Comment by xtiansimon

> “There's a bit of a category mistake here, because a single utterance by a father is not a meme. But the example is meant to be an aid to developing an intuition for the general idea.”

In the Dawkins sense, if the Dad’s use of the Santa myth makes the child feel happy, and preserves in some sense their innocence (ignorance of the world the way it really is), then the mother can recreate the same myth pattern elsewhere, most likely through family traditions.

Or in a semiotics of Ecco, the parents are overcoding Santa and the child is undercoding Santa—same expressions but different interpretations between the two groups. Maybe childhood lives in that gap.