“IT’S a good job Santa brings all this stuff - it would be really expensive otherwise.”

A colleague once told me, with a manic laugh, that his young daughter said this on Christmas Day, as she and her siblings unwrapped their piles of presents. It was actually maxed out credit cards that paid for Christmas. All Santa did was rock up and guzzle sherry.

As children we were blissfully unaware of the cost of Christmas. And that’s how it should be. It’s a wonderful thing to truly believe in an other-worldly being who flies in from the North Pole to deliver sackfuls of gifts - but the magic is soon gone, and Christmas is never the same again.

Once you grow up, Christmas becomes a stressful affair. It’s one long to-do list, endless spending and mounting debt.

I always find it depressing to see children traipsing around shops at Christmas. Apart from the sheer boredom of shopping when you’re that age - I’ve yet to see a child who doesn’t look bored in a mall - it must dampen the magic of Christmas to see stressed-out grown-ups elbowing each other to buy presents, wrapping paper and all the paraphernalia.

Surely childcare arrangements could spare youngsters the frenzy of festive consumerism. We used to get dropped off with grandparents while our parents did the Christmas shopping. When we eventually realised what they were doing they told us they chose the presents, which were then sent off to the North Pole, to be delivered by Santa on the big day. Which was all perfectly acceptable.

That’s the thing about Christmas - there’s a lot of subterfuge involved. And because you cling to the idea of Father Christmas (stop believing and you might not get presents) for as long as you can get away with it, you swallow up the lies.

Santa is cool, nothing fazes him. No chimney at your house? That’s fine, because Santa has a magic key that can open every front door. International time zones? They don’t apply to Santa, because his flying reindeer get him round the world in one night. And of course he has ‘helpers’ who conveniently appear just as you’re starting to question the whole charade.

I used to get confused by all the different Santas, of various shapes and sizes. He was everywhere - shopping centre grottos, school parties, church halls, community centres, on the telly. Sometimes he turned up on street corners, flogging tat out of a suitcase. Occasionally Santa was a shifty-looking 18-year-old in trainers and grubby red trousers, smoking a fag. None of these Santas looked like the one in my head, it just didn’t sit right. So I was told that some of them were ‘helpers’ who stood in for him when he was busy. Me: “But aren’t Santa’s helpers elves?” Mum: “Well yes, but they can change appearance, to look like him.” Which, again, was perfectly acceptable.

A swanky trip to Lapland would’ve been lost on me because, lovely as I’m sure it is, Santa in his snowy grotto would be just another imposter/helper. Every child has their own Father Christmas, it’s the power of imagination that makes him special.

The man himself would visit my bedroom on Christmas Eve and leave a pillowcase full of presents. The relief - he’s been! - of waking up to find that the empty pillowcase left at the end of the bed was filled with glorious lumps and bumps I could feel in the dark. It was a risky business though; what finally did for my sister was waking up to see our mum, tipsy and clumsily dragging a pillowcase sack through her bedroom door. Probably quite a relief to my sister, because she was very scared of Santa. She’d burst into tears at the sight of him at the church fair and refuse to sit on his knee - even when everyone knew he was just so-and-so’s dad in a rubbish cotton wool beard.

Someone once told me, rather pompously, that she didn’t allow her children to believe in Father Christmas because it meant lying to them. How sad for them, I thought.

Christmas is all about lies - beautiful lies that create something wonderful. It's gone in a heartbeat, but lasts a lifetime.