This will make a great Lifetime movie one day. We’ll call it, How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Film at 11.

A Chicago news anchor enraged parents when she announced during a segment on children’s gift expectations that Santa Claus isn’t real.

During a conversation with her cohost about how long children should believe in Santa, Robin Robinson, a news anchor at Fox Chicago since 1987, argued that kids should learn early on that Santa isn’t real.

“Stop trying to convince your kids that Santa is Santa,” Robinson said to cohost Bob Sirott during a segment Tuesday night. “That’s why they have these high expectations. They know you can’t afford it, so what do they do? Just ask some man in a red suit. There is no Santa.”

And for the kids whose parents can afford it? Who have told their kids that Santa can only bring so many presents in his sleigh, so they have to pick just a few? For the kids whose parents worked really hard so Santa could get them that great toy they wanted this year? Well, screw them, I guess.

After opening the box, Pandora was later forced to apologize for her Grinch-like proclamation.

In the segment, titled simply “An Apology,” Robinson read Facebook comments slamming her slip-up, and went out to Michigan Avenue to confess to viewers and get reactions, which were overwhelmingly critical.

You don’t say.

Robinson referred angry parents to “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus,” a famous letter to the editor and response that ran in the New York Sun in 1897, where Francis Pharcellus Church assures eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon that the famed Christmas figure is real. She read an excerpt of the piece before Sirott added definitively that “there is a Santa Claus.”

You know what Francis Church, the editor who wrote that famous response, didn’t do before telling Virginia that Santa Claus is real? He didn’t tell her flat-out that “There is no Santa”. That first proclamation kind of takes a dig into the latter.

Robinson said in her apology that a “very few” viewers defended her statements, arguing that kids “mature enough to watch the nightly news” and the sometimes-violent and upsetting content it contains should be unaffected by the anchor’s gaffe.

Which isn’t the point.

Robinson gets paid and is expected to deliver the news — not decide to tell the children of Chicago that their parents are lying to them. This is more of the “It takes a village to raise a child” mentality. Leave my kids alone, mind your own business, and just deliver the news. That’s your job — deliver the news, don’t take on the role of moral counselor to my children.