Not objective.

Not a myth. Not a lie.

(Although my husband has had a number of articles accepted by Catholic Exchange, the following one on Santa Claus was not:)

http://www.fightingirishthomas.net/2006/12/claus-clause.html

Actually I’d say some myths are lies. (The myth of american exceptionalism, the myth of the sacrifices of soldiering, etc.) But may myths are not lies.

For this very reason, we can’t destroy the distinction between the different levels of truth. Myth will not work as myth if we insist that every element is literally, factually true. Since Tolkien was brought into this discussion, the distinction in his own terminology was between the primary world and the secondary worlds of human creators (or sub-creators).

The truth of a secondary world is true in its own way and warrants belief in its own way, without any need to confuse or conflate it with the primary world. Nor is the primary world the sole dwelling place of truth. Here is a passage from Tolkien about his own perception of the “reality” of faery stories as a child:

“I had no special ‘wish to believe’… at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in ‘real life.’ Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.”

A little further on he says:

“I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse. And that was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never even the footprint of a worm. The dragon had the trade-mark of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faerie. I desired dragons with a profound desire.”

So yes, Tolkien may have read or wrote Father Christmas letters to his children, but that doesn’t mean that he did everything in in power to get them to believe that everything related in the letters existed “in real life”.

It’s not about possibility, but desirability.

You and I are in absolute, 100% perfect agreement.

This is not a fair reading of my post. After all, in it I say:

I was told by my parents that Santa Claus like Superman; he wasn’t real, but sometimes it was fun to pretend like he was.

So clearly I have no problem with fiction, and am not attacking all “not truths.” If you think that stories involving Santa convey some moral truth, that’s fine. But stories can convey moral truth to children even if they understand that they are fictional (imagine a parent trying to convince his children that the Grinch was real, and then attempting to justify his actions by saying that the Grinch story conveys a valuable moral lesson; it makes no sense).

Resist that temptation. It is not a noble one.

Do, however, make sure your Christmas story telling is of an deeply enriched Catholic sort. That’s the better cure for the disease.

I agree that it would be ridiculous to preface the telling of every story with a clarification as to whether it is true or false; when my own son comes of age I would delight in reading him the tales of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien as my father did to me.

I think we have to let Blackadder clarify whether he’d “dismiss myth [or fiction] entirely”, classifying Jesus’ telling of parables as “lies” in the same manner as Santa Claus (or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, for that matter).

I’m inclined to think not, although it would be a good philosophical subject to explore (the ‘morality’ of fiction).

But I’d have to agree with Darwin here, “The American Santa mythology (elves, north pole, rudolph the raindear, etc.) doesn’t particularly strike me as conveying any real truth.” At least with respect to Santa, I find the real Santa much more engrossing.

Funny . . . do you suppose Jews have these moral quandaries about the story Hannukah, being predicated on a real miracle?