How to talk to your kids about Santa: relax, lie, have a drink, repeat

My four-year-old, Layla – once happy to write a letter to the North Pole and leave out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve – now wants to know how it’s possible for his sleigh to fly, and how he can carry all those presents, and if we don’t have a chimney at our place, how he’ll get in, and, hey, isn’t keeping people from getting why we lock the doors anyways?

I’d really like Layla to hold on to a sense of wonderment and magic for a little longer – her joy around the holidays is amazing and contagious – but I must admit I’m starting to feel a bit guilty for lying to her. After all, what will she think of me when she finds out the truth?

I remember confronting my own father about the existence of Santa when I was a little older than my daughter is now. In response, my father told me to close my eyes and imagine a red ball in my mind: “Is it there? Do you see it?” Yes, I said, and my father replied, “Well, see – it’s real! Just like Santa.”

I don’t remember exactly what I said in response, but I recall the sentiment: What a crock of shit.

Lying to our children gets even more thorny when we’re asked to answer our children’s more existential questions – the ones more complicated than whether Santa or the Tooth Fairy are real.

My family cat died recently, and trying to explain what happened to a four-year-old left our heads spinning. We’re not religious, so telling her that the cat went to cat heaven would have been hypocritical – but the “everything dies” talk didn’t exactly go over well. At all. Layla wanted to know if the cat had been buried, and if she had, “Was her mouth open?”

“Could she taste dirt?!”

At that point, any lie, fib or fairy tale would have been preferable.

Keeping certain truths from our children has become a natural part of raising them – and parents, for the most part, have good intentions going in. There are difficult things about the world that kids are too young to understand or that they’ll find too upsetting, and, when we can, every parent shields their children from pain or trauma. But every year, our kids get older and the line between protection and dishonesty gets thinner and thinner – and lying to them saves us a little hurt now but runs the risk of causing distrust later.

I wonder if the little white lies are more about our discomfort with our children growing up at all – keeping them innocent for just a little while longer is perhaps not just for their sakes, but for our own.

Maybe that’s OK. My daughter will be jaded soon enough and, once her teen years hit, I’m sure she’ll be mad at me about a whole host of things that have nothing to do with magical reindeer and everything to do with “unreasonable” curfews and schoolwork. So for now, I’m forgiving myself for the fibs. They do make life easier, and Layla seems to enjoy them.

So until she asks me when she already knows the answer, as far as I’m concerned Santa is real, the Tooth Fairy leaves money, and Mommy’s end-of-day cocktail is “juice” for grown-ups. Everybody wins.