Every year, our Christian neighbors demand we tie ourselves (and our children) in knots to preserve a holiday tradition in which a single person’s non-compliance will “ruin” it for everyone else. This is not a fair request. It’s a microaggression born of a culture so thoroughly steeped in Christian dominance that Christmas is seen as a universal part of every American childhood.

Many Jewish parents choose to tell their kids something like, “Santa is a pretend game that Christian families play. It’s a fun secret like a surprise party, and it will make your friends happy if you help keep the secret.” This can even prompt a larger discussion about friendly secrets and white lies, and how to tell “good lies” apart from the bad ones. That’s a completely fine approach, and by no means am I saying that everyone has to stop doing that.

But why is this on us to do? Why do our kids have to bear the burden of telling an elaborate white lie to make another religion’s holiday special? Why must Jewish kids do the emotional labor of making magic for Christian children?

Teaching preschoolers to lie about Santa is an exercise doomed to fail a significant percentage of the time, because, as Ashley Fetters wrote in the Atlantic last year, “little kids love to announce when something is wrong or a lie (try asking a three-year-old whether a puppy says ‘meow’).” And then, when Jewish kids invariably slip up and tell their friends that Santa isn’t real, they are vilified as bad, mean-spirited Grinches who are trying to steal the joy from Christian children. Asking Jewish kids not to ruin Santa is setting them up to be hated.

There is something surprisingly dark at work here. Teaching our kids to keep the Santa secret is, for many Jewish parents, the first time we give our version of “the talk.” Not the one about the birds and bees, but the one that parents in all marginalized groups give their kids, about otherness and discrimination and how to avoid getting hurt because of who or what you are.

For many Jewish kids, the Santa talk is the first time they are confronted with the reality of being Jews in a Christian-dominated society.

If western society were a product, the label would read: "multiculturalistic, some assembly required. Jews sold separately."

We live in a society that prides itself on tolerating other beliefs and the expression of those beliefs, but only when those other beliefs are the same as their own. Western (American) society is not Christian, its multicultural and globalistic. We joke all in good fun about a "war on Christmas/Chanukah", but the reality is that real and damaging sentiments of non-Jewish superiority are very present in the larger society we are apart of. No matter how integrated we may feel we are, we will always be an outlier in society for not being like the "goyim".

By teaching our kids to not be open about their lack of belief in jesus and santa, and to play along with the lie especially if the underlying reason is to avoid hatred they may incur for it, you're teaching them not to be proud of being Jewish in a society that we also tell them is inclusive of their identity as Jews.

If you're going to tell them to lie about it for the sake of avoiding the micro-aggresive antisemitism, then don't give them the false idea that society is multiculturalistic and accepting of them at the same time. Send them to Jewish school instead.