The Matt Walsh Show - Why Letting Kids Believe In Santa Is A GOOD Thing (Despite The Santa Haters)

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

It's that time of year again where people come out to complain about lying to kids about Santa, but it's not a bad thing and I will explain why. - - - Today's Sponsor: ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/walshYT and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! - - - 🎄✨ DAILY WIRE CHRISTMAS SALE IS HERE! ✨🎄 🎁 https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe ⭐️ 40% Off DailyWire+ New Annual Memberships ⭐️ 50% Off DailyWire+ Annual Upgrade Memberships ⭐️ 50% Off DailyWire+ Annual Gift Memberships - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You talking to me? Kayak, got that right. You know, it's about that time of year again for the Santa discourse to start. And every year, I'm seeing this on social media, you know, the great Santa debate. And it started again. I don't know who started. I probably not one person started it. But I'm seeing it pop up on my feet again, all the debating about Santa.

Who the heck are you? What are you talking about? I'm Santa Claus. No, you're not. Now, by the way, if you have little children in earshot, you should turn this off. So they should be listening anyway. But if they are, you should turn off. Because I do want to chime in on this because it does annoy me.

There's a lot of posts on X that have been popping up. There's just one, for example, from an account I follow. It says, if you tell your kids there's a Santa, you're lying to them. They're going to later find out that you lied to them and realize that you may again lie to them in the future. I don't know why parents do this, although mine didn't, but it's a good indicator of bad parenting in my book. So there's a lot of stuff like that. You're lying to your kids about Santa. You're a bad parent.

You're traumatizing them. They'll never trust you again. All this kind of stuff. And let me just say this. We are a Santa household. We are Santa believers. We are Santa Maxing, as the kids might say, every Christmas. Are we lying to our kids?

Are we engaged in a deceptive conspiracy? No. Because here's what you have to understand about young kids. They don't understand what not real even means. So these parents that feel so proud of themselves because they go to like their four-year-old and say, Well, Santa isn't real. Do you understand your four-year-old doesn't know what you're talking about?

Do you understand that your four-year-old, not real doesn't mean anything? For your four-year-old, when you say Santa isn't real, well, he's like, well, what do you mean? I see Santa on TV. I see him at the mall. What do you mean, he's not real? Clearly real. And that's it. Like, that's all that a young kid understands.

Young children think that Superman is real. Okay, they think fairies and leprechauns and dragons and mermaids are real. They think monsters are real. They're worried about them. They're like, they're actually worried about a monster. in their closet. That's like a real thing that a five-year-old is concerned about in his life. And when you say, we've all, maybe you had this conversation with your five-year-old, and then, well, monsters aren't real, number one. And there's, like, there's not, I've tried

to reason this way with my own kids. I open the closet, say, like, look, there's not, it's a wall, there's nothing in here. And the thing you're worried about doesn't even exist. And even if it did exist, like, it's not in your closet. Look at the closet. There's nothing in here, I promise you. But it doesn't matter. They don't, it doesn't, they don't understand that because they have it in their imagination. They have it in their mind. And so if they have it in their mind, then it's real. And that's all they know.

They think every character they see on TV is real. Paul Patrol is a documentary for your four-year-old. Your four-year-old is not watching a cartoon show. Your four-year-old is watching, like, the real-life adventures live. You know, for a four-year-old, Paul Patrol is cops. Bad boys, bad boys, what you're going to do? It's like watching live footage of, of actual police officers at work.

It's just that they happen to be, they happen to be dogs. So that's what it is. This episode is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Your online activity isn't private. Data brokers track your habits, beliefs, and spending. They legally sell that information. Corporations use it to target ads, platforms,

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Find out how you can get four months free by scanning the QR code on screen. Click the link in the description box below or by going to expressvpn.com slash Walsh.Y.T. And so here's my question. With your kids, they have this fantastical view of the world. Do you go out of your way? I know their parents are proud of themselves. We don't do Santa in our house. too honest. We're far too honest

for that. Well, do you extend that to everything else fantastical that they believe? Do you go out of your way to make sure they don't believe in anything else? If your five-year-old daughter came up to you and said, hey, Daddy, I saw a fairy in the garden. I was out in the garden, I saw a fairy.

Would you like bend down and look her in the eyes and say, fairies aren't real? I know you're lying. You didn't see a fairy. Okay? Debunked. Actually, fact check, fairies aren't. real. I could show you on Snopes. Come here, let's look it up on. I'll show you the Snopes. It's been debunked. Do you do that with your five-year-old? Or are you like a normal person?

And when your five-year-old says, I saw a fairy in the garden, do you say, oh, you did? Awesome. Where was it? What did it look like? Oh, wow, that's amazing. I would hope it's the latter. I would hope that's how you respond. Is that lying? I mean, if telling your kids about Santa is lying, that would be lying too. Is it lying? But you know, it's not. It's playing a game. You're playing a game. This is a point that I think Jordan Peterson has made. I think it's a good way of putting it. We tell you kids about Santa.

Are you lying to the internet? You're not lying. You're playing a game. It's a game is what it is. And now your kids don't really know that it's a game, but they don't know that any game is a game. Everything is real. Children live in a fantasy world where magic is real.

And going out of your way to kill this kind of magical thinking on a five-year-old is ridiculous to me. Let them live in that world. They're children. Why take it from them? Like, your kids get to live in a world for a short amount of time. where there's actually a magical fat guy who flies through the air on reindeer and comes down a chimney and gives them presents.

That, I mean, it's a little, as you get older and you think about it more cynically, it's a little bit creepy. But for a kid, it's like amazing. And they get to actually live in that world as far as they know. And why not let them? When do you tell your kids that Santa isn't real? Well, that's not difficult to figure out. you tell them at precisely the moment when they grow out of it anyway.

Kids grow out of it eventually. They kind of figure it out. And when that happens, you tell them that Santa was just a game. I don't even, like I hear from these adults sometimes to talk about, well, when I found out Santa wasn't real, I was traumatized. I never trusted my parents again.

Okay, well, then get a grip. Okay, that's a you problem. Really, you're an adult still dealing with the trauma of finding out Santa wasn't real? Really? Because what should have happened what happened with me. It's like, I think my parents told me official. I don't even think my parents ever officially told me. I just kind of got to an age and I'm like, well, this is obviously

isn't, this obviously isn't real. You just kind of, it's just, you just see it because you lose some of the innocence of childhood and you start to realize, like, okay, well, there's no fairies and leprechaons and stuff like that. And then you realize that Santa isn't real. And, and, you know, maybe as parents you sit down, we did this with our oldest kids, our oldest twins a few years ago, did the talk. It was the first time about Santa. And that was their reaction. I told them, you know, the Santa isn't real.

And they didn't collapse in tears. They didn't start screaming. They didn't, they weren't traumatized. You know what they said, both of my kids? They said, yeah, Dad, we know. And that was it. That was the whole conversation. And they were excited because now they get to play the game on the other side with their

younger siblings. And now they get to sort of be Santa around Christmas time and they get to help with some of that stuff. And they have a lot of fun with that. Not because they're malicious and they're excited to lie to their siblings, but it's just a fun game that now they get to play and they get to help their younger siblings, you know, kind of have this kind of magical reality. So I would hope that that would just be the final statement on Santa. And I have decreed it as so. And hopefully we can all leave it there. You heard it here and that's the end of the conversation.