"You know that Santa - he’s just fake believe," announced my six-year-old nephew.
Surely he wasn’t telling me that at the grand old age of six he was already having doubts about Father Christmas.
"What do you mean?" I asked, tentatively.
"Him, there. He’s fake believe." Sam pointed to the admittedly poor-looking Santa in the shabby Christmas fair grotto we were standing near, eyeing him with some suspicion.
"I mean, he can’t be the real Santa can he? The real one is making all our presents and getting ready. He can’t be in all these places, like here and my Beavers party."
Breathing a sigh of relief, I relied on the old tried-and-tested fob-off that fooled me as a child.
"Well Santa has lots of helpers who dress up as him sometimes when he’s too busy to go to parties and grottos. You’d know if it was the real Santa," I added cryptically.
"How?"
"You just would," I heard myself snap. "Do you want to go into the grotto or not?"
He decided he did. Two minutes later he emerged with a packet of sweets looking pleased with himself. "I said I want Magnetix for Christmas," he said. "I told him to tell Santa."
Believing in Father Christmas is one of the loveliest things about childhood - and the gradual realisation that he doesn’t really exist (so I’m told) is one of the saddest.
I don’t remember it coming as a bombshell, it just seemed to start off as a nagging doubt, set in motion by older kids at school. First you’re in denial then, as you get older and start applying logic to life, you have to admit there’s just no way an old man on a sledge can get around the world in one night. You’d kind of given up on the flying reindeer some time ago, you just hadn’t admitted it to yourself.
Like Sam, I remember getting a bit suspicious when Santas appeared in shopping centres, school parties and on street corners (I remember a particularly rubbish Santa I once saw in a market - he was wearing grubby trainers under his red trousers and smoking a fag) but I clung onto the notion that they were just his ‘helpers’ because a world without Santa was unthinkable.
Then, before you know it, you’ve become one of those horrible children who tell the younger ones the harsh truth. "He’s not real you know," I remember telling my crestfallen sister, who was about six.
Christmas just isn’t the same when you stop believing. When I was a believer I’d go to bed on Christmas Eve so excited I felt sick. I’d convince myself I could hear bells in the distance. And the utter relief on Christmas morning when a pillow-case full of presents had arrived at the bottom of my bed!
The empty sherry glass and mince pie crumbs on the plate we’d left out for him were further confirmation - proof, even - that he’d been.
All year round children are told not to talk to or accept gifts from strangers but for one night of the year it’s perfectly acceptable for an old man to come into their bedroom while they’re asleep and leave them presents. It doesn’t make any sense, but it doesn’t have to. The fact is that for a few short years we live in a world of ‘fake believe’ and once that’s gone nothing is quite so magical ever again.