Santa Claus in the Classroom

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“Santa isn’t real. Your parents put your presents under the tree. You don’t even have a chimney.”

I still remember my grandmother breaking what was, at the time, tragic news to me when I was just eight-years-old. I felt confused, frustrated, and sad. And I certainly am not alone in having felt those emotions. The recent story of a substitute teacher telling a grade one student that Santa Claus is not real has sparked a great deal of conversation—and heated debate—in faculty lounges across schools all over North America. In my own, my colleagues and I reminisced about how and when we found out about Santa’s true identity. But the word “true” has since stuck with me.

Current staff room conversations do not center on whether Santa Claus exists but, rather, on what a teacher’s professional and moral obligation is in the classroom regarding both respecting and encouraging students’ beliefs. Many teachers and parents are arguing that motivating students to believe in Santa Claus pushes a Eurocentric, Christian framework in the classroom. Santa Claus is, after all, Saint Nicholas: the saint who is welcomed yearly on Christmas—a Catholic holiday, which Christians all over the world mark as the coming of their Lord and Saviour, Christ. Other educators and administrators are advising that teachers ask those students who know that Santa isn’t real to not burst their peers’ bubbles (which inspires the privileging of a single cultural lens).

So, what are we teaching, truly? Are educators precluding critical literacy in our schools and classrooms by encouraging our students to believe in a fictional being? Are some students, through no fault of their own, being silenced to allow others to live out a childhood fantasy? Is such an action productive because it accommodates student beliefs, or is it problematic because it promotes a unilateral, imaginary narrative? At what age—if any—should students understand that Santa Claus (and his dear friends, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy) are not real beings? Or are they actually real because peoples’ beliefs and cultural views make them so? Our Western society seems to have invented and celebrated an entity—a mascot—for nearly every occasion.

To what degree, then, are teachers on the hook for maintaining the beliefs that are facilitated by parents in our students’ homes? That the teacher who made national news is a substitute teacher is even more problematic because she, like most occasional teachers, likely does not know the students on a personal level and does not have the benefit of having built a rapport of trust and with her students and their parents. There is an interesting intersection or clash of perspectives, and teachers are smack dab in the middle of it all. Those teaching in a Catholic school may not find an issue with allowing children of any age to believe in Santa Claus because, as some are arguing, belief in an entity that cannot be seen is the cornerstone of Catholicism: the Mystery of Faith. Those teaching in a public system, however, might be more affected by this discussion because their classroom, depending on their school board’s policies and practices, may be meant to be either a secular space or one of inclusion that integrates and observes all religious practices.

Is the presence of Santa Claus—a commercial and cultural icon—in the classroom at odds with a non-denomination approach to education? As social media users continue to rejoice about the return of Elf on the Shelf, I cannot help but wonder if we, as teachers and as parents, are, in some way, gripping to a semblance of our own childhood fantasies. In welcoming Santa and all of his friends, Are we trying to preserve our own sense of wonder and imagination that, perhaps, were taken from us a little too soon? With Christmas approaching, there is still some time for us to make up our minds regarding Santa Claus’s place in the twenty-first-century classroom.

I just hope that we don’t end up on the naughty list for doing so.
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