Yup, don’t lie to your kids if you don’t have to.
I mean every family’s different and I don’t take my opinion to have a strong shot at universal validity, but from where I sit it is really hard to see what the added value is in lying to kids about something like this.
Having said what I said in my previous post, totally cute moments like this may make up for it. 
My parents lied to me about Santa and they also lied to me about real stuff (for example, lied to me that I was not adopted, and lied to me that we were not moving when in fact we were).
It was easy for me to discern the reasoning behind both sets of lies, even at a young age. The Santa lie was to make me happy and to make me believe in something wonderful. The others were more malicious.
I am not a parent and I don’t know how to parent, not really. But, kids do understand motivations more than most people think. 
I think this is the last year my son believes in Santa - he’s 8. He’s commented that some people think that Santa doesn’t exist for a couple of years now, so it can’t last that much longer. He’s shady on the Tooth Fairy, too - enough so that he tried to booby-trap her to see if she existed. I almost killed myself getting that damn tooth (he set up a motion detector, trip wire and a few other things).
Anyway, I’m thinking this will be the last year. Though I said that last year, too. What’s funny is that he doesn’t believe in any higher power at all - he thinks that notion is laughable, but for some reason Santa is totally reasonable.
Oh, well. I think I was 7 when I stopped believing. My sister and I found all of “Santa’s” gifts in the garage closet one day and they magically appeared under the tree a few days later. So we did what any reasonable kids would do - we slit the packages open, played with them every night and re-wrapped them and put them back when we were done. Mom had no idea until I told her a few months ago (I’m 39).
I’m quite sure I knew there was no Santa by the time I was 6 or so - 3 older brothers all with degrees of jerkitude ranging from “normal older brother” to “sociopath” sorted that out for me.
My kids: Moon Unit knew, but didn’t “know”, by about age 9. She asked me if Santa was real. I asked her if she really wanted me to answer the question. She insisted she did, so I told her. Poor kid cried. I mean, she sorta knew but I think it was upsetting to hear it stated as a fact.
Dweezil, who has mild autism, was at least 12. He sorta knew, but one year (when he was, well, about 12) the little bastard REFUSED TO GO TO SLEEP on Christmas Eve, and kept popping out of his room to catch Santa (or us).
That year, he wanted a Wii for Christmas and I said I wasn’t sure it was in the budget. He said he would ask Santa for it. I said that Santa couldn’t always swing big-ticket gifts for which there were well-documented shortages.
The year after that, we all tacitly went the “don’t ask, don’t tell” route. I’m reasonably sure he knew by then.
Ahahahahaha!!! My daughter (Moon Unit) is sitting at the other end of the table and wondering why I’m snickering. Clever little kid. Clearly destined for Great Things
This comes up for retail employees. “Hide this, get it into the bag without him seeing, we’re trying to preserve the Santa illusion for one more year…”
When my daughter was 10 she asked me if mommy and daddy were Santa Claus. I sat down and told her the truth and explained the traditions and such. She had huge tears coming down her cheeks. She wasn’t mad just that something she loved is no longer. Tough tough moment I will never forget. Too bad they can’t be little for longer, they grow up way too fast.
While we’ve humoured the idea, we’ve been very careful to never say Santa exists - lots of ‘the stories say’. We’ve also said that the Santas in the shopping centres are not the real one, as 'none’s ever seen the real Santa".
Which probably explains why my just-5 year old believes that Santa’s not real, but that there are a team of men dressed as Santa who break into our houses and leave presents. So close and yet so far…
Unendurable. I would have gone with escalating lies until such time as her husband had to clean it all up for me.
My kids are 6 and 4 and never believed in Santa. It never even occurred to us to pretend it was real. We’ve asked them, “Is Santa fake or real?”
They both chime out, “Fake!!!”
I’m not sure EXACTLY when my (now 11 year old) son figured out there was no Santa. But a few weeks before CHristmas 3 years ago, he finally asked me point blank “Is Santa real? Tell me the truth.”
At that point, I asked one of the most useful questions I know. “What do you think?” He replied, “I think you and Mommy put the presents under the tree after I go to sleep.” And I immediately said, “You’re right.”
I imagine he’d been thinking/wondering about that for a while, but he officially learned the truth just a few weeks after his 8th birthday.
After I told him, his only question was, “Do I still get presents?” When I said yes, he was ecstatic. He hasn’t really missed Santa since.
But you know, it was only LAST Christmas Eve that he finally asked me, “Wait… so all those years I left out milk and cookies, did YOU eat them?”
Truth? What truth???
It seems some of your fellow Dopers think that Santa Claus is a phantom and that plagiarism is illegal. Well Eutychus, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Eutychus, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Eutychus, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Eutychus. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.
We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Eutychus, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Eutychus, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
When my daughter was three I had to prep her to pretend so as not to “ruin” it for a five-year-old. She went along with it and enjoyed participating in the fantasy as far as it went. I always do the stocking thing, but as a cultural tradition, not to actually fool anyone. Lying to your kids for fun is pretty messed up, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m glad my parents didn’t play tricks on me like this.
Well… as a kid, I figured it out for myself, and I think it would have been much better if my parents had just told the truth.
I actually figured it out in regards to the tooth fairy through an experiment I did - put the tooth under my pillow in a plastic bag with thread tied around it, still connected to the spool. I honestly didn’t know whether the tooth fairy was real or not, so the experiment was very much open to proof either way. My parents played along and had the strong crisscross all over the house, then end up back under my pillow with a dollar inside.
What they didn’t know: I had colored the end of the string with a marker. The color was gone, therefore the string had been cut and retied, therefore the tooth fairy was fake. And so was Santa and the Easter Bunny and… I really wasn’t sure where it stopped, which is part of the reason I didn’t let them know I’d caught them in the lie. (When I was 18 I won an award for turning it into an essay and that was the first anyone else knew of it).
Frankly, I never took anything my parents said at face value again. I hesitate to put too much emphasis on Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, since this incident is symptomatic of bigger problems at home. My father was a lying manipulative bastard even on his good days.
But still… I really think parents need to think about all this. Kids don’t have to believe that something is real to enjoy playing the game.
You could do what we did…we never said he was real and left PLENTY of clues for them to figure out. Santa and Mom had the same handwriting and used the same wrapping paper…
My son was in second grade and I suspect he worked it out and told his first grade sister. They came to us filled with pride that they’d figured out the puzzle. We congratulated them and welcomed them into the Santa club - which includes keeping the secret for younger kids and buying toys for kids in the hospital and whose parents are too poor to be Santa. (“Once you are in on the secret, you get to BE Santa! And don’t worry, you’ll still get Santa presents.” My parents have modeled this for years - I’m going on 50 and I still get Santa presents. Though not many)
My daughter is a skeptic and atheist at heart - and so we actually kind of created a problem for her own second grade teacher - because that was the year of the Santa wars. Sunni and Shiite have not battled over faith as much as my daughter’s second grade class - with my skeptical daughter leading the charge for the anti-Santa side. She always did a good job keeping the secret for “younger kids” - but her own peers would know the truth!
I have to say I never gave it a moment’s thought. I was raised believing in Santa and so I passed it on to my kids. I don’t think any of us were harmed by it, but when you frame it as “lying to your kids” it makes me wonder if I ought to have done things differently. On all other topics I was very honest with them.