“Daddy, why do these three Santas all look different?”

Oh, fudge! Except I didn’t say fudge. Actually, I did not say anything. I was dumbstruck. It was so innocent, so cute, so honest, that I was disarmed.

My three-year-old daughter had done something an AI bot could not do. She correctly identified three pictures of Santa Claus on three different Christmas cards. Very cute and age appropriate and Christmasey. Except she was on to Santa’s cherry red ass. She was about to blow wide open a thousand-plus years of lies, damn lies, and Santa Claus.

“But this one looks old and this one looks young. And these two have glasses but not this one.”

It’s done, I am properly fudged now. An earnest three-year-old and her inquiring mind seek to know.

Think. No time to think. Lie. Lie! LIE! It must be a lie. Stick to the script. The truth demands a lie. Do it for the children.

“Well dear,” I start, “these pictures were taken at different times.” Oh great, I have made this about space-time and mortality. Wonderful! “And Santa is older in this picture than he was in this picture and even older in this picture. And so, he started to need glasses to see.”

Satisfied for now, she looks up and says, “Oh, ok Daddy. I love you.”

I don’t feel good about it, but the lie has held. I quickly brief my wife on the latest lie, so that we can have our story straight. We would not want to be triangulated or caught off guard now would we? We are both in so deep.

It goes fine for about 10 minutes until I get another question. “Daddy if Santa is so old, will he be able to bring presents to everybody’s house this year?“

Fudge, she is good. Stop waterboarding, folks, and send this little girl to Gitmo.

I almost break, but being a good Burkean conservative, I defer to tradition and authority. “Oh my, Santa has been delivering presents for hundreds of years and I am sure he will be okay this year. He brought me and your mom presents, and your grandparents, and their grandparents, and on and on. I am sure he will know just what to do.” Great now I have brought the dead into my lie and am inching closer to the least effective parenting trap of, “I said so, that is why.” Fudge. But heck, “society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn” or something like that.

“But, Daddy what if he needs help?”

I need another lie. Sin begets sin and lies become me. “Well, Santa has the elves and the reindeer.”

“Oh yeah. That is right daddy. What are the reindeer’s names?”

(Trying to recite them by rote like the Our Father.) “Well you know Dasher and Dancer, and Comet, and Donner Kabab, and Blitzkrieg, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, and oh yeah Rudolph. He will guide the way with his red nose. It will be great.”

I purposely cancel Olive, the other reindeer. She just laughed and called them names anyway and was too good to let reindeer play games … like Monopoly.

I start to feel strangely good. No alive! I am normally a scrupulously honest person, so this chain of lies makes me feel like the daddy version of James Bond. “Martini, shaken not stirred and a big swig of Pepto and a couple of ibuprofen … on second thought how about an Earl Grey, a Patrick O’Brien novel, and an early bedtime?”

“And reindeer fly so that Santa can come to all the children’s houses?”

“Sure. Of course.” Of course, reindeer fly! Why wouldn’t they fly? Bernoulli Principle-Berschmoullli Principle.

Can we talk about something easy like the difference between boys and girls, global warming, or Middle East Peace? Heck, what about that damn surveillance state that Santa has set up? He sees you when you are sleeping and awake? Although in recent years he has gone soft on the coal and seems to reward plenty of jerky kids as long as their families are middle-class or higher. Perhaps my daughter’s worries about his age have a point. Anyway, I got some more lyin’ to do.

So, it goes on. Lies and more lies. I have become a monster. I lie to those I love the most. I lie to the younger, more earnest version of myself who promised that his future self would never do this to his hypothetical kids. I have become a sell-out, or worse yet, an adult.

Thanks to Nancy Reagan, I was too scared to do drugs when I had the chance, and now I am too old to start. The closest I will ever be to drugs or drug running is the closet full of presents I hid from my child. Perhaps some toy dealer will show up, cut into one of the presents, taste the plastic, and look over to Santa and say, “Yeah boss. It’s good.” That’s a scene from Care Bears II: First Blood. Seriously, go check it out. That Elephant Care Bear cousin did more snow than Tony Montana. Did that happen? Sure—because I said so. Believe me. I tell my kid that a 400-pound man slides down our chimney, so why not?

So why do I lie? I lie because I am a Burkean conservative. I truly detest Santa, but I care about the culture and tradition surrounding him. Is it a distraction from the reason for the season? Sure, but I think that it is a bit of fun and joy and unity for our fractured nation. America is a nation that typically shuns traditions. We think of ourselves as forward-looking people and are incredibly ahistorical. But in Santa, we have found our common myth. Is it commercialized? Sure. Grounded in Christian teachings on Christmas? Heck no. But for a short moment, adults can put aside their differences and celebrate something fun that transcends race, or party, or class, or generation.

I miss the simpler days when I believed in magic (in a young girl’s heart), Santa, flying reindeer, and parents who would never lie to me. Believing in Santa is naive and innocent and reminds me of when I was more carefree. Somewhere in the past decades of debt, diplomas, distance, disagreements, and death, I lost the plot. I lost the simple joys of childhood and my sense of wonder (probably because I realized that adults lie about all kinds of things including Santa Claus). Lying to my kids about Santa helps me remember these little moments.

But this is more than simple nostalgia. Like Edmund Burke, I believe in the inherited wisdom of the ages. I now understand why my parents were a bit tweaky around the holidays and I sympathize with them. I now know why my dad would paraphrase the Griswold family and say he had help from Jack Daniel’s. Heck, he WAS Jack F. Daniel, Jr. and his Jack Daniel’s was Elijah Craig. But I digress. My parents were pathetic liars as well, and I love them for being just that. Thanks to them, I never lie. Except about Santa, and the Easter Bunny, oh and the Tooth Fairy, and … oh well. Thanks Mom and Dad. Now that I have grown up, I fully appreciate the importance of rituals and traditions.

As I write these words I am tearing up. Fudge me. I better say something creative or profane to distract myself. I thank God for my family and for the lie that is Santa Claus. It helps me connect with something from my past and to pass on a tradition to those who I will never live to see. In this way, I truly believe that it is a Burkean tradition in the truest sense of the term. I am damn glad to be part of the lie. I hope my daughter won’t find out the truth too soon, but I hope she too will lie about Santa.