AJ wrote:

For want of a political soundbite equivalent: Christmas should not be about fucking presents.

tin_robot wrote:

Liveinadive wrote:

@tin If I am staying at my parents place they still leave my stocking outside the bedroom door. Im 27, do not care that I am far too old for it.

Yep, everyone in our house gets a stocking, kids, grandparents, friends, whoever stays over on Christmas Eve.  Purely because it's nice waking up and finding it there, Santa or not.  (This is particularly bizarre for my wife, whose parents are Muslim, and never had a stocking until she married me.) As for whether or not it's right or wrong to let kids believe in Father Christmas?  I think introducing children to the concept of supernatural magical beings and that letting them discover slowly, and through their own resourcefulness, that even the most beguiling magic may actually have a more mundane explanation is not a particularly bad lesson for them to learn.  Equally I can think of much worse ways to discover that not everything you're told in life is necessarily true. All of which is pretty irrelevant, the main reason we all do it, is that it brings the kids massive pleasure, and if I'm honest their parents too.  (Or at least, in my case.)  My memories of Christmas as a child are amongst my happiest, and they all relate to that first bit in the morning, waking up and seeing the stocking.  I wouldn't want to deny them that.  (I also don't think it has much to do with consumerism.  The excitement was less to do with what was in it, and more to do with the fact it was there at all.) I had an interesting chat with my eldest (she's 11) yesterday about all of this.  She admitted she'd worked it out a few years ago through a combination of snooping in our bedroom, and comparing notes with friends.  She realised that we must have given her the presents ourselves and, yes, had pretended to sleep in the hope of catching us out.  For the most part she sees it as a nice story, rather than a lie.  (I once worked for a paediatrician who would take great pleasure in pointing out that technically telling kids that there was a magic man who gives them presents, then later informing them that you'd actually made it up, ticked all the criteria for emotional abuse.  As a result I always had a slight anxiety about how they would react, despite not even being able to remember the revelation from my own childhood.) One bit she'd never been able to work out however, and which had left her still slightly baffled, was that every year they write a letter, and every year we set fire to it in front of their eyes in order to "send it to Santa".  Despite this, the letter reappears exactly as written, in their stocking, but with a reply from Father Christmas.  She asked that I not tell her how it was done, because she wanted to work it out for herself, and be left with at least a little bit of a mystery. (It's worth saying that she and her younger sister got up in the early hours of the morning last week, wrote their letters, put them in envelopes without us seeing them, and sealed them, in an attempt to test this particular trick.  The eldest to see if we could still pull it off, the youngest on the grounds that if the letter reappeared she would continue to believe.  We burnt the still sealed envelopes last night, but the letters will, of course, return on Christmas morning.) tl,dr.  Santa's great.