Which supernatural or mythological being that you believed in as a child was the last one you finally accepted as bunk? And, if you can, describe the feeling that accompanied your epiphany. Ideally, your choice should be a being commonly believed in by your peers (i.e. friends and family of similar age and culture)—Santa, Easter Bunny, Trolls, Boogeyman, Pixies, Hobgoblins, et al. Don’t hesitate to include lesser known beings indigenous to your particular environment, like the Australian Bunyip. However, suspecting “God” and "ghosts" may be the most common replies by a wide margin, let’s take those two off the table, thus preventing thread dullness.
For me, it was leprechauns. For some still unfathomable reason, I accepted leprechauns as fact many years after I deconstructed all other childhood fantasies—I was about 12. When the light-bulb lit I recall it as a head-slap :smack: moment, feeling very embarrassed I hadn’t relegated the little green guys to the fiction heap long before. But, quickly following that was a period of melancholy—the world just felt a little less wondrous.
The day of my birth was near Easter, so my father got me a stuffed toy bunny. Yellow and white, it was a constant companion in my early years. As I sit here typing, it is watching me from a shelf. Over 56 years it has seen much milage and compression of stuffing, but I still have it. I’m thinking of having it cremated with me.
Santa, and I believe I was 8. It’s so hard to remember. I don’t remember ever believing in the tooth fairy, and I don’t think we really did the Easter Bunny as more than a joke.
I do remember that, when I was 5, my best friend and I had worked out how Santa really worked. He was an organization of many different people, and he didn’t necessarily use chimneys. That was just simplifying it for the “kids,” i.e., those younger than us.
Is it typical for kids to figure out that one isn’t real but cling to the belief that the others still are? I find that odd, because as soon as my aunt inadvertently devastated my seven-year-old self about the truth about Santa by asking my mom how much trouble she’d had buying a Santa present, my next thoughts were how the easter bunny and tooth-fairy must be fake too.
They were resurrected, but perhaps in a different form.
An example, recently I picked up a hitchhiker, sort of unusual for me, but anyway I felt I should. As I was talking to him I just got the feeling that he was a leprechaun or if you will had the gifting of one. After dropping him off I just got this stream of enormous good luck.
I don’t remember ever believing in anything, perhaps because I had siblings a fair bit older than me. I’m amazed anyone ever believed in leprechauns at all, let alone to the age of 12.
I don’t know if I ever believed in the Easter Bunny, and anyway from a very young age I was well aware that if it showed up my parents’ cats would have eaten it. Santa probably died when I was about 5 and I started asking questions like “How does he come down the chimney if we don’t have one?” I also wondered how his sleigh would travel, seeing as we rarely had white Christmases.
By the time I was 8 and my mother told me she saw Santa walking down the street yelling “Ho ho ho!” I knew it was just a neighbor who’d had a bit too much eggnog.
My mother says that by the time I was 3, I could tell that the Santa at one store was a different person from the Santa in another store. She also says that I concluded that since the Santas were all different, there WAS no real Santa. I think that I had started disbelief in the Easter Bunny the following spring.
When I was in grade school, though, I learned about unicorns, and I sincerely believed in them. I thought that they were just extremely elusive, but not mythical.
We were never taught any of those tales, tho we did know of them and that they were made up. We knew we got presents because our parents loved us. I remember being the breaker of myths for many in my 1st grade class. At the time, I didn’t understand at all how they could think those things actually existed.
No idea. I neither remember believing in them nor do I remember a grand epiphany, yet my mother assures me I did believe in them at some point (and I don’t recall pretending to believe to fool her, either.)
I do recall a conversation when I had already knew that Santa as presented in children’s stories couldn’t really be the answer, so I asked her what was up with that (the stories, not the existence of Santa), and she gave me the Christmas Spirit answer. I liked it. Neither of us recall the age, but we both fondly recall the conversation.
I don’t really remember “believing” anything like that. I think I just “accepted” what I was told until I was old enough for the question “is this real?” to make sense. Once I asked that, the answer was always, “No, but it’s fun to pretend.” I don’t think I was ever heartbroken.
The closest, personally, was cryptids like Bigfood and Nessie. When I was a kid, I was sure they were real. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? I’m the cynic who still secretly hopes somebody finds a yeti someday.
I don’t remember ever believing in anything like that. My father always treated those stories the same way as he treated our “bedtime stories” (which were pretty much a D&D game minus the dice, featuring my brother and I as the stars. Very obviously fiction). I just assumed the Santa and Tooth Fairy stories were the same sort of thing (troll doll, too! “I wish I may, I wish I might…” - I got some little wishes under my pillow, but I knew it was my parents all along).
My mother pretended they were real until I was about twelve, but that was mostly because she wanted us to sit on Santa’s lap for a photo (she’s big on family snapshots). She knew my brother and I didn’t believe in any of it.
Actually, like typoink, I think the last thing I believed in must’ve been the Loch Ness Monster - which I’d been thinking of as a still-living plesiosaurus since I was a four-year-old and first visited the Natural History Museum. I was probably ten when I accepted that one as fiction. It was really sad to see it go - I’m still fascinated by animals that have gone unchanged for so long.
I was 9 and it was Santa, although I think it was more of a fervent hope than a belief.
My parents used to encourage my siblings and me to write letters to Santa. At 9, I felt writing to Santa was kind of a dumb thing to do. I also felt Santa should know what we wanted without being told, but I did it anyway.
That year, I asked for Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, among other things. About a week later, I saw the box in my dad’s car and got a queazy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t even bother asking. Seeing that box was all I needed. I remember mentally kicking myself for being suckered in to something so obviously made up. We didn’t even have a chimney, for god’s sake! I also remember tearing-up and feeling stupid about that as well.
The moment Santa died, the Easter bunny, the Tooth Fairy, God, ghosts, and whatever other supernatural claptrap I was ever told about did as well. My mom tried to convince me that God was different, and real, but it was too late; he got tossed with everything else.
I actually thought my mom was pulling my leg with the god stuff, and didn’t realize until I was, I think, 12 that she really believed in it. That realization devastated me much more than Santa dying.
"…at least a thousand rounds were fired in a scene of carnage never before seen in this far northern community. CSIs have been called in from around the nation to try to reconstruct the time-line of the events surrounding this massacre. Locals appear shocked, even as nations around the world prepare to mourn.
[Mother Nature][SIZE=“1”]“I always knew there was something wrong with that guy. Bastard called me a Ho. I hope he rots in Hell!!!” [/Mother Nature]
The Deathtoll stands at 238, not counting reindeer… many of whom were wounded and had to be put down.
[Herbie the Dentist]“I sewed them up with floss as best I could, but there were just so many…”[/Herbie the Dentist]
[/SIZE]
My Easter Bunny never died, he just doesn’t come around any more.
I don’t just have faith in the Bunny, I actually saw him when I was about ten.
My family had all gathered to celebrate Easter at my grandparent’s summer place. In those days, the house had only one big bedroom with a long row of beds, and my brother, my cousin, me, my mom, and my aunt were all sleeping in that room. I woke in the middle of the night to hear a whispered conversation between my mom and my aunt, who were trying to figure out whether they should wake us up. Of course, I popped right up to see what was going on, and they pointed out the open door of the bedroom. You could see out into the big room, where there was a refrigerator with a small window above it, and silhouetted in the window was the shape of a rabbit’s head. Yes, the Bunny is about seven feet tall and walks upright! Naturally, we were all kind of freaked out about this, but it was also very cool. We eventually decided that waking up the boys would be more of a pain in the ass than it was worth*, and our best chance of getting lots of chocolate in the morning was to lay down and go right back to sleep. It worked too.
*We have all regretted this decision ever since, because of course no one ever believed our story. Now, I’ve been known to lie, and so has Mom, but I’m shocked that anyone in my family has the balls to doubt Aunt Debbie’s veracity.
I believed in the Tooth Fairy for a little longer than Santa, because my brother swore up and down that he saw her one night. Then he finally admitted that he was just trying to “pay me back for that Easter Bunny thing.” Liar, liar, pants on fire! :mad:
Wait, what? My dad’s rabbit weighs all of four pounds and even the Maine Coon hasn’t tried to eat it since housecats are generally reluctant to take on animals more than a third their size. The Easter bunny is usually depicted as aproximately human size. Were your parents’ cats tigers?
Someone should have told my little Fluffy this. She’d regularly pick fights with large dogs. I know that she picked fights with our German shepherd on a frequent basis, and she’d also antagonize our neighbors’ Shepherd mixes. She was not a tiger, she weighed about 8 pounds.
My birthday is on New Year’s Eve. So the Christmas just before I was five was when I learned there was no Santa.
See, we went to the Christmas Eve service, and it started at 7:00 PM. Getting in the car it’s already dark that time of year. We had to wait because Mom had to go back in the house for something she forgot. Through the crack in the curtains I saw her put away the milk and cookies(Oreos!) we’d set out for Santa.
I didn’t say anything, but I also knew there probably was no Easter Bunny or tooth fairy either. But I didn’t want to risk getting no candy or money under the pillow if I said I didn’t believe.
I remember that night so clearly. Yet my mother tells me that three years later she told me there was no Santa, and I replied “I know that!” and I don’t remember that!
