My kids and I were hanging out last night and my oldest (9, daughter) told me she wanted The Sims video game for Xmas. She said she was going to write Santa asking for it. I said it was a good idea and let it go at that.
Later in the evening I got to thinking… at 9 1/2 she still believes in Santa… How old was I when I figured it out? My best recollection was much younger. Maybe 7. I know she hasn’t much time left before she figures it out but I’m enjoying her innocence.
How old were you when the Santa myth was blown for you?
I was about 7 or 8, too. I hate kids sometimes. I mean, I only came to this country at 4, so I didn’t learn about Santa really until the following year, so I only had two or three years before someone felt it necessary to tell me. :mad:
I was also about 7 and then found out that you start get less presents when you no longer believe in Santa. I was doubly Heart Broken. So far my daughter is 8 [sup]1[/sup]/[sub]2[/sub] and still believes. I hope this keeps up one more year. I am afraid that when she figures it out, my son will immediately know also and he is 3 years younger.
Couple years ago my oldest daughter was 7 and having some doubts. We took her to see Santa with her sibs and the first thing Santa did was greet her with, “Hello B_____! Did you enjoy the (whatnot) I brought you last year?” Blew her mind. She still has trouble reconciling the doubt her logical brain creates with that inexplicable greeting. Baffled me, too, because even I had forgotten what she’d received last year, and I have no idea how he remembered her name. I suspect my wife may have slipped him the info. I think she’s hooked now until Sanata gets caught in the act.
Me? I was maybe 8 or 9 when I couldn’t make myself believe anymore.
We are using the fiction that we leave the Colored Eggs out for the Easter Bunny to hide. This one is of less imporatance anyway.
I love the “reindeer hoofs on the rooftop” part. That went beyond the call of duty for a quarter payment. Nice job by your sister.
I don’t think I ever believed in Santa. We moved to Australia when I was 4 from China, where there was no Santa, and I’m pretty sure my parents said something along the lines of “He’s an story made up by those funny white people” when explaining him to me. And the only thing he ever gave me was a bag of caramel popcorn. Eh.
If you want to keep the secret, steer clear of Judy Blume’s Fudge books. One of them (I forget which) lays it right out. We were listening to it as an audiobook when I found that out. I shut it off real quick. Then I fast-forwarded past the dangerous part before the next time we listened to it. Apparently I wasn’t fast enough, because a few days later, my daughter asked me and I had to tell her the truth.
My parents never taught me to believe in Santa. We were celebrating the birth of Christ and we knew my parents and grandparents supplied the gifts.
They did give us change for our teeth under the pillow, but we also knew it was they that laid out the Easter candy hunt, since they handed out the maps. good times
There’s Judy Blume, again corrupting the children. Ban her!
I don’t know that I ever believed in Santa. I do recall waking up to shouting on a Christmas Eve when I was four or five and seeing the parents arguing with a half-assembled racetrack scattered about the living room floor, but even before then I don’t think I really bought into the story. There were just to many equivocations and rationalizations to pressing questions, like how Santa was going to enter the house without a chimney and how he transported all those presents in a single sleigh. (I wasn’t buying to the religion thing, either, although it was a few more years before I could resolve why that didn’t sit with me.) I know that I’d lost any semblence of faith in The Big Red Nick by kindergarten because I was punished for arguing with the teacher over his alleged existance; that is to say, she wasn’t debating me but just trying to get me to shut up lest I ruin things for everyone else. :rolleyes:
I can’t say that I really hold with this whole deceptive mythology of Santa Claus; I don’t have kids, so perhaps I’d feel differently, but I know it disturbed me to find that adults were outright lying to me, and like certain political figures continued to attempt to do so by twisting the language long after it was clear that I knew better. I daresay it manifestly contributed to my early cynicism about the world. Santa as an icon is one thing, but this pernecious mistruth and deception is…disturbing.
Or maybe I’ve just read too much Orwell.
Now I have to go; I’m waiting for the Great Pumpkin to come to my patch.
I was 7. That Christmas, I wrote a letter to Santa, requesting a train set. I was very specific about the guage. And I got my set, but it was the wrong guage. I began to suspect that Santa needed a lesson in reading. The following Summer, I had lost something – a toy, probably. I searched through the entire house for it, including my mom’s dresser. Hey, it might be in there, right? You never know. Going through her underwear drawer, I found the letter I had written 7 months before. I applied a bit of logic to the situation, and came to the conclusion that the whole Santa thing was a sham.
It didn’t really upset me. Being that it was July, and that I had doubts already, I could handle the truth.
Dear Winston:
" Your little friends at SDMB are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.
"They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Winston, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little.
"In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of gasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
"Yes, Winston, there is a Santa Claus. 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.
