A reader sends the above video:
I know you are not prone to posting Norwegian music-videos, but this Santa exposé from a children’s program in 2005 caused some turmoil when every five year old in the country was told at the same time that “Santa does not exist”. The video is quite self-explanatory – and very funny! The refrain goes something like “Santa does not exist, it’s just bullshit.”
Another perpetuates that theme:
I love the reader’s stories on learning about Santa Claus. Mine’s probably not as interesting as some of the others, but here it is anyway. I was eight and was deeply fascinated by science. I had just learned about the experimental method and decide to see if I could apply it. The test was simple: I asked Santa for one set of things and told my parents that I had asked for a different set. I then waited to see which I would get. As I suspected, I got the second set and that was that.
Another reader:
It just happened an hour ago with my two kids. We went to a department store to see Santa. After they saw him, the older one said that “If Santa kept us waiting for half an hour, then how can he be clever enough to deliver presents to a million children?”
Another pins the blame on a Muslim:
I think I hung on to the Santa myth a little longer than most kids around me. One day, as I was playing on the floor, I noticed that Muhammad Ali was being interviewed on TV. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I distinctly remember him saying something was a lie, that it was a lie just like Santa Claus. At that moment, it all came to me – the flying reindeer, giving toys to every child in the world in one night, climbing down the chimney even though we didn’t have a fireplace. All of it was exposed as conspiratorial fraud.
Another got greedy:
I was maybe 7 years old, and my dad told me that if you put a list of what you want in your stocking, Santa will bring it for you. I remember that I wrote down every possible toy I could think of and put it in my stocking. My mom took the list out and gave my dad the dirtiest look ever – that was when I knew.
How another’s consciousness was raised:
When I was 7 years old, I got a Super Nintendo for Christmas, and I was probably the most excited boy in the entire world. A lot of my friends wanted Super Nintendos that Christmas, but I and maybe one other kid actually got one. But for some reason, I didn’t think that was fair. Why did I get one when ALL my friends wanted one too?
I decided to ask my mom why Santa wasn’t fair in gift giving. All of my friends, at least to my knowledge, were “good” too, so why did Santa not give them Super Nintendos too? It was then that my mom decided to tell me how Santa worked.
As I got older, this was a lesson that stuck with me when I had kids of my own. It was a sort of realization that what we are doing is equating “being good” with our parents’ socioeconomic status. My wife and I talked a lot about it and decided that we wouldn’t “do Santa” with our kids. We didn’t want our kids thinking that they were “better” than other kids because we could afford to give them a nice Christmas and other kids’ parents might not be able to. Our kids know of Santa and what he represents at Christmas time, but we prefer for our kids to appreciate that their gifts come from love and, to an extent, our financial capabilities, and not equating these things to their behavior.
Another gets a bit morbid, even for us:
It’s good to teach children to believe in Santa Claus, because they need to learn, early on, that those they love and trust will conspire to deceive them.
Another ends on a cheerier note:
One Christmas, when we had no money because I was unemployed, I spent hours out in the barn in my workshop building a dollhouse for our two girls, aged four and six. It was a replica of our house. We got them scaled people and furniture to go with it. It turned out really nice.
On Christmas morning, I did the whole “Waltons” thing, stolen from “The Homecoming.” I whipped a big rock on to the roof above their bedrooms and made a lot of noise downstairs until they came pounding down. I told the girls that I had just caught a burglar in the house, a fat guy in a red suit with a bag of our stuff. I told them that I had whipped a rock at him and that he had run away and jumped in a sled. I told them that some packages had fallen out of his bag when he ran. They saw the dollhouse and the people and the furniture and their eyes went wide. Merry Christmas.
I am getting to the point. A couple years later, when they were about six and eight years old, the older neighbor girl clued our girls in on the Santa thing. They came back for dinner and asked us directly whether Santa was real. I don’t lie to my kids, so I told them that no, there was no Santa.
“Then who made the dollhouse?”
My wife pointed at me.
Their eyes went wide again. I was Santa. Merry Christmas times two.
The Dish 