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.
Being Jewish, we were told about this mishegas the moment we were able to hold cognitive thought
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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.”
I stopped believing around 9 or 10 but started believing again when I became Santa for my family.
Aww!
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.
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
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.
What do you mean Santa isn’t real? 🥺
TIL
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.
We don’t lie, and talk about “who is going to be Santa this year”. Treat it like a game. I don’t think the youngest quite understands and we don’t purposely ruin it, but that the adults are Santa is openly talked about.
Recently one of my kid’s friends got an elf on the shelf, and my kid asked what it was. I think that if other parents lie to their kids that’s for them to sort out, we can’t be expected to lie to our kids to keep up another lie. So I straight out told them what it was and that some parents use it to try to trick their kids into being good. They replied “can I have one?”
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.
When I was 6 or 7, I realized the neighbors (who were absolutely AWFUL) received more presents than my family did and the only difference was that their family made more money.
I started thinking about all the kids in my class, and the ones that got the most presents weren’t the nicest kids, they were the ones with the richest parents. Then it clicked.
That’s a pretty depressing conclusion of your deductive reasoning for a six or seven year-old.
Do you celebrate Christmas now?
Lol, no.
My husband and I agree that it’s just a marketing ploy and don’t typically exchange high-cost gifts. We’ll make food and enjoy the lazy day with a new videogame or puzzle, but rarely anything more than that.
I don’t remember a specific age the transition happened, or if I ever actually believed it, but I remember my family getting a PS3 one year for Christmas “from Santa”. Sometime in the Summer, I was in the car while my mom was on the phone talking about the PS3 she got for us needing a repair or something. Again it wasn’t that I believed in Santa at that point, it just became a core memory of “Oh you lied about that”
Something not dissimilar happened to me in the late 80s regarding a Nintendo that Santa had brought us. My mom just said that “Santa leaves receipts for the parents”. I couldn’t argue with a logic at the time because I was a child.
