we do the st nicholas day thing: kids wake up to find treats left in their shoes. so im looking at my 1 year old, who’s just getting a grip on reality, up at 6 eating chocolate out of her shoe and her face says: damn im really back to square one here i have no idea whats going on

aquinas says in the summa theologica (my note here is ST III, q.68, aa. 1-2) that in an emergency even an unbaptized person can validly baptize another. this means that if a ship of atheists wrecked onto an island, the population of that island could go from 0 to 100% catholic.

interestingly, i am not any of these people, the middle individual being richard scarry: https://hell.twtr.plus/media/2a969c373f061b44ce2f93627e02fd4952bbe3774140321147567de908173387.file

kid's don't operate the same way adults do. there's a dimension of the santa question that forces children into an adult paradigm. maybe it's correct or incorrect, but there's a meta aspect: is it fair to do that? - to ask a prehistoric person to be modern, like you. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/e112c2cea74de13f4b4596dcadbfcc6bc1232b4943c0b31e4e27965c6965c695.file

but, for me to engage with that is technically lying, if doing the "santa thing" is lying. in that paradigm, it's a lie for me to pretend to call his sheep toy on the phone to find a lost object. you can't really wiggle out of this, because he thought it was real, for sure.

now, would it be appropriate for me to say: "stop doing that. that's not a phone. it's just a block. you're not really talking to the sheep toy. also, he's just a toy, he can't talk." i think most people would say that there is something unideal about this. to me, that's clear. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/042be965f6bd9cef89713ad6df4cd62101d29b64cd03856ed9c842b8645b1d73.file

one example of this is: i have a son. when he was very small, if we lost a toy, i'd take out a block and "call" his sheep toy on this "phone block", and ask where the lost toy was. eventually, he started doing this. he would say: "i'm calling stormcloud sheep, maybe he knows".

the santa question is often presented as, "well, you're lying to them". it's never presented from the other direction: are you giving them information that is (great phrase) developmentally inappropriate? are you taking an egyptian person and giving them a book on postmodernism?

there's a danger in hustling a child through one of these stages too quickly: this is the natural development of their spirit and mind, and they can't go back. writing is a good example. once a kid learns reading and writing, they can never "go back" to the pre-literate state. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/8fa23219f8460c20e80f3941c9950d6a6da5b171fffc167824d6b17ec6948ceb.file

the youngest children are "in" the early stages of human history. something like (even metaphorically) the garden of eden, or, perhaps something like prehistory, and then they go through egyptian, roman, medieval, modern history as stages, learning something crucial in each one.