FOR BEING DIFFERENT

Dear Spike:

You were confused. That much was certain.

"Did Santa Claus come to your house on Christmas?" the restaurant hostess asked as we waited for our friends to arrive for breakfast this morning.

"No," you replied, shaking your head and clearly perplexed — and maybe a bit terrified — by the notion that the white-bearded fat man would make a house call. "He didn't."

Your relationship with Santa Claus is not substantially different that your relationship with Mickey Mouse. He's a character. A guy in the movies. A fairytale.

He doesn't know when you are sleeping. He doesn't know when you're awake. He doesn't climb down your chimney with a bag of toys. And he doesn't leave a lump of coal in your stocking when you've been naughty.

He might do all those things for other kids. And there's nothing wrong with that. But we've chosen to celebrate a slightly simpler version of Christmas, one that doesn't include the guy in the big red suit as anything more than just one of many symbols of Christmas — no more important than a snow flake, a candle or a tree. In our home, Santa's been sidelined.

But in doing so, it would appear, we've robbed you of a bit of cultural literacy. And so you were caught unprepared for a lot of the questions that adults ask of children in the days surrounding Christmas...

Are you going to visit Santa at the mall? What do you want Santa to bring you this year? Have you been a good girl for Santa Claus? Was Santa nice to you this year?

There's nothing wrong with those sorts of questions. For a few weeks, each year, Santa is an opportunity for adults to relate to children. He's an easy conversation starter — like the weather, the local ball club... or the works of Leo Tolstoy.

But for kids who don't celebrate Christmas — and for those who don't celebrate the St. Nick version of Christmas — it can be a bit awkward.

That's the price you pay for being different sometimes.

You'll have a lot of opportunities in this life to make decisions that set you apart from the crowd. Sometimes the decisions you make will set you so far apart that you feel like you're really not a part of the crowd at all. At times that can feel confusing. And sometimes it can feel lonely.

Alas, when you choose to dance to a different beat, sometimes you're going to be dancing all by yourself.

Just keep dancing.

If there really was a Santa Claus, I think that's what he'd tell you, too.

Love,
dad

P.S. — For Christmas this year, your mother made you a complete set of animal friends from A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series (Pooh Bear, it might be noted, first appeared by name in a Christmas story written by Milne for London's Evening News in 1925.) You hugged each one and said, "welcome to my family." I reckon you'll be friends for a long, long time.