They say that having children really "makes" Christmas. That otherwise jaded individuals can suddenly, with offspring in the house, be overcome with childlike wonder. This has yet to happen at Whare Tamaira-Fox but as The Master has only just turned one he doesn't really have much of a clue as to what's going on. His childlike wonder is mostly along the lines of "I wonder what tinsel tastes like" and "Unattended gift-wrapping scissors! WANT!"

And recently we've been having conversations around what we do and don't tell him about Santa Claus. As rational, truth-seeking, science-loving folk the actively engaging in the perpetuation of a myth to another generation sits a touch uncomfortably. We won't be telling him that God is a real, actual thing so why would Santa get a free pass?

Because society doesn't actively encourage the belief in Santa Claus into adulthood. Oh, and probably because the opportunity to massively troll one's own offspring is just too, too tempting.

The Silver Fox has always been quite certain that he wanted to spend as much time as possible telling outright lies to our child in the interests of creating an inquisitive, critical thinker who has finely tuned BS radar from a young age. I've seen him tell a child that a picture of a teapot was actually an elephant. They were confused but delighted by this. In my own childhood, my mother's father was a stellar practitioner of this particular philosophy who simply could not be relied upon to answer a straight question with a straight answer. Even questions as mundane as "Grandad, how old are you?" were answered with cryptic statements like "twice as old as me teeth" or "older than this table leg". He regularly told my sister and me that he had bought us each "a packet of Juicy Fruit" for Christmas and wasn't that great since that was our favourite chewing gum, wasn't it? We only ever 70 percent believed anything he said and often quite a bit less. We adored him.

So I think we've come to the conclusion that we will play along with the Great Christmas Fib until such a time as The Master starts to ask questions at which point a little Socratic Method may come into play. There will be no attempts to quash his burgeoning deductive reasoning. If he starts to smell a stinker when he's six, then he'll get applause from us (and possibly some kind of certificate), not increasingly bizarre conspiracy theorist level rationalisations for flying reindeer. In the meantime we'll just let him soak up the Christmas mythology and see how long it takes him to figure it out. Mind you, if he's registering to vote and still leaving cookies out for Santa then we may have to have a wee talk. Having your photo taken with Santa as a grown up is fine, writing him a letter to say you'd like a new lawnmower in your stocking this year, not so much.

This strategy may mean that our kid turns out to be the kid who tells all the other kids that Santa isn't real. But he can't even say his own name yet so that's not a bridge we have to worry about crossing for quite a while.

How old were you when you discovered the truth about Santa and did it emotionally scar you for life or did things pretty much carry on as normal? Is it okay to lie about Santa?

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