santa believers. We are Santa Maxing, as the kids might say, every Christmas. Are we lying to our kids? Are we engaged in a deceptive conspiracy? Uh, no.

Because here's what you have to understand about young kids. They don't understand what not real

even means. So these parents that feel so proud of themselves because they go to like their

four year old and say, well, Santa isn't real. Do you understand your four-year-old doesn't know

what you're talking about? Do you understand that your four-year-old, not real doesn't mean anything? For your four-year-old, when you say Santa isn't real, well, he's like, well, what do you mean? I see Santa on TV. I see him at the mall. What do you mean he's not real? Clearly real. and that's it.

That's all that a young kid understands.

Young children think that Superman is real.

They think fairies and leprechauns and dragons and mermaids are real. They think monsters are real. They're worried about, they're like, they're actually worried about a monster in their closet. That's like a real thing that a five-year-old is concerned about in his life. And when you say, we've all had, if you've maybe had this conversation with your five-year-old,

it's like, monsters aren't real, number one.

And there's, like, there's not, I've tried to reason this way with my own kids. I open the closet, say, like, look, there's not, there's, it's a wall, there's nothing in here. And the thing you're worried about doesn't even exist. and even if it did exist, like it's not in your closet.

Look at the closet.

There's nothing in here, I promise you.

But it doesn't matter. They don't, they don't understand that because they have it in their imagination. They have it in their mind. And so if they have it in their mind, then it's real. And that's all they know. They think every character they see on TV is real. Paul Patrol is a documentary for your four-year-old.

Your four-year-old is not watching a cartoon show. Your four-year-old is watching, like,

the real-life adventures live. For, you know, for a four-year-old, Paul Patrol is cops. Bad boys, bad boys, what you're going to do? It's like watching live footage of actual police officers at work.

It's just that they happen to be, they happen to be dogs.

So that's what it is.

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