If some misery tells your child there is no Santa/FC...

[GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER]

Just occurred to me, since a so called friend did tell dd aged only 5 that there was no Santa, 'it's just a fairytale'.

Thank heaven I thought to tell her at once that so called friend had probably been so naughty when she was little that Santa never came, so it was no wonder she didn't no believe in him. Should add that I was helped by the fact that friend had form for rowing, effing and blinding, inc. in front of dd at least once.
This worked like a dream, so thought I'd share in case anyone else's dc encounters a misery wanting to spoil the magic.

We seem to be talking about the difference between suspension of disbelief, and outright lying. Actors don't start a play by assuring us that what we're going to watch isn't real. We all know that, but together we willingly suspend our disbelief and all pretend for the course of the performance. Likewise, we can sit down to have a teddy bear picnic with our children, or indeed to lay out whiskey milk for Santa, all of us knowing that we're pretending.
There's a massive difference between that kind of imagination, and lying to our kids that another child has been bad (as some on this thread claim to do) to explain why Father Christmas doesn't visit them.

usernameavailable
I'm sorry for what you and your child/ren are going through. I've been there, and now, through the other side of the worst of it, I believe all the more in both the power of imagination to help us through the hardest times and in age-appropriate honesty and never lying to my children. I don't find a conflict there at all.

Very well described, Somerville. The lie comes not in pretending, but in pretending you are not pretending.

My 6yo is currently very confused about fact and fiction. Programmes like Octonauts bother him because it's a fictional telling of real facts; they watch a lot of Horrible Histories which is real humans pretending to be historical real humans and performing a fictional representation of a real historical event. He is constantly asking whether someone or something is "real" or not, whether narwhals or Octonauts or Lenin or whatever. He is happy with pretending or suspending disbelief so long as he knows that's what is happening. I couldn't in all conscience tell that child that FC is literally real.

Meanwhile my older son was never confused by any of that but was horrified by the idea of someone's coming into our house at night. He loved the story of FC but couldn't have coped with thinking he was really coming to our house.

The idea that all children will be enchanted by a "real" FC is way off the mark!

So DD doesn't believe in FC really, she keeps trying to justify why he might be real. However she totally believes that for the whole month of December a plush elf comes to life and causes havoc in the house