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).
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.
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.
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?
"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).