Santa and Muslims

My married friend asked me for my opinion on a small incident that happened with him and his little two twin girls. He doesn't know if what he did was good and would like some opinions and advice on what happened, I recommended he post here but his English isn't thst good, so I asked him to write it and I translated this for him. (Sorry if my writing style doesn't fit here)"Secularism has affected our lives drastically and for the better. Being secular in a very religious community however, is an everyday challenge. Especially when you are giving it your all to raise your kids to be loving, kind and humane. Away from any kinds of racism, prejudice and hate.I live in an Islamic country where religion is one of the pillars of the society, you can’t just take it out suddenly from an individual's life. Even for my little cute 6 years old twin girls. But I managed to never mention God or religions or any metaphysical concept or divine entity as to have them think for themselves for what is right and wrong, so that they can be kind without being scared of being punished in any sort of way if they acted otherwise. But unfortunately, in this community, a lot of relatives have the “right” to interfere in your parenting and unknowingly ruin everything you’ve been trying to do. This isn’t only as serious as when one of my cousins or their grandparents would talk about Haram and Halal and hell or heaven, most of the cases, that’s not really the problem.Just the other day, one of my daughters’ friend came over and I was sitting in the next room while they watched an animated movie. Everything was going well and they were having fun, until of course, a scene of Santa Claus flying and giving every kid a nice present. Which is very nice, right?“We’re Muslims and we’re not allowed to love Santa Claus! He’s probably not even giving any gifts to Muslim kids”Of course, had that been one of my daughters, I would have simply talked to her and explained it in a way to make her focus on us being “Human” more than being “Muslim”. But it wasn’t one of my daughters.  As one of my daughters had, after a moment of brief silence replied.“Are we Muslims?”“Yes! We’re all Muslims but Santa Claus isn’t!”I was getting frustrated in my room as I had listened through the whole conversation. Until one of my daughters came running to ask.“Dad, are we really Muslims?”I would have given anything to clarify to her that we’re not, to avoid her having conflicts later on. But I knew if I had clearly said that we’re not, it would definitely cause my daughters problems, mainly getting shunned.  “Yes, we’re Muslims but we love everyone including Santa Claus. He is very awesome and I love him.”Thinking about it now, saying that yes we are Muslims might have been actually been the best thing to say in any scenario. Because it didn’t really matter the part where I said “We’re Muslims” as much as it mattered to teach them that we should love everyone."I thought what he did was actually great but he was feeling a bit upset and wanted to make sure he's doing parenting right. Thank you all in advance. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2K4AqVq