I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people—adults!—mourning over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. To me what’s awful is not—as it is usually presented—the “loss of belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol.
