I knew I shouldn't look at this thread because it would annoy me, but I did, with the predicted result.
DS1 was actually afraid of the idea of a man coming down the chimney, even if he did bring presents! I had to tell him the truth to calm him down. For the rest of them, I did just what my parents did with me. I was brought up on a whole heap of fairy stories, fantasy and later on sci-fi. FC was just one of those great stories which I enjoyed but didn't believe were literally true. Besides, I was a cynical little so-and-so pretty much from birth, and if I was supposed to believe that a young man with a patently false beard really flew into the shop on that cardboard sleigh drawn by animatronic reindeer I would have felt quite insulted, and why would we have to pay to go in? (Oh yes, I was watching.) But I still heartily enjoyed going to "Santa's Grotto" even though the presents themselves were nothing to get excited about. My dad would read The Night Before Christmas to us every Christmas Eve - he was great at reading aloud - and we'd all collude in pretending we hadn't heard my mother rustling and grumbling as she filled our stockings and occasionally dropped one with a big thump (would Santa really have said "blast"? 
We hung up my dad's bristly old cricket socks and it was really exciting to see what was in there, a little bit at a time, even though I knew my mother had been buying things all year and squirrelling them away in her "magic drawer" in the linen room. She was pretty good at not letting us see the things early, but really crap at lying, I could always tell when she wasn't being strictly honest because it made her so uncomfortable.
Pretending is the magic when you're little. Nearly every kid loves "let's pretend" and I would never advocate taking that away from them. I am just totally aghast that so many people think it's EVIL and sucking all the magic out of a child's life not to do this Santa thing in exactly the way they do it. IMO a child doesn't have to believe the real fat guy really arrives with real reindeer to enjoy the whole thing. Oh, they probably will forgive you for lying to them in a good cause, but they will also be disappointed once they find out the truth, whereas if they were in on the story from the start they can enjoy it as a participant. Like watching magic tricks and sort of knowing it's sleight of hand, but still being amazed at the magician's cleverness. There are one hell of a lot of amazing things in real life too.
FWIW my DCs have grown up as excellent storytellers with an avid interest in fantasy, film, cartoons and writing. Maybe they're compensating for something I robbed them of, who knows? 
Only one of them insisted that FC really was real, in the teeth of the evidence and all his school friends and brothers telling him differently, until the age of 8, and he's the one who had most difficulty engaging with the real world as a general rule (it was suggested at one time that he might have Asperger's, NOT because of the FC thing I hasten to add).
So: those accusing the OP of bringing up joyless little automatons, GET A GRIP. It is not child abuse or neglect not to tell your child a charming untruth. I told mine the same story, I just didn't tell them it really happened. I doubt very much whether your way will scar your children for life, but then again, the signs are that my way didn't either.