Should a child be told that Santa is real?

[Major Hogwash]

123. It was hard for me to keep the truth from my little brother.

The year that I was told the truth by my grandmother.
I was devastated by that revelation.
Because I still believed.

So, then on Christmas morning, a few months later that same year, when my father used snow flocking that was used for Christmas trees to form several footprints going from the fireplace's tile setting in front of the fireplace to the tree and back, I was totally aghast that my father expected me to join in with the huge lie in order to fool my little brother.
Those footprints hadn't been there the night before, so I knew that someone had put them there!

Then I realized that my father didn't know that my grandmother had let the cat out of the bag earlier that year, and he was not only lying to my little brother, he was lying to me!
So, I gave him the F. Lee Bailey treatment, and I asked him about 100 questions about Santa.
I spent at least the next 10 minutes cross-examining him for his concocted, phony version of Santa and the whole North Pole mystery story.
When suddenly, my grandfather interrupted my interrogation to join forces with my father to corroborate my father's story by asking me if I hadn't heard the footsteps of the reindeer on the roof late at night on the previous night!

Well, I hadn't.
And so, how was I supposed to call my grandfather a liar for saying they woke him up!?
Instead, I smiled, smirked actually, just like the all-knowing Barney Fife, realizing that he also didn't know that grandmother had confided in me earlier that year.

My mind was racing 1000 miles an hour knowing that I had just stumbled on to the biggest lying cabal in family history!
I was stunned, I was scared, I was mortified, all at the same time.
So, I turned to the one person in the world who I knew I could trust, the one person that had never lied to me in my entire life, my mother, and I asked her.
And she said, "Of course there is a Santa, everyone knows that . . you've even met him several times!!"

Well, that confused the hell out of me for yet another year.
So, I stopped the inquisition to start opening my presents.

But by the next Christmas, it no longer mattered, because by then I had accidently walked in on my aunt when she was dressing, while her and my uncle were both visiting us at Christmas.
And I saw my aunt in mid-dress, putting on some of the lacy stuff while still half-naked, standing in front of a full-length mirror, so I got to see both sides of the wonderfulness of women all at once.
Another mystery solved!
I knew back then, even though I was quite young when that happened, that I was very lucky to be a member of my family.
For I was allowed to live after walking in on her like that.

So, any doubt or questions I had about Santa no longer seemed relevant by that age.
Because when my aunt said there was a Santa Claus, there was a frickin' Santa Claus!!

Who was I to question the wisdom of the adults in my family?
After all, I had just gotten the best Christmas present I would get that year, so I wasn't going to ruin it by pissing her off!