Montessori on Santa Claus

A very happy Friday, everyone.

I don’t have a grand holiday message for the Friday Note this year. (If you’re in the mood for that, here’s the one from last year.) It’s hard to top the holiday celebrations that happen at each of your campuses, and, as staff, you’ll be receiving in the mail a holiday gift and note from Higher Ground as well.

I do have some interesting passages and reflections on Christmas from Montessori. Specifically on Santa Claus and related figures (e.g. Father Christmas). I present them to you as passages of interest to spark your own reflections, and I’ll offer you some of my thoughts as well.

As some context to Montessori’s takes here, Christmas was receiving a sort of revamp and revival in Montessori’s day and age. One of the most famous newspaper editorials of all time is Francis Church’s piece for The Sun in 1897, “Is There a Santa Claus?” A little girl, Virginia, had asked her father to resolve the matter of the reality of Santa Claus authoritatively, and deemed The Sun to be a suitable authority.

The result was this editorial, which famously says that “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”. The author chastises doubters as being “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age” and reminds the 8-year-old girl that “all minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little.”

I don’t know whether or not Montessori read this editorial; it was contemporary with her and it made a splash, but other than that, I have no evidence that she did. But she did write in a few different places on Santa Claus that read like direct critiques of Church’s thesis.

Montessori took the opposite perspective as Church. Church lauds the “childlike faith” of children that takes things like fairies and Santa Claus as real. For Montessori, playing into this sort of credulity when we know it is a fantasy is a big mistake:

We, however, suppose that we are developing the imagination of children by making them accept fantastic things as realities. ... In Anglo-Saxon countries…Christmas is an old man covered with snow who carries a huge basket containing toys for children, and who really enters their houses by night. But how can the imagination of children are developed by what is, on the contrary, the fruit of our imagination? It is we who imagine, not they; they believe, they do not imagine. Credulity is, indeed, a characteristic of immature minds which lack experience and knowledge of realities, and are as yet devoid of that intelligence which distinguishes the true from the false, the beautiful from the ugly, and the possible from the impossible.

Is it, then, credulity we wish to develop in our children, merely because they show themselves to be credulous at an age when they are naturally ignorant and immature? Of course credulity may exist in adults; but it exists in contrast with intelligence and is neither its foundation nor its fruit. (The Advanced Montessori Method, vol. 1)

Montessori is repeating an argument here for which she is (in)famous: that young children often confuse the fantastical with the real, and that children need help from adults on this front, not further fuel for confusion. On this basis Montessori gives some controversial proscriptions, such as minimizing the child’s exposure to stories with fantastical elements, such as fairies, talking animals, and so on.

What’s interesting about Montessori’s argument in the context of Santa Claus is that it is a case where children clearly definitely do often confuse the fantastical and the real. Even if you’re skeptical that children are confused about whether or not fairies or talking animals really exist, many definitely do think Santa exists. And often do so with the overt direction of adults. The Church editorial is just one example and statement of what continues to be a fairly commonplace phenomenon of trying to convince children that Santa Claus is really, truly real. Montessori’s normal arguments have unusual force here.

Church is definitely, explicitly belittling the scope of the child’s mind (and the human mind more generally), and, in less explicit and less severe ways, so do many others (e.g. The Polar Express). Montessori calls this sort of thing out as contrasting with the development of intelligence.

In The Child and the Family, Montessori shares two anecdotes of children who learn from their respective mothers that Santa Claus is not real:

Often those adults who work tirelessly to encourage the habit of truth in the child surround him with the kind of falseness that cannot even be reckoned as a “little lie” but is premeditated and has as its end the deception of the child. In respect to this let me relate an anecdote about Christmas and Santa Claus. One day, a mother who resented painfully being a party to this particular deception confessed it to her little girl, who was so disappointed that she had been deceived that she was depressed for a week. Her mother wept when she recounted this little drama to me.

But the situation is not always this serious. Another made the same confession to her little boy. He started to laugh and said, “Oh, Mamma! I’ve known for a long time that Santa Claus doesn’t exist!”

“But why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Because it always made you so happy.”

The roles are often reversed. Children, who are the most acute observers, have pity on their parents and agree with them in order to please them.

Again, in the above passages, Montessori is focused on the child’s relationship to the truth, to knowledge, to understanding. She does not think of the child’s mind as “little”; she thinks that it is amazing, but nascent, and that it reaches maturity by being connected with reality. Exhorting the child to take the Santa Claus myth seriously undermines that connection, or at least undermines the exhorting adult’s authority to serve as a guide to that truth.

But, to round out the picture, Montessori seems to think that stories like Santa Claus are fine if they are taken by the child as stories, as myths, as theatre.

If you must, you can have a Father Christmas with a mask and a sack of toys. It is like a theatre, just an act. I remember two brothers in a family. The big one dressed as Father Christmas and came in with a sack of presents. The little one said, “Has Father Christmas really come? Is he real? Oh, I can’t go near him.” And they said to him, “Yes, you can, go on, go and touch him.” At last he did so and said, “Oh, he is just like my brother.” … In my country it was a woman who came at night if I was good, and I believed in her for a long time. It was like magic to wake in the morning and find all the things I wanted most, all the things I had asked her to bring, on a table. I was satisfied. If you give children the serious things, you can give them the light and amusing things too—fairy tales, the theatre, fun, etc. We are accustomed to lies. Why should we worry if our joy with children comes from little things like that? (1946 London Lectures)

Even here, though, Montessori is emphatic that this myth is just a bit of fun that should be separated off from the real meaning of Christmas. “We must only be careful not to confuse them with this other thing”, she writes. “Don’t take away from the greatness in order to give futilities. The soul of the child is nourished by greatness” (ibid.).

This is the other side of the coin of Montessori’s concern that the child be set on a path towards the truth: that the child should be set on a path towards great values and great beauty. There’s something too light-weight about the idea of Santa, or Father Christmas, or Befana.

Here, I’m not sure I agree with Montessori.

Part of her objection is rooted in her Catholicism. What is the real meaning of Christmas, according to Montessori? For her, as a Catholic, it’s the birth of Christ.

I remember how we had little paper blankets and a wax figure of the new-born Child. Every child had one. This was a remembrance, not a toy. We had no presents, no noise, and no visits from other people on Christmas Day. All we had was this festival in the church. Later another custom came from the northwest of Europe—a beautiful custom—to have a lighted tree with presents underneath. This is very nice, but the presents and the tree do not convey a religious idea. It is an ordinary treat. (1946 London Lectures)

The idea is that even if we take Santa Claus as a mere story, she worries Santa, along with the whole ensemble of Christmas traditions around lights and presents, confuses the more religious and more important meaning of Christmas.

This is a different point from the previous one about the child’s credulity in believing in Santa Claus. This point is about the aesthetics of Christmas, the meaning of Christmas, about what is important about the holiday and how to make that accessible to children.

Of course, not everyone will share Montessori’s particular faith. I don’t. But even putting that issue aside, I think Montessori is missing something here.

An important dimension of the winter holidays is the celebration of abundance. This is what I wrote about this last year, including its connection to Montessori education. Even though Christmas trees and presents are fun, I don’t think they are mere fun, or an “ordinary treat”, as she puts it. They do present a grand and beautiful idea to children: the idea of significant material progress, presented as a means to puncture through the darkest, coldest time of year, and in a form that grants it spiritual significance. This is a general idea that, in other places and contexts, Montessori says is crucial for children to understand and internalize.

I’m not sure whether or not Santa Claus really plays into that message of spiritual and material abundance. But I’m skeptical that he undermines it or confuses it, especially when he’s presented as mere folklore. So I agree with Montessori’s general exhortation, that “the soul of the child is nourished by greatness”—but I don’t agree that winter festivities are anything but that.

I’m relatively sure that my two-year-old daughter knows that Santa is a mere story—and that she considers the holiday lights shining in the 6 o’clock darkness to be beautiful and sacred.

I hope you enjoyed the Montessori quotes. And whether and however you celebrate the holidays, I hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend.

Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessorium