Speaking of Lies...

I have tried fairly consistently to always tell the boys the truth in their short lives. It just seems like good policy. Sure, sometimes I don't elaborate on the truth, or give them a simplified version of a complex answer that wouldn't interest them at this point anyway, but I make a conscious effort (as does Joanna) not to fabricate answers simply to placate them. Sure, it would be easier to say, "Wolves outside will devour you if you go out without permission," rather than, "Going outside is fine with Mommy and Daddy, but if you go out by yourself you might get hurt or lost, so you always need to make sure that we are with you," and perhaps for the moment it might even prove more effective to warn of dire vengenace to be wreaked by the beasts that lurk in the darkness between the trees, but in the end I think it's good practice to keep things on the level.

This despite how darn fun it is to lie to kids. I can hardly say why this is so--why is it so much more amusing to lie to someone who has no real chance of disbelieving? It's not like you have to be some master storyteller to get a kid to believe just about anything. I will always remember fondly Devin convincing my cousin that pirates used to ply the waters of our tiny mountain lake, stealing vast treasures of gold and diamonds from a handful of fishermen in rowboats. Not that it's malicious, but there is a definite tug-of-war in me between my delight in a child's acceptance and the certain knowledge that purposefully attempting to make a child believe something that isn't true is A Bad Thing.

I occasionally make my students read an essay on this phenomenon. It points out that when kids catch adults in a lie, it changes their fundamental belief in things. If Mommy can tell them that she can't afford to buy them a toy, then turns around and buys something for herself an hour later, the poor kid's left with little to work with except that Mommy is hurtful and a big fibber. It also suggests to the child that lying is acceptable when it gets you out of difficulty--something I manifestly do not need the boys picking up any sooner than they already are (Nathaniel already tells us routinely now that either he is "too scared" to do his chores or that his stomach hurts the second we ask him to do something).

[Whoops--between that paragraph and the next, I had to run out and drive away some raccoons from the trash. Of course, they tipped over the can that had the boxload of packing peanuts in it...]

Why bring this up? Because Christmas is coming. And this entails telling the boys what may involve the largest lie ever shared among humans outside certain cults: Santa Claus. Telling stories about and seeing the boys excited about Santa is terrific. Such stories were a large part of my childhood, and so much a part of shared cultural experience, that it would seem nearly abusive to try to excise the old fellow from the holiday. Surely, we don't put the emphasis on him when it comes to the meaning of the day (at this tender age, the boys are only aware that Christmas is "Jesus' birthday"), but he's pervasive in the decorations, in the talk of the time, in the programs and commercials they're exposed to. Heck, in my family I still get gifts from Santa every year. This year, one of my goals is to write letters to the boys from Santa, as I occasionally got as a child (much of my inspiration also comes from those letters written by J.R.R. Tolkien to his children, published these days as Letters from Father Christmas--why doesn't our New World version of St. Nick get a dignified moniker like "Father Christmas," anyway?).

I certainly don't hold with the KJV Onlyists who would insist that any reference to Santa is the work of the devil; I've even heard it suggested that when children learn that Santa is not real, they then might question whether God is as well, since He's another person we talk about a lot but never see. I don't intend to insist to the boys that Santa is a real person; we already talk about him as a "fun story," and hopefully they'll see through our actions, words, and prayers that our belief in Christ is genuine while our discussion of Santa is amusing entertainment. But still, a guy kind of wonders.

It was Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, of course, who put this into perspective for me--and a great deal else having to do with fiction, actually. It occurred to me that this bears much relevance to my desire to write fantasy fiction as a Christian, as well as the occasional Christian flap over Harry Potter and the like. As ever, my two literary heros have also not failed me on the field of literary criticism. Tolkien's excellent essay "On Fairy-Stories" has much to say on the matter; in discussing our fears that children will really "believe" in fantasy, he says of his own childhood, "Fairy-stories were not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability," and later, "I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse."

Lewis, in his An Experiment in Criticism, sums it up very neatly:

"Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in women's magazines."

[Dang--between that paragraph and this next one, I've spent some half an hour getting the boys back to bed; Nathaniel was roused by a bad dream and Caleb followed, out of curiosity, I suppose. One day I'll have to relate to you the fantastic tales they can come up with in the middle of the night...]

I suppose there would be real trouble if we constantly insisted that Santa was a real, living, breathing being--but we no more do that than we admonish them to believe in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or Frosty the Snowman, or Bob the Builder and Dora the Explorer for that matter. (We may be drawing a fine line by taking the boys out to see the "real" Thomas the Tank Engine, but even at this point they seem to make a distinction between the Thomas they see on television who talks and gets in quarrels and has occasional facial expressions, and the train they rode on last week.)

We already play games that are clearly consensual fantasy. When you steal one of my son's noses, they immediately demand that you put it back. If you claim to be putting it on your own face, they will come and snatch it away from you again and put it in its proper place on their own head. If you pretend to eat their fingers, they will insist you "spit my pieces back out." And they constantly ask questions of inanimate objects, pets, and other unspeaking subjects (like their sister), which I always answer in the voice of the object. We've had long conversations in such a fashion (the most tedious being the three-hour dialogue with "Mammoth Mountain" as we drove there for our vacation this summer; you try talking like a mountain for that long...). Yet in all of this, though they boys may be serious, there's never a moment when it wasn't clear they were playing at it as well. They never scream at the thought of having no nose, or cry out in pain for a bitten-off finger--and they never question for a moment why I am doing all the talking for the passing firetruck, or their baby sister, or the moon...

This has been a long and rambling post (blame the interruptions, the hour, and my confused thoughts); I'll leave off with another Tolkien quote:

"'"Is it true?" is the great question children ask,' [Andrew] Lang [compiler of fairy tales] said. They do ask that question, I know; and it is not one to be rashly or idly answered. But that question is hardly ever evidence of 'unblunted belief,' or even of the desire for it. Most often it proceeds from the child's desire to know which kind of literature he is faced with. Children's knowledge of the world is often so small that they cannot judge, off-hand and without help, between the fantastic, the strange (that is rare or remote facts), the nonsensical, and the merely "grown-up" (that is ordinary things of their parents' world, much of which still remains unexplored). But they recognize the different classes, and may like all of them at times. Of course the borders between them are often fluctuating or confused; but that is not only true for children."