Good bye, Santa!

A long-awaited holiday finally comes to the kindergarten class. Kids are in anticipation of the soon to come, wonderful Santa Claus, the old man in a red jacket and snowy beard, who always arrives with gifts! “Hello, children!” he roars in a deep voice. “Have you been nice kids this year?” The kids are excited and respond, “Yes, we've been nice!”  

Though not all of them respond. Lisa is crying and leans to her mom's bosom; Jimmy is calling for his father. They remove the terrified kids. Parents are bewildered – they told their kids that Santa Claus is a kind and good man who gives gifts. What's happened? How can a child overcome the fear of Santa Claus? 

Before we name the reason, let's question if Santa Claus has always been the nicest, kindest old man we have always known. No, not at all. The “New Year Father” came from Western European tradition where, for a long period, before pre-Christian times, the image of Knecht Ruprecht (Krampus) circulated, which was a terrifying forest spirit wearing a goat's hide with horns and carrying a big sack.

Before today, according to other traditions, a Santa Claus prototype was presented as Joulupukki, which was a goat. Joulupukki didn’t whip children anymore, but the way he asks “Have you been nice children this year?” is dreadful. Even adults feel this fear. This is how all sins come to light. I remember how one boy became so scared of Santa that his parents called a doctor.

They scared children with Krampus in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Germany and Austria: if a child was disobedient or had bad behavior, Krampus would come and take them. Children did their best to be obedient and do the job given to them by their parents. Nobody wanted to be in Krampus's sack and experience his whipping. It is also interesting that winter in pre-Christian German and Slovenian traditions was associated with death and New Year Old Man embodied it.

The image of the New Year spirit was ennobled and cultivated by Christianity and a famous bishop, Saint Nicholas, took on the role of a gift giver. The carrot policy alone couldn't work, so Knecht Ruprecht became the stick, a loyal assistant of the Saint who followed him around with birch rods.

To understand why children are scared of Santa Claus, it is necessary to study both the history and the unconscious side in detail, which System-Vector Psychology helps to do. It explains many things and phenomena by means of the eight-sided matrix of men both individually and as a collective.

In human groups, ranking has always existed. Every member of the group executed his natural role both for his own survival and for that of the group. If there were some reason that the member couldn't or didn't want to perform his natural function, he was expelled from the group, which meant that he was doomed to die. It is obvious that everyone did their best.

The man who watched over the execution of everyone's function was  an olfactory counselor of a urethral chief. He naturally had the ability to discern pheromones on an intuitive level: he could find out who stole, who broke rules and laws of a group. Nobody really liked the counselor; they were afraid of him and particularly susceptible people with the visual vector thought that he didn't cast a shadow! The visual vector personified the olfactory one as Satan, or Mephistopheles, an evil force who helped with group ranking. 

The fear of Santa Claus is rooted in those very images from the collective mind because in our common psyche there are imprints made by humanity over the centuries. There is a fear of death in everybody's unconscious. This fear of an imaginative child, a child with the visual vector in terms of System-Vector Psychology is very strong; nevertheless, a child isn't aware of the reasons and can't explain why he got scared of Santa Claus – it is useless to ask. The people who have the visual vector have fear and are phobia-prone, unlike others. This fear is rooted in early childhood, but initially it is the fear of failing to execute their natural role of a day guard and become useless to a group.

The fear of darkness is an enormous fear for visual people. Darkness is scary because it is difficult to spot a stealing predator, which threatens them with losing the ability of being useful for the community – which would result in death. A visual child often asks parents not to turn off the lights in his room, and if parents don't do listen, he goes off into hysterics. Parents may explain this as their child being capricious. It isn't caprice. It is the fear of death, which needs to be worked on in order to put it into its right place in the child's psyche and so that it won’t interfere with his life as an adult.

The visual vector has to be developed from fear to love. The less fear for oneself, the more “fear” for others, i.e. love. The aspiration for love is natural in the visual vector, but it isn't provided. Underdeveloped qualities of the visual vector can be displayed in a person as the love for animals and aversion for people. They can be sensitive and severe at the same time. It means that the fear of death interferes with a person's ability to realize himself within society to the degree he is supposed to according to his psyche. Such people are unhappy. To avoid this, cultivate love for people in your child in their early years.

It is good for the visual vector's development to read kind stories with a happy end. It is better to never read stories and fairy tales where characters eat each other and shed blood. Another child won't take it seriously, but a dermal-visual one will be traumatized with the fear of being eaten for his whole life, for in the pre-cultural times the very dermal-visual boys had been treats for a cannibal in the group. In order not to stimulate children's fears and the fear of Santa Claus particularly, it is better to avoid reading cannibalistic fairy tales completely because not every parent can define the dermal-visual connection in combination with other vectors.

It is important to pay attention to cartoons and movies that a child watches. Nowadays there are a lot of fearful characters and violent plots. Choose cute characters for your child.

If it turns out that your child has to meet Santa Claus and is scared of him, keep the child in your hands, pat his head and back, and don't leave him alone with a scary old man. If the child wants to, he will start speaking to Santa Claus himself. If he doesn't – don't make him. It means there are some fear issues present, and to learn how to get rid of them, read here.