The season of lying is over for another year! A time where you love every present from your in-laws, your partner pretends he knows what he bought his mother and every person over a certain age is complicit in a fantastical story about a chubby old guy in a red suit.
Parents tell their children lies all the time and Christmas is definitely the time to be selective with the truth! The whole Santa story keeps the magic alive both for them and for us. The bonus is that for months leading up to the big event behaviour can be kept in check by the threat of a Santa no show. In my house the laundry became the place where we did the washing and was completely redundant as a mini Alcatraz!
Children will believe anything we tell them because they are innocent and in some ways we abuse this for our own means. One of my friends told her children that Santa was watching them via the alarm sensors throughout her house. She found her four year old confessing to the sensor that he hadn’t hit his sister on purpose! Another friend tells her kids that when the ice-cream van plays a tune it means they’ve run out of ice-cream and then there are my catholic friends and God knows what they’re telling their kids! Or does he/she?
Our children trust us so implicitly, that you really can feed them any old bullshit to keep them in line. My lie of choice involves spiders, which are always present in places that I would prefer my son not to explore! The downside of this is that he now has an irrational fear of all insects and this is something that I will have to rectify in years to come.
Last week I found myself telling my son that the dummy fairy is the sister of the tooth fairy and that she had broken in to the house and stolen his dummy! Luckily he’d forgotten about the tooth fairy that worked in a toyshop where previously he’d exchanged his daytime dummy for a toy garage.
Children like to ask questions so you need to get your story straight and think about tangents they may follow. I remember asking my mum why there were so many Santas; quick as a flash she had an answer so I never doubted her story. Children want to believe and why would you their loving parent lie to them anyway?
We often lie to our children to protect them from the harsh truth of a situation and in a few years time they will be doing exactly the same to protect us.
I don’t want to incriminate myself here as my mum does read this blog but we all end up lying to our parents. Sometimes parents don’t want to hear the truth especially in those late teen years when alcohol, drugs and sex come in to the equation! We reason that it is so much kinder to be economical with the truth or if that fails we blame our friends!
