My daughter is 4 years old, and this Christmas was the first one that Santa was a BIG deal.  Pre-kids, my husband and I had decided that we weren't going to do the whole Santa tradition.  What we didn't plan for was how hard Santa would be pushed in school (small town in an area that's 99.999% culturally Christian). Lots of Facebook posts from classmates' parents about not letting kids who stopped believing in Santa spoiling the magic for those who still believed.  The thing is, my daughter has absolutely no chill and can't keep a secret.  So when my daughter started talking about Santa and believing in him, we reluctantly decided to play along just enough to keep her from being the a-hole that "ruins" Christmas for her preschool class. 

Fast forward to a few days before Christmas.  We go to a family function and within minutes of arriving my 5 year old niece tells my daughter that Santa isn't real.  Daughter asks me if it's true,  so I ask her what she thinks.  Daughter replies that she thinks he's real and crisis averted.  But later at the gathering, my brother-in-law (that niece's dad) boasts about how they don't do myths at their house.  It seems that when niece learned the truth, she wasn't taught that some people prefer to be kept in the dark.  I say nothing to niece or brother-in-law about it. After all, if I don't expect my daughter to be able to keep a secret, I can't expect her cousin who only a few months older to keep one either. And everyone has the right the raise their kids as they see fit.

But I'm feeling annoyed about the whole thing.   Both at being peer pressured into a tradition that we  didn't really care to do and for not getting the same consideration from our brother-in-law that we were trying to give to others.  So I'm sure I'm an asshole for being a hypocrite.  But I'm also wondering if parents who want you to lie and pretend to keep up a tradition that you don't follow are the assholes. Or are you the asshole if you ruin another family's tradition by being honest?