Christmas is such a bizarre and wonderful time. I buy into all of it: dragging a dead tree into my house and decorating it, eschewing any notion of a healthy diet, replacing this with a massive “sharing” tub of Quality Street and some sickly liqueur that I wouldn’t countenance at any other time of year, endless TV Christmas specials … the usual.

And now that I have children, the “magic” side of it all has come into play. Every year we dash outside so I can show my daughters some variant of Santa’s sleigh passing over the house in preparation for visiting us later (thank you to various international space stations and Christmas Eve travellers keeping the planes in the air at this important time), we leave food and drink out for Father Christmas and the reindeer, their faces when they see on Christmas morning that “he’s been” are a delight …

So, I’m not part of the “bah humbug” brigade: when else do you get to create magic and memories on quite this level?

But it’s also safe to say that the festive season can be hard work and a lot of extra effort. And year after year I find myself ranting about the fact that my children are under the impression that the man in red has chosen, made, wrapped and delivered the presents from me and their dad. I’m cool with the old guy popping round on Christmas Eve when we’re all asleep, and maybe even dropping some small gifts into stockings, but is it about time he left the rest of the glory to the real people?

My daughters’ dad’s position is that they’ll be grown up soon enough and realise for themselves that maybe mummy and daddy had something to do with it all, and let’s carry on letting them believe for now. I wish I could be as sanguine as that: every Christmas Eve sees an exhausted, frazzled me grumbling as I speed-wrap the presents I forgot about that I bought early, about Father bloody Christmas swanning in at the last minute, taking all the credit for other people’s hard work: both mine and the elves.

I’ve put my foot down that gifts from other people are actually “from” them, not via Lapland – so right now we’re in the unsatisfactory position that our offspring think that everyone else buys them gifts but that we don’t: ours are made by unpaid elves and flown across the world in a sleigh.

A quick straw poll of similarly overwrought friends shows that most people seem to feel the same way: “My son says that he’s asked Father Christmas for a top-end digital camera. Well lucky Father Christmas who doesn’t have to actually pay for it.”

Back in 1988 Roald Dahl wrote a poem Mother Christmas about exactly this matter. These were different times, and when he stated that “I’ll bet you buy the presents / And wrap them large and small / While all the time that rotten swine / Pretends he’s done it all”. He was making a point about the patriarchy: that the burden of organising Christmas still tended to fall on women. Now, that’s a different rant, but I can really see where Dahl was coming from with this one.

So, as the unsung magic makers, what can we do about this sorry state of affairs? Well, short of bursting the bubble and telling a few home truths (and I’m not rotten enough to do that), I’m not quite sure. So for now I’ll continue to both put up with and moan about it.

And at least I get to scoff the big man’s mince pie and drink his brandy, right from under his nose every year.

• Suzy Prince is the editor and publisher of Actual Size Magazine