It’s coming up to Christmas time: the time when my kids start asking questions about Santa Claus — “would Santa have seen me being naughty then, Daddy?”, “how long is it now until Santa comes?” and “can we get some jelly babies to leave out for Santa?”

I’m quite familiar with the concept of believing in Santa. God is something similar; I’m quite familiar with the idea that some people believe in God and some don’t, although my theological knowledge is probably not the highest.

BTP goes to a Church of England school, basically because there were two very good schools in our area, one CofE, one non-religious and I didn’t particularly have a preference. I want my children, when they are older, to make up their own minds about religion and spirituality.

Provided that the school equips them with the tools with which to do so, then I don’t mind whether that school starts from a religious point of view or not. The tricky bit is that whenever I ask him what he’s been doing at school, he can’t remember, and yet there are obviously bits going in, leading him to ask me questions like…

“Daddy, are you taller than God?”

“Um… well, I don’t know, really. No-one has ever seen God and talked about how tall he is. I don’t think he actually has a height as such.”

It’s also one of those things where as an adult, I am aware that saying that I personally don’t know whether or not God exists is fine for me; but to try to explain that concept to a child is probably trickier.

I mean, we’d had the bacon incident not that long earlier … we were having bacon sandwiches and I was asked where bacon comes from. “Pigs”, quoth I.

“That’s nice of them,” came the response.

Again, I decided at this point it was probably better to leave it there, as a long complicated explanation of how we kill pigs and cut all of the meat off them so that we can have bacon might just be the sort of thing which would put a dampener over dinner.

And I think theology is probably a more complicated discussion than bacon.

However BTP wasn’t content to let the matter drop.

“Well, what about Jesus, Daddy, are you taller than him?”

“Again, I don’t really know. I don’t know how tall he was. I might be taller than him, because when he was born, people generally used to be a bit shorter than they are today, but I don’t know how tall he was so I can’t say for sure.”

Only now I have this slight fear that he’s going to wander into class and then start telling everyone that his Daddy said that he was bigger than Jesus.

For me the concept of belief refers to something which has not been proved. I believe that I am a reasonably good writer; I know I love my children; some people believe in a deity; others believe that there isn’t one.

But I was a little surprised by seeing a sign — for Bardardos, I think — which said that I should shop with them if I believe in children.

Eh? I’ve never seen children as an item of belief. I feel justified in saying that I know that children exist; it doesn’t seem to me the sort of thing which relates to belief. If the sign was exhorting me to shop at Barnardos in order to support children, I’d understand that, but if I believe?