I never believed in Santa, along with 30% of the Straight Dope.
Wow-30%.I don’t know whether I should be surprised that the number isn’t higher or that it isn’t lower.Good thread that you started too,by the way.
I figured it out in 1st Grade, age 6. Before Christmas that year.
The numbers just didn’t add up.
Oops meant to tell you I was 6:smack:(About Santa) Sex before I was 10
Well,6 years old is better than 10 years old.You beat me by 4 years.As for the 2nd sentence in your post,I don’t know what to think.Does that warrant congratulations?
And I grew up thinking that maybe like 10% of kids believed past age 4. I’ve learned some kids keep on believing up to really old ages.
I meant the book “Human Sexuality” mom made it easy to find. Sorry to be unclear. I didn’t let a woman take advantage of me for a few more years:D
I was 11.
I recall debating Santa’s existence at 10 with my mum, but she allayed my suspicions till the next year when I finally couldn’t wrap my head around it all.
My kids (now 13 and 14) believed until about the same age.
I think I started to suspect at 8, but my parents & siblings tried Really Hard to re convince me. I think my brothers & sisters were worried they’d get less stuff. But what made me forget & re-believe for another year?
The smell of pine from the tree, the wood burning in the fire, all the old ornaments from great grand parents, the 1940s Lionel train around the bottom of the tree, the foods, the special decorations,“Rudolph’s On!”, the hokey music, the carolers,
sledding at night down snow banks glowing blue from moonlight, the smell of snow…
Sorry. Memories. 
And that Phone Call From Santa…!
“Hi There…! This is Santa…!”
“You’re a FAKE…!” click 
(If there were telephone poles at The North Pole, I knew that NORELCO Santa would have shaved them down to a Nub…!)
I was about 7 or 8. Though I’d always found it odd that “Santa’s” handwriting looked suspiciously like my mother’s.
I don’t remember being particularly upset about it, either.
No watershed moment for me that I recall. It just gradually dawned on me, and then I was embarrassed to think that I believed before that.
I consider that a lesson in all beliefs.
Probably five or younger. But five sounds about right. I base this on my sister who is a couple years older and who made it her mission each year to snoop around the house and find the presents and triumphantly show them to me. Which made it hard to buy into Santa.
For a couple years I was worried that if I revealed that I knew Santa wasn’t real, I’d stop getting toys at Christmas and just get boring “parent” gifts like socks and sweaters. At one point my mom asked me “You know Santa isn’t real, right?” and I admitted to it but said I liked seeing the name on my presents. Even when I was older, my mom would put “Santa” on some on the fun stuff.
I guess that’s probably how a lot of people figure it out.Somehow,I never was clever enough to notice;I only realized that after I’d already quit believing.
- And it was because of snotty little kids who couldn’t let it be. I only learned about him when I was four, since I came to this country at that age.
When I was 30 I called my parents blubbering that Santa skipped my apartment and they explained it to me.
I had moved out of their basement the previous year.
- My mom was talking to one of her friends, and the friend made some comment about having a hidden stash of wrapping paper separate from the regular wrapping paper. My mom must have noticed the look of realization on my face, and she made it VERY CLEAR that I couldn’t share my discovery with my little sister.
By that point, though, I had been pretty skeptical for a few years – how could Santa possibly do it all in one night? But the NORAD Santa Tracker seemed to be irrefutable evidence. When you’re six, it’s Christmas Eve, and the local news and the Air Force says that Santa is approaching at mach 5, you set aside your skepticism.
That’s a good point.I bet that if NORAD quit 'tracking"Santa Claus the number of Santa-believing children would be cut in half.It is kind of impressive,however,that a government agency is willing to do that for all the children.
I don’t remember even believing in Santa, but I did very firmly believe, being the baby, that if my parents ever realised that, they’d just go ‘Oh well, you worked it out. No point in presents any more!’ and wouldn’t bother with the celebration any more. I think it was my brother that told me that I should fake it, but I’m not sure, I was very small.
So I faked it (very convincingly, my parents still don’t believe that I was playing along) until I was about 10, when I realised there was no way my 14 year old cousin was still going along with it, but they still did Christmas.
I have an experience I want to write up as a short story some time as a creative writing exercise. It’s a true story, though.
As the child of immigrants (from China by way of Taiwan), I’d never heard the story of Santa Claus - I learned about it in school. Sure, I’d seen the iconic images of the big jolly guy in the red suit with a bag of presents over his shoulder, but to me that was just another image lumped in with the Christmas Tree we didn’t have in our house either, or the menorahs put up by our Jewish neighbors for that matter… Not that a 5 year old thinks in those terms anyway. It was just one of those shop display symbols of the season, with no personal meaning to me.
I only started going to school in first grade, after we moved from an apartment in the South Bronx to a house in Bayside, Queens, a suburban part of NYC. That December, the arts and crafts teacher at my elementary school had us make stockings out of red felt. This involved taking a pre-made felt boot and adding fake white fur trim to the top and using glitter and glue to write our name on it, and a candy cane sticker on the other side.
I asked what this was supposed to mean and she said, “You know, for Santa Claus.” When it became apparent that this connection was new to me, she gave a quick reading of “'Twas The Night Before Christmas”. Some other kids in class filled me in on the more practical details: on Christmas Eve, they put their stockings up by the fireplace, and in the morning they came down and the stocking would be full of little toys and candy! Unless they’d been really bad or something, but of course, they hadn’t been. Oh, and you had to be asleep when he came, or he might not leave anything.
There were also a few kids, of course, who said that Santa Claus wasn’t for real, but they were outnumbered by the kids who said he was. They had all that hard evidence of the goodies received by all those kids who hung stockings, and one kid said last year he had stayed up late pretending to sleep and had heard rustling from the other room. Finally, all the kids who said he wasn’t real also admitted they didn’t hang up stockings at all for Christmas (apparently they were something called “Jewish”). So of course Santa hadn’t visited them, just as he’d never visited me!
Just to be sure, I asked the art teacher: “Has Santa never visited me because I’m Chinese?” She replied kindly, “Oh, no, Santa visits all children who put up a stocking, don’t you worry!” (She may also have asked if we were Christian, which I probably said yes to knowing that my mother had been educated in a Catholic school and had a rosary in her bedroom drawer she never used, plus I wanted Santa to come.)
Even better, now that we were living in a house instead of a run-down 2-room apartment, my Dad had bought and erected an artifical Christmas Tree right next to the fireplace, which had a wooden mantelshelf. My parents had put my wrapped presents under it, just like in the stories! Why with all that Christmas Spirit, only one thing was missing for a visit from St. Nick, and I was making it right here in class!
So on the last day of school before our holiday break, I took my craftwork home with me. On Christmas Eve, I snuck down around 11pm (well after my bedtime, but well before midnight), put up my stocking with a piece of tape, and crept back upstairs to sleep.
And the next morning, I experienced that childlike sense magic on Christmas Day that is so much written about. Where the previous year I might have been excited to find out What I Got For Christmas, this year it was flavored with extra magic: Had Santa Claus Come?
I ran downstairs as soon as I awoke. The answer was no.
That was a very interesting story,Robardin.Your story really did a very good job of demonstrating how Santa Claus has become,I guess you could say,a social icon in the United States.Thanks for sharing.