The best gift you can give your children this Christmas? The truth

It must be hard to be a parent at Christmas. Not because you have to pay a bunch of money for the latest cool toys (cup and ball? Hoop and stick? A spinning top?). Not because you have to deal with essentially a whole month of red cordial-level excitement. And not because you have to attend the school Christmas concert where dreadful children sing for four hours while your child stands anonymously in the background dressed as a tree.

What must be exhausting for parents is the full roster of LIES they have to maintain for their gormless, perpetually and foolishly trusting children. It seems like it never ends for you folks, you have to move the elf from your shelf every day. But lying about Santa being real – trying to explain why Santa not only came to the family barbeque but smells suspiciously like Uncle Bill (Winnie Blues and bad choices) – is the big one.

Life isn’t all Santas.

Convincing children that Santa is real is so normalised that I don’t think anyone really thinks about it anymore, and in general, I think it’s not just harmless, but also good: I still remember that incomparable feeling of wonder knowing Santa was going to bring me delightful things during the night, and I bless my parents for constructing that joy. But, nevertheless, it is lying, and parents seem to have gone mad with power recently.

Lying to children not only seems to ramp up during the festive season, but it has also become something of a trend to prank and bewilder your progeny. If you’re on social media, you would have seen a recent trend where parents show their children a video of a weird spinning gnome and tell them that it was them when they were a baby. Why? It’s hard to tell – but it must be the rather grim pleasure of one-upping a literal infant. Another trend is telling children that if they don’t behave, the Grinch will steal their toys, and then having someone dressed as a Grinch come in and scare the living daylights out of them.

While I do find it somewhat funny watching parents absolutely traumatise their families for social media clout, my instinctive reaction to the majority of these videos is one of distaste. What joy can you really take from pranking a child? Everything’s new to them! They have no reference points to understand why the Grinch breaking into your house is a funny joke and why a Michael Myers serial killer with a machete isn’t. Oh wow, you’ve managed to baffle and scare a tadpole with barely any cognitive development, how clever. My friend’s kid just keeps eating sand, so I don’t think it’s a huge intellectual triumph to convince her an elf lives in her house. It seems to me, and I may be projecting, that these parents dislike their kids and regret their choices, and use the magic of Christmas and Santa as an excuse to get some prank-based revenge.

When I was a kid, I discovered the awful truth about Santa in a relatively dramatic fashion, and I think it shaped who I am today (untrusting and cynical). It started with my sister stealing my advent calendar chocolates and gaslighting me, claiming that I’d already eaten them. Not being too bright myself, I accepted this but much like the dwarves of Moria, she got too greedy, and ate a full week in advance, making me realise something was off. To catch her in the act and save the last and biggest chocolate on the calendar (Christmas Day), I rigged up a complicated series of non-lethal traps around my room. At this point in my life I had been raised on a diet of Enid Blyton novels, so plucky traps were my go-to response to almost any situation. Of course, I woke up late on Christmas Eve to the sight of my dad, blinded by the light of a bunch of flashing toys, assaulted by the sounds of fake mooing cows and ringing Christmas bells, tangled in tripwires, holding a sack full of toys. While I was and still am an idiot in many ways, I was able to make the cognitive leap to realise that my dad was either pretending to be Santa, or had killed jolly St Nick and stolen his sack.

While trapping my father in a web of jerry-rigged toys and sticky tape like a festive spider was an interesting way for the most innocent part of childhood to end, in retrospect I think it was an important lesson for all children to learn. That lesson? That life is full of disappointment, that you should never trust anyone, and that people will always try to take your advent calendar chocolate and only you can stop them. I think telling kids that Santa is a lie might be the ultimate festive prank, yet it is a useful way to teach them how awful the world is (the Tooth Fairy, however, is horribly real and we must give her our teeth, so she doesn’t take them from our sleeping mouths).

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