Or is this Santa post unreasonable?

Maybe its how/if you are told as well. I've seen parents of children of up to 10 who have been asked to tell the truth, and instead, they have gone out of their way to "prove" Santa's existence and added a heaping of emotional blackmail ("If you don't believe you won't receive!") It's not surprising that those children will feel annoyed when they find out.

We play along with it with my 4yo because you can't avoid it and I'm not going to actively tell her it's not real when all her friends believe.

When she asks me to be honest, I will be.

I'm wondering now if my granddad didn't have leprechauns at the bottom of his garden. I have very fond memories of us looking for them in the wild bit at the bottom of the garden. I never did see them but granddad said I had to be very quiet and I'm not sure I managed it.

Oh I know you weren't @OrangeSlices998 but it seems to be what a lot of people are implying 🙈

Well I’ll never know, but as we have Santa in our house I do know I love it and I’d hate that to be taken away from my children too early.

The Bible is NOT suitable for children, regardless of your religious beliefs!

We did do Santa with ours and I don't remember it being a huge deal at all. My daughter realised quite young that he wasn't real and my son a bit older but neither of them were upset and definitely hasn't had any adverse effect on them.

I wonder if the reaction depends on how old you are when you find out. I can imagine feeling a bit upset if I was 12 and thought everyone was laughing at me. I found out at 7, a month after my birthday (I can work it out because of when my birthday is and a month later the Christmas stuff starts) I was a bit surprised, asked my mother to confirm it and life went on. I think the penny dropped with my kids at about the same age.

I'd also been told about St Nicholas and I told my children so when we found out it was just about how this was a way of carrying on what St Nicholas did.

I think people get themselves into unnecessary knots about this. Santa is just one of a huge number of imaginative threads that we weave into our family life without going out of our way to label as ‘truth’ or ‘lie’. Like the slipper goblins who hide my son’s slippers sometimes, or when we go Gruffalo hunting in the woods, or when we talk about dragons and unicorns and kelpies. I don’t consider it harmful to children to let them believe there is magic woven in with reality when they’re little, and I believe that in the overwhelming majority of cases an understanding of the way the world really operates develops organically as they mature and their brains develop.

There certainly doesn’t seem to be widespread harm to my generation from having been brought up believing in Santa, but for some reason a large number of us have collectively decided that anything other than relentless, earnest realism is causing psychiatric damage to children, despite that flying in the face of our own happy memories.

At the end of the day, everyone knows their own child best. If you have a legitimate fear that your own child won’t cope with the introduction of a fantasy element to Christmas then, of course, avoid it and feel secure in your choice. But there’s no need to make sweeping extrapolations that a concept which has brought joy and magic to millions of children for decades is actually harmful and cruel.

It's a stupid patriarchal story. I hated being lied to, but then I'm autistic. My daughter, also autistic, was suspicious by age 6, and I couldn't keep being vague, so when she asked me outright I told her the truth.

I just say lots of people believe in Santa, what do you think? I don’t see that it’s really necessary to actually confirm it one way or the other.

OP, I was exactly the same as you before I had kids. Now that I have them, we do make Santa part of our Christmas. But Christmas is not all about Santa and it’s not our only tradition so there is a balance. I would not use the concept of Santa or the Elf to manipulate their behaviour. The kids definitely want to believe and enjoy the idea of magic. I play along with them. I do think it’s weird when parents engage in all kinds of deception to keep children believing when they are growing out of it. It’s also healthy to let children grow up and develop critical thinking skills. By oh my goodness my 9 year old’s letter to Santa this year was the sweetest thing ever and I know she will look back and cherish this time.

That's so well put! I never thought of it that way! I have to admit that I had been feeling bad for lying to my kid about Santa and feared how she'll feel when she finds out. But the way you put it makes me re-think. Maybe it's a bit like a magic trick that you are blown away by, then as you say, if/when you figure it all out, you feel proud.
I had also been thinking that I hope the day my children find out about Santa, they will still see the magic behind all the effort, love and care that is put in making Christmas magical.

Oh 100%. I absolutely wasn’t implying that that was the case! My parents never really went in for much Christmas magic, I knew from a young age Santa wasn’t real - still liked presents, the food, the lights & decorations etc. Christmas magic isn’t dependent on believing a fat man in a red suit comes down the chimney!

Never a truer word said. Kids brought up with advice from this idiot. Scarey!

@ANiceCuppaTeaandBiscuit but maybe it was only less magical because you once believed (and then stopped) - if a child has never believed then they won't have that experience as Christmas never changes for them.

My working assumption would be that her book sales have dipped a bit and she wants to give them a boost before Christmas.

Making fun of those who have breakdowns isn't funny.

You do realise someone with severe MH issues doesn't align to your views on this issue?

Do you make fun of those with anxiety of driving at night? So it's only MH issues by your logic

I think what I don't like about these threads is the idea that children are "missing out" if Christmas isn't done a certain way.

My parents often worked Christmas (NHS), I was an only child and all our family were overseas so often the Christmases I read about on here are absolutely nothing like any of my childhood experiences.

But that doesn't mean my those Christmases were somehow bad or less magical or boring which is what a lot of the comments seem to imply.

I know you can do all the fun stuff, and I’ve loved Christmas before and after finding out Santa wasn’t real. It’s just a magical time of the year for me. I have siblings and I did all the fun stuff around Santa for them after I stopped believing but for me, personally, it definitely was never the same. Look maybe for some people it is as magical, but respectfully, I disagree.

And we’re the kind of family who owns a massive bunny costume so every year someone can dress up and hide all the eggs 😅

It did upset me when I found out Father Christmas wasn't real, I remember clearly. So we don't do that in our house, kids enjoy Christmas regardless as it's a time for family, food and celebration of the past year.

I agree, I hate the whole naughty list concept etc. We definitely don’t entertain that in our house.

I don’t know any adults affected by discovering Santa isn’t real!

But equally I don't know any adults who are scarred because their parents never went along with Santa in the first place.

And I don't think it generally does do long-term damage to kids finding out Santa isn't real, it didn't to me (that I'm aware of) but children are individuals, and some may find being lied to, however well meaning, by a parent very confusing. Parent the child you have, not the child you believe you should have, I guess. I know DD1 likes to be told the truth, she doesn't like not knowing things or having doubts about things, and her enjoyment of Christmas has never been particularly rooted in Santa anyway, so that helped inform my decision about how to approach Santa. With a very different personality, I might have chosen differently.

DD2 has never liked Santa, she finds him scary, so instead of hammering home how magical he is, I'm just going to remove him from the equation for her unless she indicates otherwise.

It's a point of view but not one i subscribe to. I loved the magic of santa and so did my kids but now we are older we can laugh at the fibs such as ds1 insisting he had seen and spoken to santa one year, he finds it hilarious that he was impressed he'd convinced us it was true and now realises we knew all along he was telling whoppers. DS 2 recalls the time we walked with a group of friends to the top of the hill to see santas sleigh, which was actually Haleys comet! His happy memories are about sharing the excitement with friends, having hot chocolate together and aren't diminished in finding out the truth in any way. Dd thought for years that reindeer had glitter feet because of the glitter footprints we used to leave in the dining room using washable glitter glue and a stencil! They love the effort we made to make it magical and hope to replicate with their own kids one day.

Others have a different view and that's ok but I can't see it becoming mainstream tbh.

Some of the things my mum had us believe when we were little and all the fun that came with them are some of our fondest memories of being a child. By today's standards, I should be rocking in the corner from the trauma. I think the awareness you develop later on as an adult that your parents were trying to make you happy (and allowing someone else to take the credit!) is something many of us come to appreciate and want to offer the same experience to the children around you. Santa isn't creating childhood trauma, if anything the current societal pressure for children to become little men/women is having a far bigger impact.