These both seem like hard ones to tackle, so I’m writing down what we’re doing in case it’s helpful to other families.
I’ve told Lily that at Christmas people tell a story about a baby being born. My plan is to continue presenting religious traditions as stories, which she can then choose to get into or not, sort of like some children get really interested in Cinderella and some older people get really interested in the Lord of the Rings.
With two babies in the household, Lily’s naturally interested in stories about babies, particularly when animals are also involved. She’s particularly interested in umbilical cords, so we’ve discussed Jesus’s umbilical cord quite a bit. I made her a pregnant Mary doll, with the baby being presented on Christmas Eve. Lily currently likes to carry him around in her pocket.
In some ways, explaining Santa was even trickier because other adults really don’t want you to mess up their kids’ belief (whereas people accept that not everybody’s on board with Jesus). I wasn’t interested in deceiving my kids for several reasons:
- It messes with their sense of reality, particularly when they get old enough to notice some discrepancies and adults are gaslighting them by pretending the evidence they’re noticing is wrong
- A lot of kids are disappointed when they find out
- It takes away the credit from those who deserve it. These gifts didn’t come from a far-away stranger, they were made or bought by your own family.
- It means the child can’t fully participate in gift-giving until they’re let in on the secret. In our large family gatherings, stockings are how we give any presents to anyone outside each nuclear family (so we don’t all need to come up with 27 presents).
So after the older cousins who believe in Santa Claus had gone home, we strung up the stockings (pillowcases pinned to a clothesline across the house, which is the only practical way to do it for all 27 people visiting). I showed Lily the presents I had for other people, and she helped me put them into their stockings.
Yesterday when she asked for a story, I told her the story of St. Nicholas. Well, a simplified version without mentioning dowries or prostitution as in the original.
A long time ago in Turkey there was a kind man named Nicholas. There was a family nearby who had three daughters, and they were very poor and didn’t have enough money for the things they needed. Nicholas wanted to help them, but he wanted to keep it a secret. So one night Nicholas threw a bag of gold down the chimney for the oldest daughter, and it landed in her stocking that was hung up by the fire to dry. The next night he threw a second bag of gold down the chimney for the second daughter. By now the family was very curious about who had been helping them, so the father hid outside the house to see who kept dropping money into the chimney. Sure enough, Nicholas came with a bag of gold for the third daughter, and the family said, “It’s you! Thank you, kind Nicholas, for helping us!” People thought he was so good that they called him a saint, and they called him by the nickname Santa Claus, which means Holy Nicholas. And that’s why we give each other presents in stockings at Christmastime.
Of course, Lily’s primary interest in all this was still in finding and opening her own stocking. 
The whole sky 