Alacazat and Asses

So, I'm not a big fan of movies for young kids. All of the fast editing. I won't get started on the subject. But stories and books are supposed to be safe, right? Yesterday had me wondering...

We were playing hide-and-go-seek with one of his cars. I found the car and oh-so-smoothly stuck it in my back pocket asking P where could it be? When he saw the empty hiding space he was grinning but confused. This is how he tried to work it out in his mind while I just smiled:

"Where it go mama? Where Doc? Maybe you do magic mama? You do magic mama? How bout we not do magic and we get him back? You say alacazat.... Where is him? Where is him mama? Maybe you ate him? Poop him out of your mouth. You ate him mama? Let's find the car."

Soooooo.... E's been telling him stories that often feature his fairy godmother who says alacazat. Just a sweet story to us, apparently a real possibility to him. I can just see him losing us on the subway and screaming Alacazat to ask his fairy godmother for help. Great. The second half of his reasoning is inspired by a Schultz family favorite that features Froggy the hand. He eats pennies and such and then spits them out or disposes of them in the, um, other direction. Apparently, P has combined this action into the one swell mouth pooping possibility.

This illustrated a point Alfie Kohn makes on punishment. You can Intend for your child to learn X through a certain punishment, but there's no way to insure that. A child learns what makes sense to Their brain, not ours (and, generally, with punishment, they just learn that we're assholes). But it also made me wonder about Santa and stories in general. Should I constantly tell him things aren't real, only a story? Seems honest, but slightly cynical. Do I let him keep the magic alive in his head? The answer isn't clear to me. I'll have to figure it out sometime, but for the time being, I magically pulled the car out of my ass when he said Alacazat.