I didn't keep most of the promises I made when my son was born. Those first months were like no other. I couldn't imagine ever letting my son out of my sight, let alone allow him to board a bus driven by a perfect stranger or go on some life-endangering outing. I perceived everyone and everything as a potential danger and threat.

I was going to be the perfect mother. I pictured myself reading endless stories to him, getting down on all fours, making things out of Plasticine and building brick hospitals. I vowed I'd never raise my voice or use profanities within his earshot. I'd buy fresh meat and vegetables and liquidise all his food. I'd hold out on letting him watch television, even if it meant I'd have to become one of those soccer mums who sits down to each and every one of his football games, rain or shine.

I failed. You only need to hear my son talk to know that he hasn't got his accent from me. It's pure, unadulterated Cartoon Network. He calls me Mom. He says "vaze", "peeza" and "fore-head". At a restaurant, he orders a soda and fries.

So on many levels I feel like I've compromised a lot of my ideals. He's on a bus-route. He hates all vegetables. We can recite the KFC menu backwards. And he's heard me shout too many times. Then again, he believes in the tooth fairy, in the Robin and best of all in Santa. So I feel like I've done something right. Although when you consider that none of these really exist, I suppose I could be accused of building my house on hay, or was that straw? Maybe I've invested too much time and energy in the things that don't really count.

Raising children is an odd phenomenon. We're all they know at the beginning - we know exactly what information they're being fed. We're wary of everyone and everything - from the cars we let them ride in, to the people they socialise with. We select their friends carefully, from among our own. Then we pack them off to school to be raised by people we don't know and are going to have to trust blindly.

And every so often on the rare occasions that our children deign to let us into their world, we are given a sneak viewing of what happens somewhere between 8 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. every day when they're at school and beyond our jurisdiction. When that happens, it's usually not very good news - my teacher said this, that or the other today. And we hold our breath and hope it's something we approve of.

I don't know what I'd do if my son came home and told me that a teacher at school told the class that Santa didn't exist. But I can well imagine it wouldn't be a very pretty sight to behold. It actually happened recently at Blackshaw Lane Primary School in the UK - when to the dismay of a classroom of seven-year-olds, a supply teacher, (apparently a stand-in for the day), took it upon herself to make the announcement. She was shown the door and asked never to return.

Despite the attempts by staff and parents alike to remedy the situation and re-instate Santa back into the classroom, the damage had been done. One parent described it as tantamount to telling someone religious that God doesn't exist. Another parent spent hours trying to convince his daughter that the teacher must have had made some grave mistake.

I found the reactions interesting. There were no parents who applauded this woman's brutal 'honesty'. It just goes to show that there are some things that parents want sovereignty over, and Santa Claus is one of them. Parents would probably sooner allow a teacher to let their children in on the facts of life, than break the childhood-shattering news that there is no big fat man who travels the world on his reindeer and finds his way down the chimney and into your room on Christmas Eve when you're fast asleep! I'm not sure why or wherefore, but I love perpetuating the Santa Claus myth. Perhaps it's because I got a stocking until I was well into my late 20s, even early 30s. We made my father go out and buy us stuff and fill up all of our stockings because Christmas just wasn't the same the year we decided to call it quits. Finding out that Santa doesn't really exist is probably among the worst realisations - a slap in the face of childhood, a wake-up call to grow up.

Christmas is about lost childhood. In great part, it's about magic, fantasy and make-believe. About a feeling that you try to recreate year after year, with every bauble you painstakingly hang up on the tree.

It's the loveliest feeling in the world, best depicted on TV of course in any of the Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda, Coca Cola or M and S commercials in between a string of Ally McBeal Christmas episodes, with Sinatra or Bing Crosby crooning in the background, snow falling and chilly outside, the hearth crackling inside, rushing out for that last Christmas present you may have forgotten.

It's about smiling at people you have never smiled at before and may never smile at again. It's a pilgrimage or journey we need to make year after year because it takes us to a special place which no other destination in the world can replace. Merry Christmas to you and yours.

michelaspiteri@gmail.com