Santa Claus is coming to town....

Once upon a time, when I was a kid, every Christmas my parents would put up two big socks for myself and my sister to check every morning if Santa Claus gave us something for that day.

The two big socks would be posted on the wall a month before Christmas and they were used to make us behave or be good or else Santa won't give us anything the following day. Every morning we excitedly peeked into the socks to see if we got anything in there and almost always there was always something there for us--- a lollipop, a small toy, crayon, drawing book, etc.--- and we would shout "Thank you, Santa Claus!" very innocently. When we had new neighbors who knew the truth about Santas, we began to doubt his existence for these neighbors did not receive anything from Santa, so how come we were getting something everyday? The new neighbors told us that our parents were the ones who placed those goodies in the socks. But we argued against them, telling them that Santa did not give them anything because they were not good.

It was many years after when we found out that our neighbors were right.

As adults now we would half-jokingly remind our mother about it, telling her that it was not good for them to tell us lies like that when we were kids. We thought it was not a good practice until our niece reached that age when she could already believe in fantasy.

Last Christmas when she was four we bought her her first big sock and embroidered her name on it, and told her the same old "lie" that Santa will only give her something if she is a good girl. True enough, the little girl would excitedly wake up to see what Santa gave her everyday.

We thought we didn't like the practice because it was based on "lies" but we're actually repeating the whole ritual on my niece.

What do you think of this practice? Do you think parents should not do this?