Santaland Lost

I don't ever recall believing in Santa, but when I was 3, I reportedly told my mum that "there's no Santa Claus. You give me all the presents." Later, I recanted, for obvious reasons.

title of shelved George Saunders short-story collection?

Oh holy shit my parents told me when I was eleven. We were at my cousins' house and they'd been joking about it so my dad took me outside and explained Santa wasn't real. I cried for at least half a fucking hour. The whole time he tried to calm me down, saying, you know, the spirit of Santa is in giving and he represents a good and real thing but isn't a real person. I was absolutely traumatized, though. I mean, of course I knew on some level he couldn't be real, but he was just too good and delightful and magic not to be real.

My younger siblings all quite believing around age 8. My parents never told any of them, I think because it had freaked me out so much. They just figured it out, worry free, on their own. I was one fucking sensitive kid.

I still really like the idea of Santa, if nothing else for all the good feelings I remember from that whole tradition. It was my favorite thing in the world. All the Rankin-Bass specials explaining what a cool and (relatively) complex person he was, all the fun and exciting songs about him and his ways, and of course the gifts. My parents made sure to use different wrapping paper for Santa's gifts, and a unique floral penmanship for his gift tags. It really made the whole month of December so exciting and golden.

I didn't know a lot of adults who really understood kids or were nice to them, either, so the idea of this wise old man who cared very strongly about children was soothing and pleasant, too.

"There was a Santa, but your dad got drunk and forgot it was Christmas and shot him when he crawled out of the chimney. They're just trying to convince you Santa doesn't exist so they won't get caught. You see those flowers growing in the yard? That's where they buried his parts."

;_;

Is 11 pretty late to still be believing in Santa? I don't recall ever discussing SC with friends at school. We talked about presents, but never their method of delivery.

I thought this was going to be a LOST thread.

i never believed in santa, but i remember terrible sinking feeling in 3rd grade when a friend of mine who did believe was being taunted by other kids saying santa wasn't real, and my friend appealed to me for validation. i think i said " i don't know." felt lousy about it.

i was twelve.

i had known since the age of nine that santa was logically impossible, and had heard my parents discussing santa gifts the year i was in third grade, so i 'knew' from pretty early on, but i took three years in accepting facts and only acknowledged no santa when my sister outed me at the table dinner table as 'in denial.'

that is some kind of awesome metaphor for my juvenile psychic state

I think I was in a state of denial from maybe 3-8, just like remy. I was one greedy bastard of a kid, tho, and I recall being very concerned about the possibility that no Santa = no presents, when in reality, the only thing that would have changed is the name tags. I do remember my mum saying to me at one point, you don't believe in Santa, do you, and I said, nope. A very quiet end to the myth, although I still got presents with "Santa" on the nametag until I was 18.

Friends of mine with 2 very young uns are now struggling with whether to "do" Santa. I think they've decided on no.

I was the youngest of four children and my oldest sibling is only five years older than I am. I was disabused of the notion of Santa Claus almost as soon as I was old enough to grasp it.

Somehow or other, I have never felt cheated by this fact - not even remotely. Hearing about the heartache others have felt at "losing" Santa, I feel like my siblings did me a favor. Now I wonder why adults are so dead set on lying so elaborately and often to their children - in a way that is guaranteed to be found out and cause disillusionment. Seems very weird to me.

Oh, finding out Santa wasn't real didn't seem like a deception on my parents' part, whereas I was shatterd with disillusionment after finding out my parents' church was an epic and bizarre lie.