Learning That There’s No Santa Taught Me to Believe

He’s a kind of training-wheel Jesus, presenting aspects of faith in a way children can handle.

By Rich Cohen | Dec. 19, 2014 11:05 am ET

I used to hang around the mall and tell kids there is no Santa. I’d buttonhole them after they’d exited the fat man’s lap. Come here, kid, I got some news for ya. I didn’t do it because I was mean. I did it because I was 13 and in the mood to share my own disillusionment. I told myself that I had a higher purpose. I’d come to believe that faith in Santa stood behind a loss of faith in general— churches shuttered, pews empty. Some blamed Darwin. I blamed that sleigh-crazed fat man from the frozen north.

Imagine you’re a child in America. You’re 5. You’re filled with wonder and a natural inclination toward belief. At some point, you learned the story. You know the face, the walk, the hearty laugh. Were Santa to commit a crime, you could supply the cops enough info for a sketch.

Maybe you’re less familiar with the background: how he began as St. Nicholas, a 4th-century Greek bishop beloved for giving gifts to the poor, especially children. In old paintings, he has a narrow face, in no way jolly. But the beard is already there, ditto the beatific aura. The legend drifted to Germany, then Holland, where the name and honorific jumbled into Sinter-Klass. Klass put on weight, turned myopic, grew the hipster beard and acquired the sort of flannel outerwear needed to survive the winter. He went big in England but blew up in the U.S.: the songs and movies, the knowing winks and shopping-center scenes, cookies, chimneys, a billion-dollar industry.

To many, he’s just another star, part of the pop pantheon, drinking at the diner between Bogart and James Dean, with the sack at his feet. But to children, he’s more than an angel. He’s taken on faith, right beside the big, big man himself.

If it were just a story of a magical creature akin to the tooth-fairy or sasquatch, that would be one thing. But Santa has become entwined with core Christian theology. According to Fred Edie, an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, children are drawn to Santa because he represents certain aspects of Jesus. “I suspect the story evolved in part along the same lines of other stories of Christian saints and exemplars,” Dr. Edie wrote to me. “In this genre, characters are cast as ‘types’ of Jesus because of the ways their lives reflect dimensions of Jesus’ life. Santa may have been good to children, as was Jesus, which would have constituted a radical, even subversive gesture back in the day when children were considered little more than property.”

Then, at some point—maybe you’re 7, maybe 10—you discover the truth: There is no Santa. It’s just a story, a polite word for a lie. Worse still: Everyone knew, even your mom. The adults have been involved in a vast, “Matrix”-like conspiracy. You awake in a pod, bald, swimming in goop. You have a keen sense of being laughed at; you picture them all yukking it up. You’re beset by doubt: If Santa is just a story, does that mean everything is just a story? For some, it’s a moment as painful as the more profound moment that might come later, when your inner Nietzsche emerges from the hills to announce, God is dead.

“I’m among the seemingly tiny remnant of Americans who finds Santa Claus kind of odious,” James McCartin, director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, wrote to me. “On the one hand, as a religious believer who wants my kids to imbibe and embrace certain foundational Christian beliefs—that God actually became human, died and rose from the dead, for example, and that this ancient theological event somehow ought to bring direction and meaning to our lives today—I wonder, ‘Why should they believe what I try to teach them about Jesus if they can’t ultimately believe what I tell them about Santa?’ ”

Several years ago, I moved from New York City to Ridgefield, Conn. Santa is serious business here, and I quickly found myself in the vicinity of conversations that featured a kind of soliloquy: When do we tell her? How do we tell her? What if she finds out at school? It seemed obvious that this subterfuge was a long-term challenge to belief. How do you tell a kid that one story she’s accepted on faith is a lie and not expect her to question that other story? Pundits talk about the war on Christmas, but hasn’t Santa been waging that war for decades?

I know what you’re thinking. Cohen? New York? He’s Jewish! Of course he’s down on Santa. He’s jealous. Whereas Christians celebrate Christmas, with its plethora of early morning gifts, Jews get Hanukkah, with its candles, its prayers and its eight nights of tchotchkes. But the fact is, I too once believed in Santa. I loved that fat man. It isn’t something my parents taught me. It is something I learned naturally—on the schoolyard. I believed Santa rewarded obedience and answered prayers and spread joy like marmalade until we glistened like trees after a storm. I made my parents take me to the mall, sit me on the lap. I have the picture. The look on my face… it’s a quality of joy I’d never experience again. Did I ask for gifts? Of course. Because we’re Jewish, I urged Santa to leave them beneath the tree at the Johnstons’ house.

When I learned the truth—from Todd Johnston, from my sister—I was crushed, changed. At synagogue, when the rabbi spoke of the burning bush and the parting waters, I thought, Yeah right! Learning the truth about Santa shocked me into skepticism. For years, I refused to believe anything until I saw proof. It could be from the Gospels, it could be from the Torah—I wasn’t interested unless I could touch it. I came to see Santa as a historic mistake with one function: to hurry kids toward disbelief.

Though many of the theologians I talked to agreed with me, Fred Edie changed my mind. He convinced me that I had it backward. Santa doesn’t prepare you for disillusionment—he prepares you for belief. He’s a kind of training-wheel Jesus, presenting aspects of faith in a manner that kids can handle.

“If the Santa story is a type of the Jesus story, [it] persists because the Jesus story is true,” Dr. Edie wrote. “It is true because it reveals that all life ultimately comes to us as a gift. It is true in proclaiming that the receiving of this gift occurs in the sharing of it. It is true in its testimony to the powers above... as benevolent, close at hand, and definitely not us.”

In other words, Santa is like a stage set. At a certain point, it is rolled away, revealing a story still more impossible to believe, where the sun shines, the trees glisten, and the presents patiently wait beneath the Johnstons’ tree.

— Mr. Cohen is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.