SantaGod is watching!

There is a television commercial out there somewhere, I forget for what (so it’s very effective), that shows a young kid engaged in some manner of foolishness. When his father notices what he is doing, he says “Santa’s watching” and the kid straightens up. Whole thing about taking advantage of things while you can.

I thought, back in the halcyon days of idealism before actual parenthood, that I would never stoop to such manipulation, wouldn’t taint the Santa story with tales of coal and naughty lists. I would communicate with my child, talk to her, help her to understand and make the right decisions about behavior.

Then my child turned three.

(The Terrible Twos, by the way, are a fallacy, an urban legend like Target being owned by the French or no-strings-attached sex. Age three is when the shit, damn near literally, hits the fan.)

We have been working the Nice and Naughty lists for all they are fucking worth. Throwing a fit because it’s bedtime? Santa sees you. Interrupting Mama and Daddy talking by screaming and hitting one or the other? Spend the day on the Naughty list. Won’t clean up your toys? Imagine how hard it will be to clean up after coal.

Oh, you want to get back on the Nice list? How about some steamed broccoli and a thorough room cleaning. That should do the trick.

I don’t feel entirely right about this, but only in a theoretical sense. In practice, it rules. I want it to be Christmas every month and I want her to believe in Santa until she leaves for college. But, I do understand the issues with coercing your child into good behavior.

I’ve been reading an analysis of the writing and compiling of the Bible lately. There are literally centuries for which there are no records of the Bible’s development, when the texts that would become the New Testament in particular were hand-copied by scribes who would often take liberties (or just make mistakes) in transcriptions. There is abundant evidence of deliberate edits, of competing versions and visions.

Laden with my new insight into the power of Santa (long may his concept live!) for parents, I’ve decided that the temptation for these scribes and other learned religious folks to make the same move, to pull a Santa and lean heavily on the “God’ll get ya” in order to make the hoi polloi straighten up and fly right, was just too much. They likely saw congregants as children, being as the literate, the only ones that could look for themselves at what a text said, made up less than a tenth of the population. I mean, really, because look, the words of Christ and the dogma of the Christian church are quite far apart, and if I can succumb to the temptation and justify my means with the ends, why wouldn’t community leaders and intelligentsia of the early CE.

Thing is, kids are allowed to stop believing in Santa at a pretty young age. I don’t recall ever being angry at being forced to be good once I discovered that the coercive force, the myth of Santa, was just that (though of course I’m secretly convinced, down deep, that Liv will in fact resent me for it, because I’m also secretly convinced I suck ass as a father). But, maybe that was because I wasn’t told to hate queers or vote Republican for Santa.

Unveiling to the devout that it wasn’t God or Jesus threatening them to stay in line but rather some elitist intellectuals of the first few CE centuries is likely to create a bit more of a backlash. Which is too bad, because read as an allegory run through a centuries-long game of telephone instead of divinely-inspired, error-free literal truth, the Bible could be a greater source of good than it is these days.

And maybe more of my friends would have as little beef with God as they do Santa.