kids and santa claus

I think kids should be told by their parents eventually, just in case they're one of those kids who still believed in him in year 7 and never lives it down when the other kids find out.

(I can't remember my age here, but the point being, it's the kids who don't want to break it to the parents)

I always left Whisky for Santa - I don't know if this is a Scottish thing or an alcoholic Dad thing; I'm sure I read of similar practices in the Broons, my reference book of choice when it comes to Scottish customs.

My wife's family gets around the wrapping paper and "from" tag issue by simply saying everything was brought be the Christkind. When my brothers-in-law (who are twenty-some years younger than my wife) still believed, the trick was trying to guess who'd actually given you what, and then mouthing "thank you" silently while the kids weren't looking.

http://sketchysantas.com/

I think this WSJ story about parents using technology to trick their kids into believing in Santa Claus is kind of weird

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395204576024141664067226.html

seems like it's moving past encouraging childhood wonder to actively pranking your kids?

funny i made one of those greetings from santa things on north pole tv or something for my son. He just about shit.

I remember one day just thinking the whole santa thing didn't make sense. Asking my dad was more for confirmation of my suspicions than anything. I didn't really care because the presents would obv continue unabated...

i just happened to stumble on my father and grandfather drunkingly putting out the presents one night. thats how it ended for me.

worth it for the wsj portrait of santa

http://i51.tinypic.com/16273bo.jpg

http://www.icaughtsanta.com/

reading about 10 year old kids still believing in Santa Claus is kind of weird to me. I only have very vague preschool memories of actually believing in Santa Claus (I actually have one weird memory of me imagining Santa Claus hanging out with God and both of them looking down at me from the sky to check if I'm being good).

My parents never made much of an effort to keep me believing Santa Claus was real.

I knew a kid in junior high who still believed in santa. Whatever, though, grown adults believe in much weirder shit

like rex ryan believing someone is going to torture his nipples.

I was only about 8 or 9 I think, when my best friend at the time ruined it for me. He grew up in a very conservative religious house and they weren't real big on Santa, so he just told me it was the parents and then went through a speech on how it was logically impossible.

Once I found out, my bro did soon after. He was crushed, I didn't care too much, prior to that I'd always thought it was weird that Santa shopped at Montgomery Ward and forgot to get necessary batteries for things....

i spoiled it for a friend of mine, i'd just got to know him. but he was 12 at the time

I once walked in with a bloody Santa hat and told a kid that Santa was murdered

TamTam Claus

That reminds me that when I did ask about Santa to my parents, they made up some story about him dying a long time ago but nobody told this to kids so they wouldn't cry. This was supposed to make me feel better about the whole thing for some reason (oddly enough, I think it worked).

"y'see Santa had the bubonic plague and medicine wasn't real good back then...."

finally went off the rails and started eating kids' brains, had to lop off his head.

had a bit too much to drink and crashed his reindeers into a mountain

then the reindeer had to eat each other to survive

My dad first broke the news to me at my cousins' house when I was 11, a few days before xmas. My cousins had been telling jokes about lesbian frogs (which went right over my head), so I thought that's why my dad called me out of the room, to protect me from evil jokes. We sat on the front porch, in the cold, and he told me Santa wasn't real. I'd been exposed to more than enough evidence of this but I was #1 believer in Santa. It was a point of pride for me. So, I started crying very hard, and it took my dad about half an hour to get me to stop. I think this was pretty traumatizing for my dad, because I asked my younger siblings about it, and my parents never announced it to any of them. They all figured it out on their own, and accepted it, because they weren't weirdos like I was with some weird Polar Express complex.

I remember before then seeing an episode of "Home Improvement" where they discuss that Santa isn't real and I was very upset. "Why? Why are they saying this?"

After my dad told me, I even checked the little bell my third grade teacher gave me after she read The Polar Ex[ress out loud to the class (each kid got one in a little box). I could still hear its ring, and I tried to convince myself maybe that meant Santa was still real. I wasn't really good at anything as a kid except drawing and being just ridiculously credulous.

lol abbott, i was like you, one morning when i was eight my mother told me there was no santa and she said, 'haha but you knew this already i'm sure, only really little kids believe in things like that' and i said casually, 'yes, of course i knew', but i was devastated, i remember afterwards walking to school with a heavy bag and a dreary heart.

found all our presents in a room when i was six, didnt actually click til the same ones showed up wrapped a fortnight later on xmas

the lads were delighted, i was all 'eeeeeeyyyyyyy dad wassup'. We had 'a talk'

I was 10 or so when my parents explained to me that Santa Claus was just a metaphor for the unselfish, gift-giving spirit that lies within us all. it's funny that I was mature enough to grasp that idea but not enough of an independent thinker to suss it out on my own. I did think it was a little lame when my parents labelled all of my gifts that year as "To: Unregistered; From: the spirit of Santa Claus".

rad parents imo, if a little capraesque

lol

that is the worst gift label i've ever heard of.

damn, abbboottt, that story is heartbreaking

Just realized today I probably stopped believing in Jesus before I stopped believing in Santa Claus, and in fact the former revelation led to the latter.

Tho now I think I'm starting to believe in Jesus again...

ah no i believed in jesus for a good while after santa, tho with typically catholic guilti always felt bad for not loving him nearly as much

Do other countries' postal services, at least the ones with Arctic territory, make up pretty-looking 'letters from Santa' to send in response to childrens' letters? (Does Canada Post still do this, with postal code "H0H 0H0"?) Those were a real highlight of the season for me when I was 6 or 7.

How did your parents explain away the fact that Santa managed to show up in every shopping mall during the season? (It occurs to me that I haven't seen this in a long time now.) I think my parents tried to claim that he sent representatives or somesuch.

yea mine said it was 'servants' of his.

From the youngest I remember, I always sort of figured the mall santas were more helpers than anything.

My mom always told me the REAL santa was the one who appeared on the last float of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade every year. We still call him "the real santa" :)

I still love Santa, man. I think he's awesome!

http://static.tvguide.com/MediaBin/Galleries/Shows/S_Z/Sa_Sh/santaClaus_isComingToTown/crops/santa-claus-coming-town3.jpg

I had three older siblings, who quickly disabused me of the idea of Santa Claus. I can't say I feel like I missed much by not believing in him, either. I never saw the "magic" of being lied to. Thank goodness my parents never made a big deal out of this stuff one way or the other, so there wasn't a big let down, or a sense of disillusionment with adults.

I think I'm in Abbbott Santa Claus camp.

I was the last person in my grade to stop believing in Santa...must have been about 10 or 11. Some of the girls in my class pulled me aside for this v. serious 'talk' and they were like, "So we think it's time you knew that there's no such thing as Santa Claus. Everyone knows except you." And I freaked out. I remember running running running all the way to the bottom of the football oval and hiding behind a cypress tree and crying my heart out. And the dumb girl who led the charge to tell me came looking for me with all her dumb friends hanging back, and the girl (JULIE ARMISTEAD. NEVER FORGET) was obviously freaked by how much I was freaking out, and told me this *stupid* story to try to calm me down about how Santa died a long time ago and now his brothers and cousins are all Santa. Which even I in my state of hysteria was like "SHUT UP JULIE".

So when I got home from school I asked Mum if it was true and she said, technically, yes it's true. There's no real Santa. But that Santa was all the good feelings you have about Christmas and what makes it nice to give presents for the joy of giving them and it's a thing to make Christmas more fun. And she said it was okay if I didn't want to believe in him anymore, if I was too old, but that I should let my little brother and sister find out on their own and not spoil it for them.
I was really jealous of them that they still knew and I didn't so it was pretty easy for me to go along with it.

And it's funny. Even when my brother and sister were old enough and knew that he wasn't real, we all just had fun pretending he was on Christmas morning. Mum and Dad still filled our Santa bags with presents, and we would still drag them all into Mum and Dad's room and be all "Lol look what Santa brought us" because none of us really wanted to be the surly teenagers who only got presents under the tree. Mum never told us we had to do that, we all just kind of liked feeling like little kids...and it was the one day where everyone was kind of cool with it. I'm still sort of that way now.

God, that like 10, 11, 12, 13 zone is probably the worst time of life for like everyone ever

damn, abbboottt, that story is heartbreaking

― mmmm... yung hummus (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, December 22, 2010 7:53 PM

^^^

Even when my brother and sister were old enough and knew that he wasn't real, we all just had fun pretending he was on Christmas morning. Mum and Dad still filled our Santa bags with presents, and we would still drag them all into Mum and Dad's room and be all "Lol look what Santa brought us" because none of us really wanted to be the surly teenagers who only got presents under the tree. Mum never told us we had to do that, we all just kind of liked feeling like little kids...and it was the one day where everyone was kind of cool with it. I'm still sort of that way now.

:')

^^^^

Yup!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS2khYJZKwA

I remember playing hide n seek with my cousins when I was 7 or so and discovering a load of gifts. Kind of hard to believe in Santa after seeing that. I then told one of my cousins and showed her all the gifts. I think I ruined that xmas for her.

Funny thing happened in France involving Santa Claus a month or so ago. Ratatouille was showing on TV. Parents had their kids lined up and everything. Just before the movie started, there was an ad where a guy says that Santa Claus doesn't exist. One of my coworkers told me that he was in the kitchen and he started hearing his kids crying and he rushed back and was constantly asked if it was true that Santa doesn't exist. He apparently did not enjoy that one bit.

interesting santa-truther discussion with niece (11): basically she treats "not believing" as laughable adult sceptic-signalling and directs any difficult questions at the false-flag activities of "fake santa"

me, a radical: he makes the elves do all the work!
she, peppery: elves are always happy