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Because we scour the interwebs tirelessly at this time of year to bring you as many Christmas-themed, dead-news-day stories as humanly possible, comes this AP report of Chris Rock's autobiographical sitcom Everybody Hates Chris pulling the curtain back from perhaps the most widely propagated hoax of our time:

Parents with young children who happened to watch "Everybody Hates Chris" in the past week had some explaining to do when the character of Rock's brother suddenly told his younger sister that Santa doesn't exist.


"Everybody knows there's no Santa Claus," Drew said to Tonya on the UPN sitcom. "Come here, let me show you something. I'm taking you to the toys Santa doesn't come down the chimney. We don't even have a chimney. We have radiators." [...]

Put on the spot, Tonya's dad Julius tells her the Easter bunny and tooth fairy don't exist, either. [...]

On the show, young Tonya becomes a lot more cynical. Her mother explains that Santa Claus is a symbol and asks: "So you do understand?"

"Yeah," the girl replies. "It's OK to lie."

It's one of the workplace hazards of being a sitcom writer: one second, it's killing in the room, next thing you know you're hearing the deafening, tearful screams of a generation of children who have just had their childhoods yanked out from under them in the name of some cheap sitcom laughs.