Christmas promises

Christmas is fast approaching with promises to our three-year-old boys of a supernatural visitor in the night. This is the first year the boys have been old enough to benefit from the fraud and so I, like millions of parents before me, have happily contributed to one of the most successful and benign conspiracies in human history.

I say benign knowing full well not everybody sees it that way (coca cola, consumerism, cholesterol, choose your objection) and indeed I’ve even heard parents wondering whether it’s okay to deceive their children. For me, as for most people, it was no difficult decision. Young children naturally inhabit the twilight world between fact and imagination. They are too busy decoding the crude rules of existence to yet bother with the sharper details of which patterns pertain to the real and which to the invented.

In the world of my boys, a couch morphs effortlessly into a fire engine, a stick into a microphone, a fly swat into a guitar and a cardboard box into, well pretty much anything. And for exactly the same reason that I’m not about to say ‘don’t be silly, you’re singing into a toothbrush’, I’m not about to object to the Santa construction.
Nevertheless, it does make me think about the interesting journey ahead of them, as they in time must confront the various tricks involved in making sense of their confusing existence.

In time they will learn that yes, sometimes people will lie to them, for the widest variety of reasons they might imagine, and yet, in order to get anywhere, they will also need to learn to trust most people, most of the time.
They will learn that often their instincts are useful guides, but occasionally the things that feel most true are nonsense: already, I watch the way they recoil with fear at the sight of a spider web, while they will sit blithely in the back seat of a car and watch the landscape melt past at a hundred kilometres per hour. (Are they crazy? A ton and a half of metal moving at a hundred kilometres and hour? Do they have no sense of kinetic energy involved? Well actually, no.)

They will learn that the people who have been their guides through the early years of questioning and wonder will become increasingly useless fountains of knowledge as their questions becomes more sophisticated. Indeed, they will find that most of the time the honest answer to their most interesting questions will be, ‘we simply don’t know.’
They will discover that even the things that seem most rock solid are best thought of as only probably true, or in many cases, as crude approximations of the thing we currently consider to be probably true. If they listen carefully they will hear that many things that were once considered self-evident are now thought to be loopy, and will infer that some of our own precious foundations are likely to go the same way.