The Unbalanced Holy Trinity of Fake Creatures

I am certainly a moralist, but even Daddyfesto is not someone who thinks that lying to your kids is never OK. In some cases, you gotta lie, and here in Christian lands, unless you’re an ass or aren't a Christian, one thing that you have to lie about is about the existence of the holy trinity of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. This is an uneven trinity if one ever existed. Most dads actually care about Santa Claus and the Christmas tradition. The Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, well: they just kinda suck away your money and time. Some moms like making the baskets; most dads could give a shit. I could handle a lifetime without peeps, personally.

But you will, of course, have no choice and be performing all three roles. It takes a few years to adapt to all this, but luckily your child at age 2 isn’t catching on to all that much when you put half a bag of candy into their Easter basket and leave the other half sitting on the counter. So there is room for a learning curve.

And there are advantages to your new role. At some point in the first few years you’ll be up late on Christmas Eve, maybe putting together a simple toy, maybe arranging a new set of blocks from Santa, hopefully with a nice buzz on halfway through a six pack of a fine Christmas Ale … and it will feel just about perfect to you. It will be one of those sublime moments of fatherhood (enjoy it, you only get two of these a year for each kid; savor the ones you get).

Five years later, when you have 3+ children and its Christmas Eve and you’re putting together complex toys (including affixing dozens of stupid crappy stickers onto plastic because your wife insists on “putting them together right” and apparently it’s not even cost effective to have those kindly Chinese workers who made the toy affix the stickers at the factory) until 3 a.m. when you count the presents under the tree and realize that you bought one child twice as many toys as the other, so you start trying to figure out what gifts you can downstream to the underbought child, but you’re not sure which gift is which, so you actually have to unwrap the gifts to figure out what they are and re-wrap them at 3:30 a.m., and then you realize that you engaged in insufficient battery purchases (children of the 1970s and 1980s would probably think having insufficient batteries is inexcusable, but it’s actually harder now, because a lot of newer toys actually include batteries, lulling you into a false sense of security), and so you run into the basement playroom and start digging into the kids’ old toys, battery scavenging, and you can’t even get the old toys fucking open because you're fucking hammered because those Christmas Ales are like 9% alcohol and you finished the whole fucking 6-pack it took so damn long getting those toys together, and you are smashing the old toys against the basement pipes to get the batteries out at 4 in the fucking morning … and then it will no longer be sublime.

Especially since, at 4 a.m., you have about 30 minutes before the kids – and thus likely you –are waking up.

With the Tooth Fairy … well, I like to say that the Tooth Fairy does a different continent every night, but no one knows his schedule. That’s why sometimes you get your money on the first night. Other times, it takes four or five nights until he comes. You don’t think he can do all the continents in one night, do you? That’s crazy. He doesn’t have reindeer or the ability to manipulate time or any of Santa’s other advantages.

After a few years pass and your kid gets to 7 or 8 or 9, another problem arises. The rumors start going around school about how Santa Claus isn’t real. You might hear your child talking to a friend about whether Santa is real. Worse, your child might put you on the spot and just ask. If that happens, there’s only one thing to do:

Sell the Easter Bunny down the fucking river.

I mean, let’s face it, out of the three members of the trinity, the Easter Bunny is by far the least plausible. Jewish people must be completely laughing at us behind our backs on this one. I mean, I've now been through 35 Easters and I’m not even clear about whether he’s a regular sized bunny or a giant man in a bunny costume kind of bunny, or whether he can talk, or how he gets into the house. Because there’s almost no Easter build-up -- it’s just BAM it’s Good Friday, it’s Easter, it’s over -- with no build-up, kids don’t dwell on it, no questions are asked, parents can wing it and get away with it. Hell, I make up something different every year (“it’s a green bunny, that’s neither male nor female” or “it flies through the air and kills silly Englishman”) until I am pinched by my wife.

Look, I understand fucking over the Easter Bunny may not seem cool. You might not be down with that. And let me assure you that I’m totally down with Carmello and don’t like snitching either. But we’re talking about protecting the big dog, here. We’re talking about Santa, and when Santa is threatened, it’s time to take action.

So just pull your child aside and explain to them that the Easter Bunny is completely made up, tell them it’s a sham that all adults are in on. Tell them that the child’s mother and you buy the candy and hide the eggs yourselves, then mock the entire idea of a giant bunny going all around the world. Then say: “The Easter Bunny is fake. Not like Santa Claus, who is completely and totally real. Make sure you don’t tell the other kids!”

This has two effects. Obviously you are building you own street cred, whereas the other kids’ dads aren’t telling them “the truth” about the Easter Bunny. More importantly, you have created your own little double agent to sow confusion within the child community. [In this regard, it might be best if some dads say the Easter Bunny died; other dads can say it’s actually Santa Claus in a bunny suit; coordination to maximize confusion can only help us here ... I might start a separate website on this … but I digress ...]

Screwing the Easter Bunny should buy you an extra year of Santa Claus that you didn’t deserve. It also means you never have to have a four pound rotting mound of chocolate in your house that your child only gnaws the ears off and which will melt on the first really hot day of summer. So it’s really a no lose situation.

A WORD OF WARNING

It is a Holy Trinity of Fake Creatures. Do not make the mistake of creating additional fake creatures to try to make it a quartet. I learned this the hard way (after originally thinking I was oh-so-clever) in creating the “Starburst Monster.”

The Starburst Monster appeared in two ways. First, if a child were to ponder and consider the very existence of the Starburst Monster and then throw a nickel into a fountain – any fountain in the lower 48 -- a pack of Starburst would fall magically from the sky (let’s just say that a child concentrating on getting a coin into a fountain isn’t paying much attention to what you’re doing in your back pocket). If we didn’t have a pack of Starburst on us, if my daughter asked for change, I showed her what I had and just said “that’s not a nickel,” even if it was a nickel. (For a while my child thought there was a coin called a “fraggle” but other than that, no harm, no foul.)

Second, the Starburst Monster would hide packs of Starburst in ridiculous places – in hoods of sweatshirts, in letters and even (in an inspired stroke, if I do say so myself) inside the child’s sippy cup full of water – and then call on the phone and, utilizing a mysterious gravelly voice, tell the child to look in the place for the pack of Starburst. Oddly his calls seemed to coincide with my trips to the bathroom.

This worked well until it all of a sudden didn’t. When my daughter explained the “Starburst Monster” to other adults who laughed and then said “did you make that up?” and she got a tad upset. The Starburst Monster was one subject in a parent-teacher conference at school. She was a tad messianic about the Starburst Monster, and her friends – even in preschool – thought she was a fucking idiot. Once my daughter learned the names of the coins and knew what a nickel was (and clearly she was incentivized to learn this), I had to be carrying Starburst on my person (or make sure I had no change at all) every time we were near a fountain. When I had no change, eventually my daughter figured out to say “well lets buy something and get a nickel in change that way” and I knew I was totally screwed. So the Starburst Monster hasn’t visited in 2+ years and I’m trying to kill him off but he’s not dying an easy death. Every now and again my daughter questions why he doesn’t visit anymore.

So play it safe. Keep it easy on yourself. The trinity is hard enough to manage.