Box your spoilers, people!
Sailboat
I don’t remember when I stopped believing in Santa, but I do remember being 7 or 8 and reading in a kid’s magazine about some people who went to the North Pole by dogsled. The article didn’t mention Santa, and I remember not being particularly surprised that it didn’t.
I’ve now converted to Judaism, so this won’t be an issue for my (eventual) kids.
:weeping: Thank you! Thank you!
<snif>
Santa’s… sniff big eyes Santa’s… not real?
(I think somewhere around eight years old, my parents starting marking up my presents with “love, Mom and Dad” instead of “love, Santa”. I wonder if I should leave out a plate of cookies and milk this year and see what happens :D)
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Santa still visits our house every christmas, we leave a plate of cheese and crackers for him and in the morning the plate is empty except for a few cracker crumbs.
Oh and all our presents are from santa too!
In interest of full disclosure, my post above is not original. It is closely based on the Classic Yes, Virignia Letter from the Editorial Page, New York Sun, 1897
This is public domain, but I want to ensure that no one makes the mistake that I could possibly write this well.
For the full and (correct text) see http://www.barricksinsurance.com/virginia.html
I post this before a Mod or Admin corrects me and in case someone has somehow not seen this before.
With Apologies.
Jim
PS, give it a read, it might bring tears to your eyes. 
I think I was 5. I figured it out after looking at the to/from tags, and noticed that the ones from Santa and the ones from Mom and Dad were in the same handwriting…I just turned and said “You’re Santa, aren’t you Mom?” I wasn’t particularly upset or anything.
While out walking one Christmas Eve, a fat guy in a sleigh pulled up beside me and asked directions to a home in Reston, VA. He asked me if it was a real place. I replied “Yes, fat man, there is a Reston.”
Hello, is this thing on?
We still get presents from Santa, and my siblings and I are in our thirties (except for the baby, who’s 25). My BIL, upon getting his first present from Santa in what must have been decades, looked a bit befuddled. But he plays along, so it’s all good.
My sister has always had a very good work ethic.
What’s really sad is I couldn’t even get that file to play.
I never really believed in Santa, but it was fun to play along with the whole idea.
My parents, feeling out-of-touch to our various likes and dislikes, instituted an annual tradition: Go the big Toys ‘R’ Us store, give my sister and I each a fixed amount of money, and we would shop for what we wanted until we reached our limit. This way, they never ran the risk of getting something we didn’t want (or already had), and we never ran the risk of being disappointed (and if we were, we only had ourselves to blame).
Needless to say, this tradition precluded any Santa pretense. Christmas morning would be about trying to remember what we picked and what wrapped boxes matched the inventory in our heads. There would usually be a suprise gift–one that our parents noticed was a last-minute favorite that didn’t quite make the cut. This present was labelled from “Santa”, but for as long back as I can remember, I don’t recall ever believing he existed–though I do remember getting into some heated arguments with my peers who were still True Believers and wouldn’t take my word for his non-existence (the Easter Bunny, too).
2nd Grade.
Santa left me a Cabbage Patch Kid (back when they were very rare).
Went back to school with said Kid and my best friend had the same one.
She told me my mom and her mom bought them together
…But, that’s impossible because SANTA gave me mine!!..
Mom confessed.
Heart was broken.
Probably when I was about 7 or 8, I suppose. The whole story suddenly just seemed ridiculous. Even at that age I’d begun to question how Santa would be able to handle his sleigh if he consumed all of the beer that was being left out for him.
Never did. Usually, it was “We’ll get something together at the store for you.”
Er… by “never did”, I mean, “never believed in a Santa”.
You guys left beer for Santa? We only left milk and cookies. Did you get better presents than we did?
[OT]I’m really starting to look forward to my vacation in Australia next month 
[/OT]
That’s right. Beer for Santa and grass for his reindeer. Dad used to drink the beer. We’d usually find the grass, uneaten, on Christmas morning, shrivelled up in the heat because Dad would forget to throw it back into compost heap. “Perhaps the reindeer weren’t hungry”, Mum would say.
Your parents musta been amateurs. At my house the gifts from Santa had different handwriting on the tags (and different wrapping paper) from than the gifts from Mom & Dad.
I don’t remember when I stopped believing, but I do remember there was one year when I thought it was Mom and Dad, but I wasn’t sure, and I was worried that, when I grew up and had kids of my own, I wouldn’t know for sure whether I was supposed to “be Santa” or let the real Santa do it.
(Anybody remember the Saturday Night Live sketch with Alec Baldwin as the dad who still believed in Santa?)