How St. Nick and his posse made me an irredeemable fibber

Last week I mentioned the fact that we need to deal with the whole Santa Claus/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy issue and the way in which it turns parents into rotten stinking liars.

Right? I mean, no matter whether you're someone who celebrates Christmas, Easter and edentulism, the fact is that if you encourage a belief in these beloved characters among your children, you're deceiving them.

And please understand, I don't see anything wrong with it. I've done it myself with my own kids. I grew up enjoying presents from Santa, candy from the Bunny, and cash dough from the Fairy.

It's just, you know, you tell your kids not to lie and then you...lie.

Well, you don't "lie" really, in the sense of a malicious attempt to distort the truth. But I don't think "deceive" is too strong a word to use here.

Though it still has a pretty negative connotation. Can we say you "deceive with positive intent?"

Sure. But you still deceive.

As much as I love Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, the only way they work is if you distract your child from what is a pretty obvious reality. For their own good, I agree, but there's still a little sleight of hand at work here.

In a nutshell, here are the main factors in deciding whether to do S.E.B.T.F. (Santa-Easter Bunny-Tooth Fairy) with your offspring:

PROS

• It's fun! I love the looks on the kids' faces when they come down on Christmas or Easter morning, or when they proudly show off the quarters the Tooth Fairy brought them (and their newly formed gap-tooth smile).
• You did it yourself when you were a kid, and you want your own children to have that same joy.
• All the other parents pretty much do it and, let's be honest here, who wants to be the freak who doesn't? (The answer, by the way, is "plenty of people." I know several of them.)

CONS

• Did we mention you're a rotten stinking liar?
• It's also expensive. Seriously, there's money to be shelled out in every instance.
• L-I-A-R!

I honestly can't say I'm in any way morally conflicted by this. I just think it's funny how we all collectively have decided that this particular lie is OK.

I always enjoy when the kids get older and you can see they just can't bring themselves to believe in S.E.B.T.F. anymore (and of course once you figure out that one is fake, the other two dominoes fall pretty quickly). In many cases, though, they don't tell you they've caught on because they're afraid the present/money train will pull away, never to be seen again.

Which is really only true of the Tooth Fairy, I guess. Once they know what's going on there, we stop giving our kids money for lost teeth. But even if you get past Santa and the Easter Bunny, you still get presents on Christmas and chocolate on Easter.

At least that's what I've always promised my kids I would do. I hope they still believe me after I've lied to them for so many years.

A pointless Christmas story, just for you

It's Christmas Day, and the last thing you need is to read more of my drivel. So just a quick Christmas story that may be of interest only to me...

I must have been 6 or 7 years old. We had an old manual typewriter with which I was just fascinated. I loved playing with it. This was long before word processing and personal printers, so I enjoyed the fact that I could create something semi-professional-looking just by smashing on a few keys.

I would type on that thing for an hour at a time. Sometimes I would type real words. Other times I would type my name (over and over and over). And other times I would fill whole sheets of notebook paper with random letters. That's all I used, of course, was lined notebook paper. We didn't have typing paper in the house, and the only place I ever saw blank white paper was at school

Anyway, I used this typewriter a lot. We kept it in a burnt orange plastic case (this was the 70's, after all). One Christmas Eve, I had a dream that I came out of my room on Christmas morning and ran to the living room. But instead of my presents being laid out on the couch like they normally were, all I saw was a small square of that lined notebook paper taped -- yes, taped, like with Scotch tape -- to one of the couch cushions. And typed on that paper was an all-caps message from Santa:

"SORRY, NO PRESENTS FOR YOU THIS YEAR."

Not sure what I did at that point in the dream. Probably screamed or something. Terry says all of my stories from when I was a kid end with the phrase, "...and then I cried." Which isn't true, but for purposes of this dream, it probably was.

Of course I woke up and it was still Christmas morning, and Santa HAD left me presents so all was well. I even got the Evel Knievel Stunt and Crash Car I had been hoping for. That was awesome.

There's no real point to this story other than: (1) It's Christmas and that's about the only Yuletide nugget I could think of, and (2) I'm even stranger than I thought, and I've been that way for a long, long time.

Merry Christmas, blog readers. Your comments and feedback over the first two weeks of this venture have been greatly appreciated. Here's hoping I can think up enough material to keep it going into 2012...