Follow-up: For those with children, do you continue the ruse with your own children, or simply tell them it’s you who gives the gifts? Why or why not?
What? You’re saying he isn’t real? Who punched Arius at the Council of Nicea in 325ad?
Jokes aside… Sigh… I was 12, it was when I googled it
I questioned it around 8 and fully stopped believing around 10. When you behave and ask for the same gift three years in a row you start to wonder. Before that I believed that he was magic and was incredibly fast.
Years ago I didn’t want to teach my children about Santa because of the Christian connections, but then I realized why we have holidays over winter. If it makes them happy I’ll do it, but I’ll also be teaching them about all the other connections to pagan religions when they’re old enough to understand.
Why do you need Santa at all? Why not just teach them, every year around this time we give gifts to each other
Same reason why we have the tooth fairy.
Same reason why we create all sorts of other things for kids. To allow kids to be kids and have fun. To help them see the good in the world before we rip the rug out from under them, and show them the world just plain fucking sucks.
I think lying to kids is how you hurt them.
Kids can have fun without that lie: “Let’s make cookies together and eat them. Let’s hang up stockings and put surprises in them for each other. Let’s decorate a tree and make a fun video”.
You do you. I don’t see it as a lie, but again you raise your kids as you want.
Same to you! What’s a little trauma, right? They’ll grow out of it.
If that’s enough to cause them trauma, I kind of feel sorry for any kid with that thin of skin.
Being lied to by your protector and guardian is enough to traumatize anyone at that age. You shouldn’t be shaming the people who get hurt by it, you should be shaming the people that do it.
Obviously Santa Claus is real. Spiritual beings exist in the same sense that love and other concepts exist and it’s completely absurd to say otherwise.
Santa is a Jesus variant!
I don’t remember how old I was when I figured it out, but I do remember being upset about being lied to about it. I’ve got 2 kids now, and whenever they would ask about Santa or the Tooth Fairy or anything like that, I would kind of turn the question around and ask how they thought it worked. Sometimes, I miss believing in that sort of magic, and I didn’t want to take that from them or lie to them, so that’s the balance I found. It seems to be working well. Our oldest had it pretty well figured out by around age 9…our youngest is almost 9 now, and she hasn’t straight up told me she knows it’s not real, but the kinds of questions she asks and how she reasons through her answers I think she’s figured it out mostly as well.
I’m not sure I ever really believed a big fat man would slide down our chimney to deliver presents on his sleigh. The fantasy of it was fun though. For me it was a pretty smooth transition to not doing Santa stuff.
I was a skeptic since at least the age of six. I remember having to write a letter to Santa in first grade and basically wrote down I didn’t believe in him. I wouldn’t want to teach my kids the “Santa is real” nonsense, otherwise they might believe God is too.
5 or 6. I don’t remember if I figured it out myself or if someone just told me the truth, but I do remember that I quickly started asking my parents if all the other magical beings were real too (Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc).
I think I was in my 20s when I realized that some people/kids actually believe in Santa. I was aware of Christmas/Santa, but that it was just a story nobody thought was real. At least I wasn’t the girl I met about that time who was telling her friends in first grade that Santa wasn’t real.
I belong to of those rare Christian sects that don’t believe in Christmas.
As a child I wasn’t good at accepting much of anything at face value. If I did ever believe I was quite young.
I think I was 3 the year my mom had to work as an Easter Bunny at a photo op to make ends meet, and I’m not sure much belief survived seeing the Easter Bunny rip its head off and reveal my mother inside.
Around 4. The chimney in the house was to small to fit anything bigger than a fist; somehow my child mind refused to parse the notion of a very fat man sliding down it. Also, the roof was so inclined birds avoided it, so no chance of parking a sled and whatever number of reindeers up there.
I don’t push the tale as a fact but I did told it to many children as something we should cherish as a symbol of good will and kindness toward each other. The legend of Odin (the original santa) is always a success and I tell it in the most epic way I find, whith Sleipnir ridding the storm clouds in the Great Hunt.
Legends should inspire, not create delusions, is what I go for.
The legend of Odin (the original santa) is always a success and I tell it in the most epic way I find, whith Sleipnir ridding the storm clouds in the Great Hunt.
I would watch this holiday stage play every year.
What I wanna know is who are all these people claiming that Santa Claus is not fucking real!?
Of course he’s real.
I remember my mate at school when I was 6 or so telling me your mum and dad let him. Can’t remember anything beyond that.
I realized the note from the Easter bunny was in my father’s handwriting. I felt “in on the joke” and remember that applying to other holidays like Xmas too. I must have been 6 or 8.
We don’t celebrate Christmas. It took me very long to realize that there are children who actually believe in Santa.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only people that believe Santa Claus isn’t real or the people who have no joy in their lives.
Even if you say you don’t believe he’s real there’s a part of you that thinks that he might be real and you know it.
