Santa is worth defending. Sign me up.

I always suspected that, for all the annual controversy, very few people really object when someone says “Merry Christmas!” to them. The firm Public Policy Polling has done the legwork to prove it: Only three percent of their respondents took offense at the greeting. Not many people are fighting in the war on Christmas.

There is still a war on Santa, however, even among people who celebrate Christmas. The jolly old elf’s detractors would have you believe that he sits on a throne of lies. When your kids learn the truth, they say, they’ll be disappointed, and less likely to believe anything else you say.

Less likely, too, to believe in Christianity, according to some of my fellow Christians: If your parents told you one comforting but improbable story when you were growing up, maybe they told you a lot of them. It’s the kind of thought that from time to time leads preachers to lash out, seeking out kids to debunk the myth.