by Jay Jamison
Virtually every American is familiar with the Santa Clause story. It’s a simple tale of a jolly rotund man who lives at the North Pole with his wife, along with a workforce of elves who manufacture toys for all the boys and girls who have been good in the past year. Simple enough. The Santa story has been used as an explanation to children accounting for the appearance of wrapped presents under the Christmas tree on Christmas morning. It’s also an ecumenical story–you do not need to adhere to any particular religious faith, to pass this tale onto your kids. I was told this story when I was a little kid and bought into the whole concept.
As a child I lived in a very large, federal style house built around 1870. We had fireplaces, not just in the living room, like many modern homes today–we had them in upstairs bedrooms too. The ceilings in that old house were very high by today’s standards. So, the Santa story fit rather well with me, the impressionable little kid, partly because the descriptions in the story roughly matched my environment. The story of the Night before Christmas described things that fit almost perfectly into the actual surroundings of my early youth.
In the end it’s the children themselves, who put the Santa story to the test. Impressionable children start putting two and two together early on. Even though we had a pretty big fireplace, which my family used each Christmas Eve, I wanted to know how Santa was going to get down the chimney, through the damper, and into the fireplace itself.
I mentioned above that the Santa story is simple, but is it really that simple? William of Ockham was an English philosopher who was born toward the end of the Thirteenth Century. He is famous for a principle of reasoning known as Ockham’s Razor, which is variously translated as: “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” Another way of expressing this is, the simplest theory that works, is the best theory. Let’s go back to that precocious kid, asking difficult questions about Santa. How did Santa get down the chimney? How did he have enough presents, for every good boy and girl? How did he know who’s been naughty or nice? (that’s a troubling one!). How did he make all those breaking and entering deliveries in a single night? And let’s not even attempt to explain a flying sleigh powered by flying reindeer.
I suggest that many parents, in their ever-expanding explanations propping up the Santa tale, are often unaware that they are reaffirming the wisdom of Ockham’s Razor, through a sort of Socratic dialogue with their kids. In dialogues with inquisitive children, parents learn that the Santa story is not as simple as it seemed at first. In fact, it’s enormously complicated, as many parents soon discover under youthful cross examination. This complexity is revealed through the inquiries of children, who may be attempting their first philosophical examination of a theory, without even knowing it. The questions become increasingly more difficult to answer to their satisfaction. You may object that my writing about this somehow destroys the magic of Christmas. But the look on little kids faces on Christmas morning still brings delight to us oldsters. So, in a way, the magic is never lost. It is renewed annually in the joy of a new generation beginning their journey of inquiry, just as we did, so many years ago. Merry Christmas.
