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?
Wait…what?!
Spoilers, sweetie ;)
How will he ever recover?
It was me who broke into your house. hehe
To answer OP’s question, I’m 37.
I think I was around 10 when I first realized it.
What clued me in was my dad, whose favorite meal was a tuna sandwich and a diet coke, insisting that Santa didn’t want milk & cookies, Santa wanted a tuna sandwich and diet coke.
When I was very little, and we put cookies out for Santa, my mom would always let me eat one because she “didn’t want Santa getting fat“.
My father happened to be on a diet at the same time. I figured it out when I was six.
From that point on, my “punishment” was to be the chief gift wrapper. I suppose the one good thing that came from that is, after many years of wrapping gifts for my whole family, I am now an expert at wrapping gifts.
Wow, six? Smart
Or maybe my parents were just bad at hiding it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My six year old has begun to plaintively declare his belief in both magic and Santa, unprompted. I think he fears children who do not play along are not as well rewarded.
I’m the kind of parent who doesn’t tell their kids what to believe, but I also don’t bullshit him. “You believe in magic. So, you’ve seen magic?” I don’t know why he’d think he needs to pretend. Maybe it’s just that he isn’t ready to face facts. I don’t argue, I just try to make him think.
Congrats on teaching your kid critical thinking, but I must say, sometimes kids just want to pretend. It’s a thing they do, and I personally miss the freedom. I had to do that as a child. Let them dream.
At the same time, I think it sounds like you’re doing a good job of planting the seeds of reason and logic that will flourish later.
I’m not here to step on youthful wonder, it’s not my turf anymore…But I do feel a need to teach them that thinking involves more questions than proclamations.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
At that age; magic does exist.
What I wanna know is who are all these people claiming that Santa Claus is not fucking real!?
Of course he’s real.
Sorry mate, it was your parents who punched Arius in the face at the first council of Nicea in AD 325
Being Jewish, we were told about this mishegas the moment we were able to hold cognitive thought
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I stopped believing around 9 or 10 but started believing again when I became Santa for my family.
Aww!
I was a skeptical kid. A fat man making his way down every single chimney in the country in one night? No way. Never really bought into it.
Rational. But what if not all Santas are fat? And what if there are in fact many of them? Gets a whole lot more plausible.
I’m here for jacked, sexy Santa :P
Umm, yeah, that would be my man, Santa Jesse, not me so much. If you were searching, Triceratops Santa was me. I felt like I needed to up the ante, er weird the ante this year. One parent commented, “That’s the real OG Santa.”
Around 10, I think… My mother thought she’d tell me about Santa and sex all in one car journey. Thanks for ending my childhood in one fell swoop!
Our kids always knew it was pretend so we all pretend together and everyone has fun. They never say anything to the believers or even the adults because that would ruin the fun. We do cookies and everything.
I don’t remember actually honestly believing it at any point. It was more like a fun thing in my family, and I was even Santa Claus myself for my little brother when I wasn’t that old.
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 don’t quite remember if this memory is actually true (my memory has been deteriorating), but I think it was that:
I found out one of my uncles are pretending to be santa (I mean like bruh, they think we kids don’t recognize their faces after some disguises). So I just stopped believing in such nonsense. Also decided that deities are almost certainly not real around the same time, and so chrismas technically made me an atheist. I think I was about 8 or 9 at the time.
Edit: I don’t have children, and don’t plan on it (due to depression), but if I ever had any children, I would never lie like that. That just cause trust issues.
Like I just start speculating that my parents are always plotting against me somehow.
If you are reading this, please dont continue with this nonsense lie, you dont want your kids to turn out to be paranoid and skeptical of everything.
Finding out that Santa wasn’t real was definitely, and undoubtedly, the first domino to fall in my journey towards atheism.
It’s spelled deities, for a second I thought kid you started calling relatives that are on a diet and don’t take it seriously out for their hypocrisy, very funny
Hard to type on phone 😕
Around 4. The chimney in the house was too 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 riding 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.
I was nine.
Also went a step further and realized ghosts, god, and in general things we’re told exist but can’t see are mostly fake 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 was about ten I think. Might have been 11. Figured it out.
No kids but yeah I definitely would tell them about Santa and let them enjoy their childhood. Life sucks. Let them enjoy the first few years.
Edit : I would not tell the truth that Santa is fake. I would tell them the Santa brings presents.
Would, or wouldn’t?
I would not tell the truth that Santa is fake. I would tell them the Santa brings presents.
Tell them what about Santa?
