I’ve talked with a lot of people about whether it is right to ‘lie’ to your child about Santa or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. Most are on about the same page as I am: They don’t see anything wrong with it. They enjoyed the game as children, and those of them who are parents enjoy keeping it up with their kids. However, I’ve been very surprised by the vehemence of some people’s anger about the subject, often due to them feeling betrayed by their parents when they learned that they had been ‘lied’ to.
What I found out is that what seems to be a strong predictor in people’s reactions to learning there was no Santa is how -serious- their parents were about maintaining the fiction. My parents didn’t try especially hard. “Santa” used the same paper my parents used, and wrote in their handwriting, and I was sometimes expected to thank my Gramma Sue for things that “Santa” gave me. Several times, my father overslept and I caught him hiding eggs on Easter morning (“The Easter Bunny hid some of them too easily! I had to re-hide them because you’re such a smart kid!”) As a result, I suspected that Santa and the Easter Bunny didn’t exist from a young age, and I actually remember bargaining with my parents over how much money “The Tooth Fairy” was gonna give me. 
So when I was ready, I gave up the fiction pretty easily. I’d already been operating in a state of suspended disbelief for a long time, because the game was fun to play.
Those of the people who I talked to who felt especially betrayed, I found out, tended to talk about the fiction maintained by their parents as something much more excessive. Santa used different paper and different handwriting than their parents, and they were NEVER allowed to find the paper! That sort of thing. As a result, they held to the belief more closely, and were more liable to defend it to their own detriment on the schoolyard, among other things. One person told me that she had done so, she suspected, at least in part because she sensed that it was what her parents wanted, and part of the betrayal was that her parents had wanted her to look like a fool. Whereas I accepted people not believing in Santa as part of the natural order of things and left them to believe whatever they wanted without pushing the matter one way or another. It was their loss, as far as I was concerned.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t wrong to ‘lie’, just so long as you don’t go out of your way to make the lie too good. As children get old enough to begin judging the situation, they’ll start to see through it, and they can come to see the truth in their own time, without having their belief either artificially prolonged or cut short. To be honest, I think that the Santa/Easter Bunny mythos teaches valuable lessons about drawing joy from everyday life by not adhering too closely to “the facts”, which can be pretty depressing once you hit adulthood. I know I tap into that ‘suspended disbelief’ state pretty commonly when I need a dream to keep me happy through the tough times.
(BTW, I don’t want this to sound like I was a pragmatic child, because I wasn’t. I was actually pretty imaginative. I did get mocked for my overactive imagination, just not on the Santa front. I don’t get mocked anymore, though, even though I’m still on the wacky side when it comes to imagination level, mostly because those people who are still childish enough to be the mocking sort have learned that this isn’t a subject that they can shame me about. As with Santa on the schoolyard, I’m of the opinion that it’s their loss that they live such mundane lives.)
