I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, agonizing over what seemed to be a huge and intractable decision. The stakes were high, and I didn’t know what to do.

The question: to Santa or not to Santa. My daughter turned 2 in October, and I knew the subsequent Christmas would form the foundation for our yearly Christmas traditions. Everything from what we’d have for breakfast on Christmas morning to whether we’d open a present on Christmas Eve seemed loaded with importance. But the biggest decision seemed to be whether we would teach our children to believe in Santa.

You’d think it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But Santa is stubbornly embedded in our culture, and some people grow irritated and angry when you opt out. Coming from a pro-Santa family, I was worried about telling my relatives of my doubts.

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“You get to do Santa this year!” an elated aunt said at Halloween.

“Actually, I’m not sure we’re doing that,” I said.

Watching her face fall from excitement to something akin to fear was horrible. When I told other people I wasn’t sure about Santa, I received quizzical looks and uneasy silences. “She’ll have plenty of time to adult later,” a friend said, as though not believing in Santa and knowing the horrors of the world were one and the same. Still, no one came right out and told me I was wrong. And I couldn’t decide. Then one day, my daughter and I were playing at the park when some local girls, sixth-graders, asked me if I would tell my daughter Santa was real. They had recently shed their own belief and were excited to be on the other side.

“I’m not sure. I don’t want to lie to her.”

“How do you know you’d be lying?” one of the girls asked, but you could tell she was feigning.

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I took my daughter to the park again the next day, and the same girls approached me. They’d spoken to their parents.

“If you tell her Santa isn’t real, you need to make sure she doesn’t ruin it for the other kids,” one said.

“My mom said the kids who don’t believe in Santa are the ones who wreck it for the ones who do,” the other said.

“I see,” I said. “We don’t want to ruin Christmas for other children.”

And we don’t. I thought of other ways opting out on Santa would spoil someone’s fun. This year it won’t be an issue, but next year, my brother and his wife will have a baby, and they fully intend to do Santa. Thinking of this, I was landing on the Santa side. What’s the harm, after all? Few people are truly traumatized by the Santa lie.

My parents were soft on Santa. They never actively tried to trick us — the empty plate of Christmas cookies notwithstanding. But that didn’t stop me from believing. Oh, how I believed.

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When I was 11, I called the Santa hotline — a group of local volunteers pretending to be Santa and his elves — daily after school. I called so often and wanted to talk so long, they relegated me to Elf-only status; Santa needed to talk to other kids. It wasn’t that I had questions about Santa’s magic or that I had a long Christmas list; I don’t recall asking for anything. Fact was, I was lonely and Santa filled a void. I would have believed in him no matter what anyone had told me. So when I began to notice that Santa’s handwriting looked a lot like my mother’s, I ignored the similarities. And when Sam, the same kid who told us how babies were made, said Santa was a lie, I was indignant. His heart wasn’t warm enough to believe. But me, I was special. I understood.

How old is too old to believe in Santa? Two parents, two opinions.

I was too old to believe in Santa, really, but I held on because my heart yearned for magical, special places. To explain my devotion, I look to the facts I was trying to avoid: My father was a drug addict and never around. My mother was a recovering alcoholic fighting poverty. My brothers and I wore thrift store clothes and got free haircuts twice a year at the college salon, but we had a good childhood, and Santa was a part of that. He offered something far and away better than what we had. So why would I deprive my daughter of this? Well, in a way, it’s because I hope she doesn’t need it.

To be clear, my problem with Santa isn’t lying exactly. I have lied to my daughter — for example, when her goldfish died of dropsy — and I will likely lie to her again (“No, I never smoked marijuana”). I recognize the benefits of lying to children, when necessary. My hang-up with Santa is that the reasons for lying don’t resonate with me.

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It seems that Santa fills two main functions. The first is to serve as a quasi-nanny cam designed to keep kids in check: all those naughty and nice lists, and conspiring elves — not to mention the loot a kid can snag. What child wouldn’t behave in a world like this? Truth is, the Santa-is-watching reason has never appealed to me.

Santa’s other primary function, from my perspective, is as preserver of innocence and purveyor of fun. This one is tempting, and I won’t say Santa isn’t fun, but I will argue that Christmas can be fun without actually believing in him.

So in the end, I will introduce my daughter to Santa as an icon, but I’m not going to tell her he’s real. Instead, I will tell my daughter the story of how one winter her great-grandmother saw two young teenage boys hitchhiking in the snow. She picked them up, and drove them to her home, where she fed them chili and gave them two of her husband’s thick winter coats, knowing she could buy another coat, but the boys perhaps could not.

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I will tell her that every year at Christmas people pay attention to those who have little, that giving surges to an annual high, which is nice, but what’s better is keeping our eyes open to suffering all year long.

I’ll tell her that her daddy works 10 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, and that’s how we buy Christmas presents, but we don’t want to buy too many because that’s not the point of the holiday.

So no, I won’t be telling my daughter Santa is real this year, and it’s too early to know if she’ll hold this against me. It’s a gamble, but maybe by not buying into the Santa game, I can offer my daughter something better: A belief in the tangible, and the real.

Chansi Long is a writer from southeast Kansas who is working on a memoir about foster care and poverty. Follow @chansirlong.

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