The First Lie We Teach Our Children

Santa endures because he normalises deception—teaching children early that comforting lies, when protected collectively, become reality.

There is something deeply unsettling about how carefully adults lie about Santa Claus.

Not casually—deliberately. With precision. With rehearsed explanations about silent movement and an unseen entry. Children don’t need those details. Adults do. They construct them with the seriousness of architects, reinforcing a story about a red man who watches, judges, and enters homes while everyone sleeps.

We teach children that this mysterious man observes them throughout the calendar year.

That behaviour is tracked. Its rewards are conditional. That an unseen authority crosses thresholds without permission and leaves staged evidence behind—crumbs, empty glasses, boot marks, hoof prints—to prove his presence is real. We manufacture proof, then defend it. Not to protect wonder, but to preserve belief.

Santa was not always a benign, fuzzy symbol of the Yuletide. Christmas itself was once darker—about endurance, scarcity, survival. What we celebrate now is a softened mask, a sanitised version of something long forgotten. But a dark lie remains through coloured lights and bright tinsel.

So why persist? We wouldn’t normally allow a stranger to break into our homes and touch our things while we slept. It’s wrong on so many levels. It goes against logic.

Because deception is useful. Because Santa rehearses control: surveillance without accountability, judgment without confrontation. He teaches obedience through myth. He makes lying communal, sanctioned, comforting and fun.

Santa helps parents. If the lie is shared widely enough, repeated often enough, and wrapped in ritual, it doesn’t just shape behaviour. It assists when nothing else can. The flipside is that if we can allow a stranger to drop by and do what he likes, we can let anything else in to do anything it wants, too.

It can break in, too, take what it likes, including the glue that holds our souls to this world.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)