8 ms·

I believe lots of cross generational strife would be solved if parents would stop lying to their kids about Santa Claus.

pfdietz 5y ago
We made an explicit decision to not lie to our kids about Santa Claus or anything else. It was a good call.
- admiralpumpkin 5y ago
  We have told our child that a "Santa" is someone who gives without any expectations, sometimes secretly or anonymously. We empowered them to be a Santa if they want to be one.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    That sounds like a great approach!
- asiachick 5y ago
  Mom? Are you planning a surprise party for me for my birthday? I think telling my kids things for their enjoyment is ok. I don't believe me or my siblings were hurt by our parents given us the santa myth and I also feel it was an important life lesson to discover santa didn't exist.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > Mom? Are you planning a surprise party for me for my birthday? How would you feel if you did have a suprise party? / No, but would you like me too? / No, but would that be ok for a future birthday? What do you think I would tell you if you asked me that and I was planning a surprise party? Or if I wasn't? You don't have to answer all their questions. Personally, I'd say, no, I don't like surprise parties, so I'm not going to plan one for someone, but for the sake of argument, I'll pretend I might.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      “If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise any more, would it?”
    - felipelemos 5y ago
      You are not actually answering him, because you know that if you are planning a surprise party and you just answered yes, you would have ruined the party. The truth is that not every lie is a problem.
- polishdude20 5y ago
  Also, think about how it adds to the work of the parents. Before your child, you probably never tried to lie as an adult and didn't need to remember your lies. All of a sudden, you've got a kid and now you start to lie to them and need to keep spinning these webs of lies to support previous lies. Must be exhausting.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    > Before your child, you probably never tried to lie as an adult and didn't need to remember your lies. Where are these adults who never tried to lie?
    - Danieru 5y ago
      Perhaps a better word is "conspire"? As in to perpetuate a conspiracy. It requires much more planning and care than a one off lie.
    - polishdude20 5y ago
      I mean more like, you don't constantly lie to people. But yeah, like the commenter below says "conspire".
  - tempestn 5y ago
    It really isn't if you just treat it as a fun fantasy and don't work too hard to conceal the truth. Kids are happy to believe and have fun with it, and then when they're ready to know the truth, it's fairly obvious. For example, don't try to come up with explanations for inconsistencies or impossibilities, but just ask the kid what they think. Eventually it'll be like, "Well, obviously Santa can't actually come to all the houses, so I think the other Santas help him." "I know you and Mom put our presents under our tree, but I think Santa gives them to you." Etc. They basically explicitly tell you how much Santa they want to believe at any given point. Once they directly ask you if Santa is real, you can ask them if they really want you to answer. (The first time mine quickly said, "No, I know he's real!" and then dropped it for a year. :D ) But if they persist, you can tell them a nice version of the truth, like that the idea of Santa is definitely real, because why else would kids get presents from Santa every year. As they guessed, you help out by actually getting the presents and putting them under the tree, but it's because of this great spirit of giving that so many people feel around Christmas that we have this tradition.
- dudul 5y ago
  How do you know it was a good call?
  - dham 5y ago
    Yea, I'd be pissed if my parents never did Santa, because frankly it was a very fond time in my childhood and once you learn Santa isn't real you never get that time back. So we do Santa with our son and daughter and there was never a discussion not to do it.
    - dudul 5y ago
      Some parents tend to see children as mini-adults. Myths and legends may sound silly to us, but they are important for children's development.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Because we have an excellent relationship with our children, and they never expressed any regret for us having done that. You think children like discovering they've been lied to?
- gnicholas 5y ago
  How do you keep your kid from telling all the other kids that Santa isn't real? Little kids can't keep secrets, let alone big ones!
  - alar44 5y ago
    Not my kids, not my problem.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    They may yell the truth about Santa but many kids will prefer to believe their parents and other adults.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Same way you keep your kid from telling all the other kids that god isn't real. If you don't make a big deal about Santa, it won't be a big deal to them, and when they ask about him, you can say 'some people believe Santa is a nice guy that's totally not creepy and somehow delivers presents to all the children' or whatever. And you may likely have already had similar conversations about religion and how it's respectful to let people believe what they want about things like that. Of course, if you push Santa hard, and they're a fact oriented kid, when they find out the facts, it's going to be a big deal, and they're going to want to tell their friends about it. You won't know if they're fact oriented before you decide to push Santa though.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    How do you keep your kid from yelling "fire!" when there isn't one?
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    We told them that some other parents were telling their kids this Santa Claus story, and that while we didn't want to do that, it wasn't meant in a bad way, and so please don't spoil things for the other children.
danenania 5y ago
I’d call Santa Claus mythology rather than a lie. I was torn at first, but myths and stories are important to humans, and myths like Santa that are very old and pervasive may be playing an adaptive or instructive role. Also, my three year old loves Santa. It makes xmas more magical for her. I also have many fond memories from childhood of this myth. It’s hard for me to see the harm.
- gruez 5y ago
  > I’d call Santa Claus mythology rather than a lie. What's the difference between "mythology" and "lie" then?
  - hluska 5y ago
    Parenting is weird?? :)
  - alephnan 5y ago
    Non-truths/falsehoods and lies aren’t the same thing, unless you’re in an Intro Philosophy logic class.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Non-truths/falsehoods and lies aren’t the same thing You're right, but the distinction in this case is far less clear than you make it out to be. The santa claus story has a social engineering component to it. Specifically, that an omniscient entity is monitoring your behavior and will give you gifts if you behave well. Given that, it's arguably a case of intentional deception (ie. lies). Absent christmas/santa claus being a cultural phenomena, telling your kids that they should behave well because there's an omniscient entity monitoring them, would be clearly a lie.
      - 7952 5y ago
        I think kids lack a clear distinction between imagination and the real world. They can believe something at one level and disbelieve at another without feeling the inconsistency. That can be a great skill to have that adults lose. But also makes the world more scary.
adrianmonk 5y ago
Is it time to link to Greg Lake's "I Believe in Father Christmas"? I believed in Father Christmas I looked to the sky with excited eyes then I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn and I saw him and through his disguise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfY4b1NszpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfY4b1NszpY (My take, though, is that Santa Claus is small potatoes compared to the song's larger themes of disillusionment that come with growing up.)
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  I think we need to understand that Greg Lake was a bit of an entitled whiner, though. The Kinks are more on point with “Father Christmas.”
duxup 5y ago
I don’t understand this, but some people seem to feel very strongly about it. I didn’t think anything about finding out that Santa wasn’t real, but it seems to make a VERY strong impression on some people. The contrast is interesting.
- benrbray 5y ago
  One thing to consider is: If the child realizes that Santa Claus isn't real before being told by their parents, they will experience the feeling of months or possibly years of all of the adults they trust lying to them. That is not a good feeling to have.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I figured it out on my own, didn’t feel that way. I assume most kids suspect / figure it out rather than have their parents tell them. The phenomenon is interesting but I can’t say I understand it either.
  - danenania 5y ago
    Our plan is to keep it going up until the point our daughter asks us directly, at which point we’ll tell her the truth.
  - quinnjh 5y ago
    Arguably part of the reason TO put on the production IMO- kids get a firsthand lesson with low stakes about platos cave
  - tempestn 5y ago
    I think it depends on how actively parents try to maintain the fantasy. IE how directly they lie. When the kid is ready to know, they'll ask directly. If the parents straight-up lie at that point, then yeah, you can start to have a problem. But you can say, "Well, what do you think?" If they're satisfied with that, they're not ready. But if they say, "I think it's you guys" or whatever, you can ask if they really want to know. And if so, then you tell them the truth (in a nice way), and it'll probably be fine. On the other hand, it can also be bad if the parent decides it's time for the child to know and tells them before they're ready. (That was what I got from a well-meaning but misguided parent, and it certainly wasn't fun.) Really it's like most 'adult' topics: you can broach the topic and then let the kid show you what level of detail they're ready for with the questions they ask.
treespace8 5y ago
It's only lying if you ever admit it. It's a good exercise in critical thinking. Our teenager keeps on trying to get us to say Santa isn't real. Not going to happen.
- 9991 5y ago
  I'm reasonably sure that's not how lying works.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  That sounds really close to gaslighting.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gumby 5y ago
It helped my kid discover the scientific method on his own, as he would weight the clues (carrots bitten off and some beer drunk overnight) vs obviously not handmade presents. I don’t think he actually believed it — I think the kids books are pretty clear on this topic.
irrational 5y ago
Yes. We’ve never lied to our kids about Santa Claus. Though we don’t preach against St Nick. The kids naturally learn about it from the surrounding culture. Invariably they all ask, “Is Santa real?” We say, “what do you think?” They always respond, “I don’t think so.” We tell them that they are right, but other kids are lied to by their parents so they shouldn’t go around telling other kids that Santa isn’t real.
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  Not sure if I'd tell a kid "other kids are lied to by their parents" because the other parents wouldn't see a cultural myth as "lies", under the "cold, hard lies" and "you are a liar" definition. And you know kids... "My mom said your mom is A LIAR"
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    My parents told me Santa Claus was mythology and that parents played along because it was fun and magical for their kids. They also told me about the symbolic meaning of giving gifts. It made the whole thing amazing for me. I always knew where gifts from Santa came from, but we could all have fun pretending. Also, consequences for ruining the magic would be equally mythological. ;)
slavik81 5y ago
In 2017, there was a court case over the question of whether foster parents are obligated to tell children that the Easter Bunny is real. The Hamilton Children’s Aid Society argued that a belief in the Easter Bunny was an important part of Canadian culture, and removed children from their home over the refusal to lie. The family was vindicated in court, several years later, but it really struck me how much trouble that caused. There are some people that really strongly believe in the importance of that fantasy. https://www.jccf.ca/court_cases/derek-and-frances-baars-v-hamilton-childrens-aid-society/ https://www.jccf.ca/court_cases/derek-and-frances-baars-v-ha...
omnicognate 5y ago
Santa Claus isn't a lie, it's a fantasy. There's a brilliant line in Peppa Pig where they go to Grampy Rabbit's Dinosaur Park and one of the kids asks if a dinosaur egg is real. Grampy Rabbit booms (caps because Grampy Rabbit is played by Brian Blessed): "NO, IT'S BETTER THAN REAL - IT'S PRETEND!" Kids immerse themselves in fantasy. It's healthy, and they often don't care at all about the boundary between that and reality. There's a sharp distinction between telling children babies are delivered by storks because you're too repressed to answer their questions properly and taking part in the Santa Claus myth to bring some magic into the home at Christmas. You don't need to go and prick your kids' Christmas bubble in the name of "honesty". My son is old enough to have figured it out for himself. My response is, and always will be, "you'll never get me say he's not real, and don't you go telling your sister that." He understands perfectly (with a wink), and it's brought the exact opposite of cross-generational strife to our house. If we actually did make a habit of lying to them I'm sure it would be a different story. We're very open and honest about real stuff (death, sex, money, etc - and where the boundaries of our own knowledge lie).
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Fantasy is a category of lying, though. Artists tell lies that we voluntarily suspend our disbelief of in order to immerse ourselves in a world that doesn't exist, IMO to learn something about ourselves. Santa Claus is a legend. Sometimes we "act out" these legends in a fake display to honor some distant past truth buried under millenia of broken telephone. The moral of the story is, lying is OK, so long as you're honest about doing it.
  - omnicognate 5y ago
    That's just semantics, though, isn't it? My point is that there's a difference between the sort of thing Santa Claus is and the sort of thing storks delivering babies is, whatever terminology you use. I don't think we disagreed on that?
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    As an author, I strongly disagree with the semantics here. Lie implies there is deception involved. The idea of a story being “true” conflates deception and history. (History being the full context of what has actually happened.) 1. All fantasy is not history. 2. All deception is not history. It does not follow that all fantasy is deception. Fantasy comes from imagination. For the audience who reads a story intending to be fictional and known to be by both author and audience, there is no deception.
yakubin 5y ago
Discovering the lie about Santa Claus was one of the first experiences that taught me not to take my parents' words at face value. So it's probably not something that parents would like, but in fact it's a valuable lesson for a child.

pfdietz 5y ago

We made an explicit decision to not lie to our kids about Santa Claus or anything else. It was a good call.

admiralpumpkin 5y ago
We have told our child that a "Santa" is someone who gives without any expectations, sometimes secretly or anonymously. We empowered them to be a Santa if they want to be one.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  That sounds like a great approach!
asiachick 5y ago
Mom? Are you planning a surprise party for me for my birthday? I think telling my kids things for their enjoyment is ok. I don't believe me or my siblings were hurt by our parents given us the santa myth and I also feel it was an important life lesson to discover santa didn't exist.
- toast0 5y ago
  > Mom? Are you planning a surprise party for me for my birthday? How would you feel if you did have a suprise party? / No, but would you like me too? / No, but would that be ok for a future birthday? What do you think I would tell you if you asked me that and I was planning a surprise party? Or if I wasn't? You don't have to answer all their questions. Personally, I'd say, no, I don't like surprise parties, so I'm not going to plan one for someone, but for the sake of argument, I'll pretend I might.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    “If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise any more, would it?”
  - felipelemos 5y ago
    You are not actually answering him, because you know that if you are planning a surprise party and you just answered yes, you would have ruined the party. The truth is that not every lie is a problem.
polishdude20 5y ago
Also, think about how it adds to the work of the parents. Before your child, you probably never tried to lie as an adult and didn't need to remember your lies. All of a sudden, you've got a kid and now you start to lie to them and need to keep spinning these webs of lies to support previous lies. Must be exhausting.
- pengaru 5y ago
  > Before your child, you probably never tried to lie as an adult and didn't need to remember your lies. Where are these adults who never tried to lie?
  - Danieru 5y ago
    Perhaps a better word is "conspire"? As in to perpetuate a conspiracy. It requires much more planning and care than a one off lie.
  - polishdude20 5y ago
    I mean more like, you don't constantly lie to people. But yeah, like the commenter below says "conspire".
- tempestn 5y ago
  It really isn't if you just treat it as a fun fantasy and don't work too hard to conceal the truth. Kids are happy to believe and have fun with it, and then when they're ready to know the truth, it's fairly obvious. For example, don't try to come up with explanations for inconsistencies or impossibilities, but just ask the kid what they think. Eventually it'll be like, "Well, obviously Santa can't actually come to all the houses, so I think the other Santas help him." "I know you and Mom put our presents under our tree, but I think Santa gives them to you." Etc. They basically explicitly tell you how much Santa they want to believe at any given point. Once they directly ask you if Santa is real, you can ask them if they really want you to answer. (The first time mine quickly said, "No, I know he's real!" and then dropped it for a year. :D ) But if they persist, you can tell them a nice version of the truth, like that the idea of Santa is definitely real, because why else would kids get presents from Santa every year. As they guessed, you help out by actually getting the presents and putting them under the tree, but it's because of this great spirit of giving that so many people feel around Christmas that we have this tradition.
dudul 5y ago
How do you know it was a good call?
- dham 5y ago
  Yea, I'd be pissed if my parents never did Santa, because frankly it was a very fond time in my childhood and once you learn Santa isn't real you never get that time back. So we do Santa with our son and daughter and there was never a discussion not to do it.
  - dudul 5y ago
    Some parents tend to see children as mini-adults. Myths and legends may sound silly to us, but they are important for children's development.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Because we have an excellent relationship with our children, and they never expressed any regret for us having done that. You think children like discovering they've been lied to?
gnicholas 5y ago
How do you keep your kid from telling all the other kids that Santa isn't real? Little kids can't keep secrets, let alone big ones!
- alar44 5y ago
  Not my kids, not my problem.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  They may yell the truth about Santa but many kids will prefer to believe their parents and other adults.
- toast0 5y ago
  Same way you keep your kid from telling all the other kids that god isn't real. If you don't make a big deal about Santa, it won't be a big deal to them, and when they ask about him, you can say 'some people believe Santa is a nice guy that's totally not creepy and somehow delivers presents to all the children' or whatever. And you may likely have already had similar conversations about religion and how it's respectful to let people believe what they want about things like that. Of course, if you push Santa hard, and they're a fact oriented kid, when they find out the facts, it's going to be a big deal, and they're going to want to tell their friends about it. You won't know if they're fact oriented before you decide to push Santa though.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  How do you keep your kid from yelling "fire!" when there isn't one?
- pfdietz 5y ago
  We told them that some other parents were telling their kids this Santa Claus story, and that while we didn't want to do that, it wasn't meant in a bad way, and so please don't spoil things for the other children.

danenania 5y ago

I’d call Santa Claus mythology rather than a lie. I was torn at first, but myths and stories are important to humans, and myths like Santa that are very old and pervasive may be playing an adaptive or instructive role. Also, my three year old loves Santa. It makes xmas more magical for her. I also have many fond memories from childhood of this myth. It’s hard for me to see the harm.

gruez 5y ago
> I’d call Santa Claus mythology rather than a lie. What's the difference between "mythology" and "lie" then?
- hluska 5y ago
  Parenting is weird?? :)
- alephnan 5y ago
  Non-truths/falsehoods and lies aren’t the same thing, unless you’re in an Intro Philosophy logic class.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Non-truths/falsehoods and lies aren’t the same thing You're right, but the distinction in this case is far less clear than you make it out to be. The santa claus story has a social engineering component to it. Specifically, that an omniscient entity is monitoring your behavior and will give you gifts if you behave well. Given that, it's arguably a case of intentional deception (ie. lies). Absent christmas/santa claus being a cultural phenomena, telling your kids that they should behave well because there's an omniscient entity monitoring them, would be clearly a lie.
    - 7952 5y ago
      I think kids lack a clear distinction between imagination and the real world. They can believe something at one level and disbelieve at another without feeling the inconsistency. That can be a great skill to have that adults lose. But also makes the world more scary.

adrianmonk 5y ago

Is it time to link to Greg Lake's "I Believe in Father Christmas"? I believed in Father Christmas I looked to the sky with excited eyes then I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn and I saw him and through his disguise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfY4b1NszpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfY4b1NszpY (My take, though, is that Santa Claus is small potatoes compared to the song's larger themes of disillusionment that come with growing up.)

KerrAvon 5y ago
I think we need to understand that Greg Lake was a bit of an entitled whiner, though. The Kinks are more on point with “Father Christmas.”

duxup 5y ago

I don’t understand this, but some people seem to feel very strongly about it. I didn’t think anything about finding out that Santa wasn’t real, but it seems to make a VERY strong impression on some people. The contrast is interesting.

benrbray 5y ago
One thing to consider is: If the child realizes that Santa Claus isn't real before being told by their parents, they will experience the feeling of months or possibly years of all of the adults they trust lying to them. That is not a good feeling to have.
- duxup 5y ago
  I figured it out on my own, didn’t feel that way. I assume most kids suspect / figure it out rather than have their parents tell them. The phenomenon is interesting but I can’t say I understand it either.
- danenania 5y ago
  Our plan is to keep it going up until the point our daughter asks us directly, at which point we’ll tell her the truth.
- quinnjh 5y ago
  Arguably part of the reason TO put on the production IMO- kids get a firsthand lesson with low stakes about platos cave
- tempestn 5y ago
  I think it depends on how actively parents try to maintain the fantasy. IE how directly they lie. When the kid is ready to know, they'll ask directly. If the parents straight-up lie at that point, then yeah, you can start to have a problem. But you can say, "Well, what do you think?" If they're satisfied with that, they're not ready. But if they say, "I think it's you guys" or whatever, you can ask if they really want to know. And if so, then you tell them the truth (in a nice way), and it'll probably be fine. On the other hand, it can also be bad if the parent decides it's time for the child to know and tells them before they're ready. (That was what I got from a well-meaning but misguided parent, and it certainly wasn't fun.) Really it's like most 'adult' topics: you can broach the topic and then let the kid show you what level of detail they're ready for with the questions they ask.

treespace8 5y ago

It's only lying if you ever admit it. It's a good exercise in critical thinking. Our teenager keeps on trying to get us to say Santa isn't real. Not going to happen.

9991 5y ago
I'm reasonably sure that's not how lying works.
bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
That sounds really close to gaslighting.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

gumby 5y ago

It helped my kid discover the scientific method on his own, as he would weight the clues (carrots bitten off and some beer drunk overnight) vs obviously not handmade presents. I don’t think he actually believed it — I think the kids books are pretty clear on this topic.

irrational 5y ago

Yes. We’ve never lied to our kids about Santa Claus. Though we don’t preach against St Nick. The kids naturally learn about it from the surrounding culture. Invariably they all ask, “Is Santa real?” We say, “what do you think?” They always respond, “I don’t think so.” We tell them that they are right, but other kids are lied to by their parents so they shouldn’t go around telling other kids that Santa isn’t real.

raffraffraff 5y ago
Not sure if I'd tell a kid "other kids are lied to by their parents" because the other parents wouldn't see a cultural myth as "lies", under the "cold, hard lies" and "you are a liar" definition. And you know kids... "My mom said your mom is A LIAR"
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  My parents told me Santa Claus was mythology and that parents played along because it was fun and magical for their kids. They also told me about the symbolic meaning of giving gifts. It made the whole thing amazing for me. I always knew where gifts from Santa came from, but we could all have fun pretending. Also, consequences for ruining the magic would be equally mythological. ;)

slavik81 5y ago

In 2017, there was a court case over the question of whether foster parents are obligated to tell children that the Easter Bunny is real. The Hamilton Children’s Aid Society argued that a belief in the Easter Bunny was an important part of Canadian culture, and removed children from their home over the refusal to lie. The family was vindicated in court, several years later, but it really struck me how much trouble that caused. There are some people that really strongly believe in the importance of that fantasy. https://www.jccf.ca/court_cases/derek-and-frances-baars-v-hamilton-childrens-aid-society/ https://www.jccf.ca/court_cases/derek-and-frances-baars-v-ha...

omnicognate 5y ago

Santa Claus isn't a lie, it's a fantasy. There's a brilliant line in Peppa Pig where they go to Grampy Rabbit's Dinosaur Park and one of the kids asks if a dinosaur egg is real. Grampy Rabbit booms (caps because Grampy Rabbit is played by Brian Blessed): "NO, IT'S BETTER THAN REAL - IT'S PRETEND!" Kids immerse themselves in fantasy. It's healthy, and they often don't care at all about the boundary between that and reality. There's a sharp distinction between telling children babies are delivered by storks because you're too repressed to answer their questions properly and taking part in the Santa Claus myth to bring some magic into the home at Christmas. You don't need to go and prick your kids' Christmas bubble in the name of "honesty". My son is old enough to have figured it out for himself. My response is, and always will be, "you'll never get me say he's not real, and don't you go telling your sister that." He understands perfectly (with a wink), and it's brought the exact opposite of cross-generational strife to our house. If we actually did make a habit of lying to them I'm sure it would be a different story. We're very open and honest about real stuff (death, sex, money, etc - and where the boundaries of our own knowledge lie).

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Fantasy is a category of lying, though. Artists tell lies that we voluntarily suspend our disbelief of in order to immerse ourselves in a world that doesn't exist, IMO to learn something about ourselves. Santa Claus is a legend. Sometimes we "act out" these legends in a fake display to honor some distant past truth buried under millenia of broken telephone. The moral of the story is, lying is OK, so long as you're honest about doing it.
- omnicognate 5y ago
  That's just semantics, though, isn't it? My point is that there's a difference between the sort of thing Santa Claus is and the sort of thing storks delivering babies is, whatever terminology you use. I don't think we disagreed on that?
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  As an author, I strongly disagree with the semantics here. Lie implies there is deception involved. The idea of a story being “true” conflates deception and history. (History being the full context of what has actually happened.) 1. All fantasy is not history. 2. All deception is not history. It does not follow that all fantasy is deception. Fantasy comes from imagination. For the audience who reads a story intending to be fictional and known to be by both author and audience, there is no deception.

yakubin 5y ago

Discovering the lie about Santa Claus was one of the first experiences that taught me not to take my parents' words at face value. So it's probably not something that parents would like, but in fact it's a valuable lesson for a child.