A Christmas-y Question

I was thinking yesterday about teaching your kids about Christ during Christmas time, and about teaching your kids about Jesus in general, and I ran into a problem.  How is your kid supposed to understand the difference between Santa and Jesus?  When you're reading them The Night Before Christmas and the Christmas story out of Luke, coloring pictures of a baby in a manger and making construction paper santas with cotton ball beards, visiting the temple grounds with the nativity statues as well as the mall Santa.  How are they supposed to understand that Christ is a real, important, actual being and that Santa is just a fun, made-up character?

This problem of kids not being able to differentiate between real and not recently came to my attention when one of my friends who is a first grade teacher told me this hilarious story:  In class they were learning about "national symbols"  like the president, the flag, the white house, etc.  She brought in some pictures of her trip to Washington, D.C. and showed her first graders a picture of herself in front of the White House.  A wide eyed boy with many a wheel turning in his little brain asked "Wait--you mean Obama is real??"

Funny, yes, but when you think about it, honestly, how was he supposed to know?  At some point in their elementary school years, the realization dawns (or in more dramatic and upsetting cases, someone drops the bomb) that Santa Claus isn't real.  Mom hides the easter eggs.  There are not leprechauns at the end of the rainbow.  But,when this happens,  they must realize that there are many fictional characters.  We tell them lots of stories! Especially if we are trying to teach them the gospel.  Do their little 6 year old minds just start to take inventory and conclude that the entire roll call of characters parading through their life are all fictional?  Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairies, Cinderella, Snow White, the Little mermaid, Elmo, Hobbits, Batman, the Hulk, Spiderman, Harry Potter, Obama . . . Jesus, Noah, Moses, Adam & Eve, Nephi.  In some cases I think we could reasonably expect them to understand--big bird is a giant talking bird, and since you don't typically see giant talking birds, that one is probably not real.  No one they know can shoot webs from their hands, so ya, Spiderman, probably not either.  But most of the biblical stories we tell are pretty fantastical.  I can just as easily see a young person reasoning--ok, it's impossible to part the sea, and there's no way you could fit two of every single animal on a boat--so those are probably just stories.  The Bible is akin to my Grimm's fairytale collection.

Walking on water?  Feeding 5,000 people with 5 loaves of bread?  Raising people from the dead?  Healing the blind?  Sounds like a superhero.

The solution that I very temporarily came to was to clearly explain to your children from an early age what is real and what is not.  Tell them which stories are just stories and which ones are not.  But then I decided that sounds an awful lot like destroying the sense of wonder, belief, and imagination that characterizes childhood and makes it so perfectly magical.  I want my kids to believe in magic!  I want them to look for fairies whenever they're in a forest, and fervently wish while reading Harry Potter that someday they'll receive their own invitation to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

But I also want them to understand very clearly and without a doubt that every word that comes out of my mouth about Jesus Christ is important, true, and something they need to believe in and count on for the rest of their lives, long after the day they reach the disappointing realization about Santa Claus.

Maybe this really isn't even an issue?  Maybe little minds deserve more credit than I'm giving them and somehow, some way, these things just work themselves out in there.  But part of that is certainly asking their parents a lot of questions right?  How do you answer when they ask "are fairies real?"  Does it depend on their age?  If you answer "yes they are" will they not trust you anymore when they learn the truth?  I know parents that refuse to tell their kids about Santa because they want their kids to always know they've never lied to them.  I always thought "eh, fine, by all means make your own parenting decisions, but I don't really think my kid is going to have huge trust issues just because I played along with Santa, right?"  But now, that's making a little bit of sense.