All those choices, and none fit. I was the youngest, and I don’t recall any transition from believing to not believing. I don’t know whether I ever believed, or what.
Don’t know the exact age, but I just figure it out on my own. The Santa Clause came out when I was 7, and I know I didn’t believe in Santa by the time I saw it. I totally kept up the appearance that I believed though. We always got one gift from our parents and the rest were from Santa, so I was worried that if my parents knew I found I would only get one present each year.
I remember in 4th grade (1983) I was reading Bridge to Terabithia, and Jess got May Belle a Barbie “from Santa”. I was pretty close to a nonbeliever before that, but I was trying to hold on to the idea because it was so much fun. Seeing it there in print though solidified my knowledge.
My daughter’s 8 this year, and believes. When she finds out or asks for the truth, I plan to explain that she gets to graduate to being part of Santa now, and until she has her own children, we can pick someone each year to be Santa for.
i guess i got lucky with this and alot of other big kid questions. i got told that Santa was the sprit of giving, and it was pretty much left at that. Hes as real as the spirit of thanksgiving, or any other holiday in the sense that he may not be physically “real” but is obviously there.
"He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. " – Francis P. Church 1897
I don’t remember ever believing in Santa Claus. I may have, but I don’t remember. I think it may have been always understood that my parents bought the gifts (and for Hannukah too).
Among my earliest memories was my mother taking me to see Santa at a department store. I think I was three, but maybe I was four. I didn’t really get the idea of Santa yet, I knew what the character looked like, but I didn’t have memories of previous Christmases. On the way to the store I pointed out all the Santa Clauses we passed. I told my mother they must just be people wearing Santa suits, or something to that effect. My mother had one of those ‘Why do I bother’ reactions, and I don’t think I ever took on the belief.
I made my kids Christmases a lot more fun. I didn’t explicitly tell them Santa was real, but their mother did. Their uncle and I would do things like speculating on how Santa got into houses with no chimneys. And I would always say how we needed a roaring fire in the fireplace on Christmas eve to the kids horror. I’m not sure how old they were when they figured it out, but one of them later revealed that they didn’t let on when they knew because they thought it would result in fewer presents.
The best part of Christmas was our tradition of going out on Christmas Eve to find the biggest tree possible. They’re really cheap on 24th. As we went from one roadside stand to the next, the kids would get increasingly worried that we wouldn’t get a tree. But we’d always find a really big one. Right after moving into our current house, we found a 12 footer, or so it was marked. I cut two feet off the bottom before I brought it into the house. Turns out Treezilla hit the peak of the ceiling at 14ft. It must have been a 16 footer originally. We had to lop off branches on the back side to get about 4 feet away from one wall, and the branches spread out over 6 feet on the other side leaving only a small space to get by.
We have other unique Christmas traditions too.
I think I was about 6, maybe 7? I remember talking to my mum and saying “Santa…he’s not really real, is he?”, and her admitting no, he wasn’t. I think I must have had an inkling before then though, because I also remember conversations along the lines of “Here is my Christmas list for Santa, but if he can’t afford everything on it, I’ll understand” - I was very aware from a young age that we didn’t have much money.
Stopped believing?
I had a friend who told me that he still believed in Santa, but that he had other people do his work for him. He was just a symbol. I was 5, and, until that point, I’d never really thought about it. But I know I was surprised, so I guess I must have believe in Santa, at least in some form. By the time I was six, I knew Santa didn’t really exist, although I did second guess myself later in life when we found a Christmas present at home after returning from the grandparents’ house, and I was the last one out before we left, and did not see it there. I’m still not sure how it happened.
Also, I always saw through my grandparents’ version of hanging money on the tree. Santa was always presented as a toymaker. Heck, that’s part of how I figured it out–the toys I got were stuff from the store that it would be illegal for Santa to make. Oddly enough, I now could more easily believe in a modern Santa who mostly buys presents.
Does anyone actually get coal anymore, though? Very rarely I’ve heard of kids not getting a present from Santa, but never anyone actually getting coal, except on TV.
Never believed, my parents never told me about Santa so I really shit all over the other kids when I started school. We were very Christian, but Christmas was about Jesus.
I had a friend who believed until a ridiculously late age - I think it was 11 or 12 - because she couldn’t accept that her parents would lie to her face for years. She was pretty traumatized when she found they had.
No (it probably went out of style along with willow switches, washing kids’ mouths out with soap, and horehound candy), but we’re talking about the Santa mythology and Waller’s deconstruction of it, and Waller went with a mathematically conservative model in which it was assumed that only a fraction of Christian kids were good enough to deserve presents. But if that’s the case, the corollary must be that the naughty kids get a lump of coal, right? But he never addressed that issue.
I’m told I believed. But I have no memory of ever actually believing in Santa Claus.
I found out at 8 when our third-grade teacher told us. Our school had a number of kids from other countries, so she was talking about Christmas around the world and said something like, “Here in America, parents pretend a man named Santa Claus brings presents to them.”
I went home and yelled at my mom for lying…she cried, called the teacher the next day. I don’t remember what the teacher said to me, but I remember crying about it in the bathroom.
Pretty miserable, but I was grateful for it the next year when we moved to a new school district and there was only one person in 4th grade who still believed in Santa.
Well here’s your extra credit! I think I must have been 10 or 11. I was pretty naïve and tended to buy into the whole ‘people who say they don’t believe in Santa just don’t have enough faith’ mentality. I would say that while I was generally a pretty smart preteen, some aspects of my emotional development were kind of stunted at the time.
This was me. I think I was 9, but I’m not 100% sure. Pretty late but not into double digits I don’t think. My parents made me promise not to ruin the surprise for my little sister. And I didn’t. But I held that grudge for a long time. I was raised by a mother who was absolutely controlling and under her roof, her word was law. If she would lie to me about Santa, what else would she lie to me about?
It’s probably the spark that’s responsible for why I was so rebellious as a teenager. Because prior to that point, I would NEVER have questioned authority on anything. I took a reverse tack and started questioning her on everything.
Not only did I never believe in santa claus but… (and I’m not trying to antagonize anyone here, just trying to add an interesting anecdote), I went to Catholic school but thought it was all just fun stories, like father christmas, that you were not meant to take literally.
Strange reactions when people found out the truth. I never got mad after I puzzled it out at age 6, as detailed above-I figured that the Santa myth fulfilled a worthwhile role in the holiday season for other little kids, and they got a lot of pleasure out of the whole shebang-it never crossed my mind that my parents were mistreating me or somesuch by “lying” to me-be it then or even now, in retrospect. But I guess I can grok why you would feel offended.
I reasoned it out on my own around 8-10 - I remember sitting in the car with my mom and asking her why Santa’s handwriting looked like my dad’s. I wasn’t THAT disappointed - I’d been having doubts for years.