Santa Wish Lists Test Parents’ Success at Instilling Values

If the heirs of Dr. Spock ever get around to updating his baby book, I’ve got a suggestion for a new chapter: How to reconcile a child’s Santa wish list with reality.

It isn’t easy, from high prices and relentless marketing to the pervasiveness of guns as playthings.

Our two sons recently compiled this year’s version of the annual buying guide. For our older son Michael, 8, the list marks a transition. This is his first since being fully clued into the truth behind those improbable worldwide overnight deliveries.

Pen in hand and with a conspirator’s wink, he sat at the dining room table and added item after item to his list. Then, with a grand flourish, he addressed the envelope to 111 Reindeer Way, his own version of a North Pole address.

He performed his ruse for the sake of his brother, Andrew, 5, for whom the Santa letter still carries the full trappings of magic.

For my wife and myself, the annual Santa letter stands more as a test, that the boys take but upon which we grade ourselves. We’ve tried to raise our sons under the umbrellas of personal safety and compassion for others, for reasons both real and altruistic: a basic parental fear for their welfare and our own sense of social conscience.

So we’ve pushed books and classic games (Chutes and Ladders plays a torturer’s role in my own personal purgatory), sports equipment and creative construction toys like Legos and K’Nex. We warn them that Santa isn’t likely to bring much from their lists, but will deliver surprises of his own. And we try to ignore the toys of the moment. No Furbys. No giggling Elmos. No Nintendo, for that matter.

And no guns. Again, for reasons both real and altruistic.

Both boys were born in Detroit, where we lived close enough to the tougher parts of the city to hear occasional gunshots at night. It is a violent place, then and now, and among the many memories of life there were the tragic stories of kids being shot by other kids by accident or for the sake of sneakers and jackets.

That proximity to violence weighs on your thoughts. I’ve never seen much sense to private possession of handguns, despite growing up in a rural area of western New York where guns are part of the social fabric. In that environment, there’s a value to teaching children how guns work, if only for their own safety.

But that knowledge doesn’t necessarily protect. My cousin’s husband was accidentally shot and killed a few years ago by a family friend during a day of hunting in the Maine woods.

So no guns in our house.

But it’s impossible to segregate children from violence, the currency of our culture. “Star Wars,” the ultimate space fantasy, is based on war, its most compelling moments drawn from showdowns and shootouts. “Muppet Treasure Island,” an innocuous rendition of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson story, is filled with musket-wielding pirates and cannon-firing puppets. Leave the television running for the Sunday football games, and gunshots and explosions fill the house, action-packed promotions for later shows.

These exposures register subtly on children, then seep out in unexpected ways. The other night we were walking into a neighborhood restaurant when Andrew broke out into song, picked up from “Muppet Treasure Island.” “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum . . . BOOM!” Then he turned to explain, “That’s the part where Billy Bones dies.” We continued on, I uncertain about where this little bit of theater fit in the continuum of social-conscience child-rearing, my son walking with the sure bounce of a 5-year-old and radiating a satisfied smile at a song well sung.

So our “no guns” rule slowly came to strike us as hypocritical. How can we constrain our children’s imaginations when so much gun-related entertainment slips through our inadequate filters? And, to a creative child, anything can become a gun, from a stick to a strategically bitten graham cracker.

In the spirit of a flexible military command, we’ve moved the line of defense. Our sons have been told they can now wage their fantasy wars, swooping toy space ships from bookshelf to couch. They can fire their plastic Fisher Price cannonballs at enemy Lego installations. They can swing from the rigging and fend off marauding pirates on the patio.

They can do all that, as long as they remain clear on the line between imaginary battles and real dangers. And as long as the weapons remain fantasy. When the innocuous toys become guns that go “bang” instead of the bzzzzt! of a space-age “‘proton” shooters, they get put away. “ ‘Star Wars’ is pretend; we don’t hurt people” has become a family mantra. And when the pirate mood strikes, we encourage the brothers to band together to roust imaginary invaders.

We’re not sure how this measures against the standards for raising well-adjusted, nonviolent children. We’ve come to the conclusion that the bigger lesson is teaching our sons the real effects of real acts of violence, that while it’s OK to swing a sword at an encroaching pirate tree, it is never to be brandished at another person.

We think it’s working, this little compromise between our adult fears and their youthful imaginations. Michael’s Christmas list this year is heavy with “Star Wars” items but also includes a kit for tracking rainfall. Andrew’s list is drawn from the “Star Wars” catalog too. But he also asks for more marbles, a Lego police station and, mysteriously, a toy turkey and a remote-control gorilla.

But the list begins with a warming note. “Dear Santa, Please don’t give me a book with a man holding a gun, because we don’t like guns.”