My sister-in-law who is expecting her first child sometime in the next few weeks asked my wife how we handled Christmas with our kids.  She wanted to know if they knew what Christmas was all about or if they thought it was all about the toys and Santa Claus.

Keep in mind that my sister-in-law has a way of over-thinking things. 

My son is 18 months, so he doesn't really know what the hell is going on, other than there is a tree in our house with “stuff” on it and under it. :-)  Our daughter, on the other hand, is almost 4.  She's a firm believer in Santa Claus and knows she's gonna get a boatload of toys and other stuff from us, grandparents, aunts/uncles AND Santa Claus.  She also knows a little about Jesus, mostly because she attends pre-school in a local church.  She knows that Christmas is Jesus' birthday (they sang Happy Birthday to Him at school). 

In my opinion, at this age, that's good enough.  I told my wife to tell her sister to a) have the child first and b) worry about this stuff when it matters.  Our parenting style has and continues to be very “common-sense” based.  We don't sweat the small stuff and will deal with the bigger issues of Christmas as our kids get older.

I'm certainly not about to take the innocence of Santa away from her.  In fact, the other night, my daughter and I were talking about Santa.  Since we don't have a fireplace, she asked how he was going to get in to deliver the presents.  Luckily, we had just watched “The Santa Claus“ with Tim Allen, so I simply explained that Santa would create a fireplace that he could use just like in the movie.  Her exact words to me were “Santa is gonna make a fireplace...that's gonna be so cool.“  It brought tears to my eyes.  :-)

We're also leaving cookies and chocolate milk out for him this year.

Edit: December 24, 2004 @ 10:30pm - Corrected the spelling of Christmas in the title