The Santa deception: how did it affect you?

It didn't affect me much at all, actually. I was about seven or eight and said to my parents "Father Christmas isn't real, is he?" and they confessed. So I'd evidently got the idea by this time that it was just a story for fun, nothing to be taken very seriously.

My daughter is three and has heard about Father Christmas at nursery. I'm wondering how to pitch him to her. I think as a story for fun would be ideal, because she's very into stories for fun that she's nevertheless quite clear are just stories. She enjoys playing along extensively with stories (e.g., her toy dinosaurs talking to her and her to them) without breaking character, but she doesn't get confused between story and reality.

(I hope to bring this approach to religion as well. Reading a picture book of the Nativity to her - she'd grabbed it in a bookshop and talked her mum into buying it for her - I asked what each thing was and she said "That's an angel. It's a sort of fairy." Can't say fairer than that!)

Edit: It may be relevant that this was in Perth, Australia, where Christmas is in the middle of summer, it's frequently forty Celsius on Christmas Day and the insane English-descended people still eat a roast dinner and people typically live in single-storey houses conspicuously lacking in fireplaces and chimneys. The entire set of Christmas traditions is clearly a ridiculously ill-adapted transplant that you're supposed to enjoy playing along with for some reason. Now I'm living in London and we're likely to have a white Christmas and my back yard looks like a bloody Christmas card, so the stories seem slightly more plausible. The reindeer will still have problems with the Sky dish and Father Christmas will still have problems with getting into the central heating, though.

My earliest memories of the Santa story involve me deceiving my parents into thinking I believed it. In all the Christmas movies and stories of the time, the Santa-skeptic kids were always bad guys, and the true-believers were depicted as innocent and good. I picked up on the social norm of "naive child=good, skeptical child=bad" pretty quickly.

I got the strong impression that my older siblings were playing along as well. I never actually asked them, though.

I'm not thrilled about the societal emphasis on gifts to make children happy, but otherwise, as a parent of two young kids, I am grateful for Santa Claus.

Santa Claus is a perfect, uncomplicated person that also loves your children. I think it's a good thing to give children the impression that love for them extends beyond the family; someone out there with power, resources and magic also loves them, personally. The gift they get from Santa is the 'evidence' of this love and this gift is usually the best gift they receive -- more carefully chosen and grander than even the gifts their parents give them. I view the phenomenon of Santa Claus as an outlet for society to express their views and hopes about generosity. Santa Claus is a model of what it means to be generous, and we all feel more generous when we channel his personality to pretend that his is real. Possibly, we teach our kids to be generous for later. (Sometimes people are generous when they've been generously treated, and sometimes they feel entitled instead, I don't know why.)

I don't see it as a deception about whether Santa Claus 'exists'-- for the first time on the other side of the conspiracy, I'm amazed by how extensively society supports the realization of Santa Claus. A culture that does this, especially at such a grand scale, really does want him to exist to love the children. The collusion at all levels, and especially the way parents reserve the best present to be from Santa, shows that Santa Claus is fitting some set of societal and parental needs. I'm sure a well-researched, thought-out social science essay could write a lot of things that I am only half-aware of, but without fully understanding why, I personally feel that 'Santa Claus' is one of the most spectacular ways that society provides support to parents.

The deception of Santa Claus isn't that he isn't a real man. (He's more real than I ever thought he was.) The myth is that all children are loved and cared for. In my opinion, the more disillusioned my kids feel when they find out about that myth, the better. As a society, we think 'Santa Claus' should visit every child (which is why there are toy drives) and we hope that every parent wants special and good moments for their children. If you're a parent that doesn't go along with Santa Claus because you don't want to lie to them, then you are caring about their well-being. The bogey-men here, if they exist, are parents that couldn't be bothered to make a special time for their kids.

(By the way, this comment was indubitably strongly influenced by this thread.)

I had my suspicions about Santa pretty early--as a too-curious preschooler snooping in my parents' bedroom, I found boxes for some gifts that had been "from Santa"; my mother had made up some story explaining it. Later (6 or 7 years old?) I found a page stuffed into a drawer that had been ripped out of a book--it explained how to tell your kids that Santa wasn't real. I read all of the books on the shelf at home, including the parenting book; that was the bit of knowledge my parents wanted to hide from me! (I suppose they thought I would be too young to understand some of the other stuff I'd find, but that I would understand that if I found it. My parents really had no idea how to deal with a young voracious reader.)

So I knew that Santa wasn't real but that my parents (my mother, really) cared that I not find out. I don't think Santa in particular affected me much in part because I was a voracious reader--I knew a lot of things that were different than what my parents told me, and I also knew that most parents were advised that kids might not be ready to know them. (Like I said, I read their parenting book.)

Knowing that I couldn't trust my parents to tell me the truth about a lot of things (not just Santa) because they thought it better that I know a pleasant lie, and also that they really had no idea what I was and wasn't ready to hear, had a tremendous effect on me. I didn't trust them even when I should have, in fact; I rarely trusted people to be telling me the whole truth or to have good judgment about what I should and shouldn't be doing. (I also grew up in a weird household, the main thing being that my mother was hospitalized for mental illness when I was 11.) It was good for me in some ways--but there are some big things I should have sought someone's guidance for, if not my parents', but I simply had no idea how to go about it or even that I should.

My parents not only pulled the Santa deception, they used a service whereby an actor in a costume would come and deliver their presents as an intermediary. This left me with a longer lasting, but much less absurd version of the Santa myth; I knew that the stuff about flying around in a sleigh and climbing down chimneys had to be wrong, but I didn't see anything wrong with the basic idea. I never thought about theb scale involved, but if I had, I probably would've concluded that "Santa" was a role, not a person, and that there was someone in that role for each participating community.

I do not remember believing in Santa or when I stopped. But I do remember the game of everyone pretending there was a Santa and a Tooth Fairy and an Easter Bunny. It was great fun and I had no feeling that I was lied to by my parents or others. When I realized that God was not in this group and I was actually supposed to believe in that being was when my problems with pretense really began. I started to notice how others, by their actions etc., displayed a lack of believe in what they said about God, but they insisted that it was important to believe. End of innocence, now I was being lied to!

I always questioned the existence of Grandfather Frost (the Russian equivalent of Santa). It didn't make sense to me that someone could break into so many tightly locked apartments all in a single day, and leave no traces of it.

To that end, I tried to stay awake on New Year nights and see for myself how he does it. This required my parents to jump through hoops, like carrying me to a different room "for my own good", to preserve the illusion. The turning point was when I peeked into my parents' closet and saw gifts that Grandfather Frost was supposed to give me. I still wish they just told me the truth from the get go, and I'm annoyed that they're bent on doing the same thing with my brother, who lacks my capacity for critical thinking.

Strangely, I stopped believing in God long before that, and before I knew it was called atheism.

The Ewok deception.

I have no clear memories of the Santa deception bar two:

We left a carrot out for the reindeer (along with a beer for Santa, which should have been a dead giveaway, really) and it was only half-eaten the next morning. Having been recently caught lying, I had figured out vaguely that the liar's reaction to false accusations is denial, and the truthful person's reaction is confusion. I wish I could say some spirit of rationality possessed me to check if my parents were lying about Santa, but it was merely me trying to catch my parents in a lie because they had scolded me for lying previously. I remember asking if they didn't like eating raw carrots, expecting denial or confusion, and being surprised when they smiled and owned up to the whole Santa lie.

The other was going to Religious Education at about age 6, hearing about God, applying my Santa-discovering skills, and being frustrated when the RE teacher refused to own up to the lie.

I've said before that I think I care about the truth more than other people because a parent lied to me- but I don't think the Santa lie was the traumatizing one.

I slowly gathered more evidence there was no Santa year by year. Once my Aunt thanked my mother for something that had a "From Santa" label. We had a tradition of calling Santa to tell him what we wanted for Christmas, Santa being my mother's older brother the actor. I recall my belief diminishing when I realized none of my classmates were talking to Santa on the phone. And then there was the fact that my brother and I began to hunt and find the hidden presents- presents we assumed would be put under the tree as "From Mom" but a few ended up coming from Santa Claus and that pretty much gave it away.

The Tooth Fairy was the first myth I realized was false- figuring this out was easy. Like the fifth tooth I lost I didn't tell anyone and put it under my pillow. I woke up the next day and it was still there. Then I told my parents and the next night, found money. I then pretended I still believed in the Tooth Fairy until the rest of my teeth came out.

Maybe there is a rationalist case for these lies. There aren't many other occasions for kids to find important things out about the world on their own. They mostly learn by being talked at "there are atoms" "the earth rotates around the sun" etc. Outside of Santa Claus when does a seven-year-old get to weigh evidence and challenge authority. Maybe it should be like a rationalist right of passage. The day your kid discovers Santa Claus isn't real you take him out for dinner with family and friends, explain the lesson and give him a badge or a bicycle or something. Welcome him to the next step on the path to adulthood.

I believe there was an idea here for a rationalist school that teaches the process of discovery by not teaching children facts about the world but by giving them the tools to learn those facts on their own. I can't remember if that idea originated in my head or if I read it here first and then told others about it. Maybe Santa Claus should be something like that.

Unfortunately my memory of this has faded. I know I had broken the charade by 6 or 7, but I can't recall my thoughts about it at the time. I recall playing along with it for rather Pascal's wager type reasons (more downside to risking the presents).

I take my poor memory of it as implying that it seemed less of a big deal to me. Same goes with the tooth fairy and Easter bunny. In comparison, unraveling the God story had a much longer and more significant timeline. Although the seeds of that were planted about the time of Santa's destruction I can't recall how the two are intertwined.

I would be surprised if the consensus here was that the story of Santa is a good parenting practice. We have a status quo bias potential here, so turn it around. If there was no such thing as Santa currently, would it be a good idea to invent him?

Or to further abstract it from reality, make up a whole bunch of stories. Would a child be better off with a pantheon of artificial creatures that want us to behave in certain ways? How about magical elves that make sure your schoolbus doesn't crash if you brush your teeth every night, or crows that poop in your milk carton if you tell a lie to a teacher. Seems all bad to me. There's enough challenge dealing with reality and our psychological bugs (like thinking that it's quite plausible that a crow pooped in your milk because you are an unlucky or bad person).

Personally I would have no problem with not bringing up my children with a belief in Santa, but I would worry about how this would affect my and my family's status. What if my kids told other children that Santa didn't exist? Would they be upset? What would their parents think?

I remember my mother being angry when I said that Santa Claus was not true.

this realization may be good for developing rationalists, because it provides children with the experience of realizing that they hold beliefs which are wrong and absurd, and that they must reject them.

If parents reacted not with anger or disappointment, but with congratulations ("Well done! You passed the test! You've leveled up!"), this might have positive effects. I'm still mildly opposed to the deception though. Analogously: it may, occasionally, be optimal to hurt someone for their own good, but one should be extremely careful about that kind of action and very suspicious of one's own motives; we should be similarly careful with sabotaging another's map.

I was raised an Orthodox Jew, which made Santa Claus rather a moot point, but provided me with any number of other mythical narratives presented as actualities. And I was raised a middle-class American, which provided me (and continues to provide me) with other myths presented as fact.

No particular myth was, as far as I can tell, especially fundamental in the sense of "If I hadn't been exposed to that myth, but everything else had remained the same, it would have all been different."

Of course, it's hard to know for sure.

OTOH, had I been raised in an environment in which no myths were presented as facts, that would likely made a significant difference... but I don't have a clear sense of what that difference would be. I've never met anyone who was raised in such an environment.

I don't remember believing in Santa Claus. It was always a game to be played with grown-ups.

My experience of other children believing in Santa was very much one of them not quite realising it was a game, and my not wanting to spoil their fun.

Conversely, I did and still do believe in God, though again I have no memory of believing in the old man on a cloud version often given to children.

As a Muslim with a weak grasp on the difference between fiction and reality, I was a bit weird about Christmas. Santa Claus definitely didn't deliver to us, and my parents never made a big deal of buying me stuff, which they never treated with the fuss and ceremony associated with "gifts": instead, it was more of a "Take This, It May Help You On Your Quest": the goal wasn't to make me feel happy and loved, but to deal with just the, bare necessities, the simple, bare necessities, to deal with all the worries and the strife of a growing child.

O the other hand, there were all those movies in the French and American television networks we saw through the satellite. All those Aesops that showed people who believed in Christmas being rewarded, people who didn't ending up believing in the end, forgiveness and gifts and fuzzies for everyone who would want them...

It was confusing. Why didn't Santa show up in Muslim countries? Why didn't he show up in most of the Third World? If he could deal with 1,300,000,000 freaking Christians in one night, surely he could reach the rest of the planet, and, I dunno, give "those kids in Rwanda" some nice cakes or whatever... and give me the freaking Megazord my parents absolutely refused to buy. The best I got was Ninjor (he was awesome, but not a MEGAZORD).

So... in the end, Christmas didn't make me mistrust the sanity of those around me the way Islam ended up doing. Though it would have been better if they did give the gifts, openly: not giving them at all left me for some time with the impression that it was Santa who didn't bother showing up because of the lack of ambiance or whatever. Eventually, instead, I ended up mistrusting the media in general and movies and cartoons in particular.

Somewhat offtopic: besides all the gift stuff and as an afterthought, there was all that business about celerating the Birth of Jesus, who is an extremely important guy for Muslims, it's just that they don't celebrate his birthday because they don't really see the point, and leave that to the Christians. However, as a Muslim child I wasn't immune to all the parafernalia and the imagery and the rhethoric about Our Saviour's Coming. As Handel would put it in a way that deeply compelled me back then: "AND HE SHALL PU-RI-FAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-AND HE SHALL PURIFY!- AND *HE! SHALL! PURIFI-Y!" If I had known about Raptor Jesus back then, maybe I would have taken it with a little more salt. As it was, Jesus being bon was Serious Business for me, especially since the child protagonist of The Rescuers introduced me to praying to the Child Jesus in a scene that even then tasted very much like diabetes, but which, despite that, felt very compelling and sincere, and, more importantly, was shown to work. if only In Mysterious Ways.

I don't remember how old I was, but I remember coming up with a great argument as to why Santa couldn't exist and then telling my parents... who pointed out the huge flaw in my argument. I remember being disappointed, but deciding that I had to go back to not believing if my reasoning turned out to be bad.

Some time later, my friend mentioned casually that Santa didn't exist. It didn't surprise me at all and I just went with it because it seemed obviously right.

I didn't know what happened, but I mentally marked it as something weird that beliefs shouldn't do, so it stands out. Looking back, it seems more like a belief in belief, coupled with the fact that I didn't trust myself to change my beliefs without understanding why I was doing it.

My parents--fundamentalist christians--didn't participate in the santa myth, they told us when we first came across santa that it was something lots of people pretended about. The main reason they didn't lie to us about santa--and they explicitly told us this--was that they didn't want us to be disapointed about santa and subsequently decide god was like santa and didn't exist either. Perhaps, that should have been a big hint about the other invisble man, but I was like 5 or 6 at the time and homeschooled.

(Looking back and reading between the lines, I think at least one of my parents was extremely upset when they found out santa wasn't real and vowed never to do such a thing to their own kids.)

I was probably in my 20's by the time I realized that there are people who actually thought santa was real at some point in their life. I had preivously thought that people who claimed to have believed in santa were just continuing the game. Anyway, the joke's on me. Turns out god isn't real. Ha, ha.

I think it's valuable to have an experience of finding out that you're wrong about the world on a very basic level. I don't know that I could actually straight up lie to any hypothetical kids in order to cause such an experience, though.

I was taught to believe in Santa Clause by both parents (atheist father and catholic mother).

One particular year (I think I was five) my mother told to me to pray the night before Christmas to get everything I wanted for Christmas. And I did. And I got everything I wanted for Christmas. Awesome! This prayer thing apparently really worked. (I had also written a letter to Santa a few weeks earlier)

The next year, my dad suggested I write another letter to Santa. I said "nah, I tried this prayer thing last year and it worked pretty well." Dad said "um....."

I prayed, fully expecting to get everything I asked for. I got maybe a third of it.

That was when I stopped believing in God.

A few years later, during Summer (I think I was seven) I asked my dad where the universe came from, and he showed me a book called "The Universe" which explained how huge clouds of gas had condensed to make the sun and planets. I asked my dad further questions about why the outer planets were gaseous ane the inner planets were solid, where black holes came from and a bunch of other stuff. And I was like "holy crap, the universe is awesome and supremely elegant and logical and stuff."

A few months later it was Christmas time, and I suddenly realized I didn't believe in Santa any more. Not because of any particular anti-Santa evidence, but just that he didn't really fit with the otherwise orderly and logical nature of the universe. (It was a few years before mounting empirical evidence led to finally give up the belief completely. Until then it was more of a "I notice that I am confused" thing).

That said, even after realizing I was being lied to, I loved the idea of Santa Clause and was glad to have that magic in my life for as long as I could. In fact, I think he teaches an important lesson that any atheist should be perfectly fine with teaching their child: magic is fun, but it isn't real, and you can't trust authorities to always tell the truth.

I remember at about 8 years old being told by cousins that Santa was not real. I considered it unlikely that something my parents had been telling me would be untrue and argued as such. As it became clear that they were right and there was no Santa, my recollection is I became angry at my parents. I don't have a high degree of trust in these recollections as I also remember believing that I never lied to my parents before the age of 4 years old and I remember being punished for lying when I was telling the truth and being totally outraged. As a parent of three children, it is simply not plausible to me anymore that I actually did not lie to my parents before I was 4. So I generally don't trust a lot of detail of recollections about my parents, lying, and my own personal disapproval or anger.

I don't recall my parents ever encouraging a belief in Santa. I think I still picked it up from the general culture, but not very strongly- Christmas was "here's $100, pick out a gift for yourself" and so there wasn't really the mystery that accompanies it normally. If anything, I think I thought "Santa" was the codeword for the commercial part of Christmas rather than an actual entity.

That actually taught me the (probably unintentional but still greatly appreciated) lesson that spending windfalls on expensive things was really difficult to translate into happiness gains. I think no more than 20% of the toys I bought with my Christmas money were being played with significantly come February (and this was pointed out to me repeatedly by my irked parents). (Side note: things have now swung the other way, where my parents are disappointed there's nothing I want with holiday money besides more stocks.)

I've been exposed to the alternate viewpoint that this realization may be good for developing rationalists, because it provides children with the experience of discovering that they hold beliefs which are wrong and absurd, and that they must reject them.

At least one vociferous anti-rationalist agrees with this viewpoint: learning the truth about Santa Claus can lead one to reject Jesus, with disastrous results. You all know Jack Chick, right?

I'm struggling with this myself right now.

I've long had the idea that, if I ever raised a child from a young age, I'd introduce Santa Claus as a make-believe game. I might be a little coy about it: tell the story of Santa and see if the kid can figure out the truth without giving a direct answer one way or the other; but I wouldn't lie. OK, there's a plan, but it's all theory, since I'll probably never raise a child.

But now I'm dating the single parent of a six-year-old. She is raising her child to believe in both Santa and Jesus; she herself knows the truth about Santa but still believes in Jesus. One the one hand, I've played the Tooth Fairy for the child; I removed the tooth from her pillow and put quarters under it, at her parent's request. On the other hand, I told her —in response to a direct question— that I don't believe in Jesus. (Then she asked me if I understood that I have to accept Jesus to go to Heaven, and her mother gave her a lecture on tolerance, in the course of which we learnt that not everything taught at her Christian elementary school is necessarily correct, so that was good.)

I am not raising this child, and her mother and I have such different views on how to do so (Santa, and even Jesus, hardly even begin to cover it) that I have decided not to make any effort to even help to raise her. (ETA: Not that I've been asked to, but I have my answer if I ever am asked.) I am her friend and occasionally her baby sitter, but I am not her parent and probably never will be (and certainly never will be without a long discussion about it, some years into the future).

Still, if she asks me a direct question about Santa, then I'm not sure how I'll answer it.

I don't think learning the truth really affected my development one way or the other. One day when I was I-don't-remember-how-old, I asked to be told the truth and I was. I do remember that I wasn't very good at maintaining the conspiracy former my younger siblings, and almost let the truth slip a few times---and I'm still not very good at it and have almost let the truth slip to children in my family.

I am wary of whether lying to kids habitually is really as good for them as we rationalize, but the real reason I'm inclined not to spread this myth to my hypothetical children is because I am so uncomfortable with lies myself---I can barely even bring myself to do it for the sake of a surprise party or something innocuous like that. I'd rather tell it as what it is: a fun story, like Cinderella or Harry Potter.

As soon as I asked if Santa was real (at 5 yr old or so), I got the truth. This made me happy. It may have helped me doubt and later leave the Mormon church at 12 yr old; it at least didn't hurt. I've always enjoyed xmas (minus shopping). I probably would have enjoyed it if I'd never heard a Santa story from my parents, but I do have a fond memory of really believing the cookies+milk would be consumed by Santa (4yr old). They definitely played pretend; they just didn't lie to my face when directly asked.

It's valuable to have at least a few people you really trust in your life; while it would be sad to throw that away in exchange for nothing, a Santa-type fun story (presented without "this is a false story ..." preamble, but readily owned up to) won't do any lasting harm.

There are real difficulties in establishing deep trust. Fun little teases like Santa (if not taken to extreme) are the least of your worries. The hard work is elsewhere.

Was raised modern orthodox Jew here, so can't really comment specifically on my own experiences...

But I can say some things on general principles: Treat kids fairly.

If you (as a parent) are going to be the sort of parent that punishes your kids for lying to you, then you'd better not be systematically lying to them (I'm not talking about lies-to-children, which can easily be presented in an non-deceptive way. Santa is NOT, however, that sort of thing at all. Santa is a blatant deception.)

I don't remember ever believing in Santa Claus. My family did exchange gifts with "Santa" in the "from" field, but as best I remember I always parsed this as what I might now describe as deference to a cultural norm.

Looking back on it, I think I must have mentally assigned Santa to the same class of myths that held Aesop's Fables or stories about Zeus or Coyote: entertaining stories carrying useful lessons about culture, but not to be taken literally. The children in media that believed in Santa always seemed to belong to idealized worlds, so I didn't figure I was expected to follow suit any more than I would have been expected to, say, come up with wacky schemes to get other people to do my chores.

By the time I'd figured out that it was a live cultural norm, most of my peers had grown out of it.

I don't recall being particularly fazed by it myself. Then again, I do think that the realisation was a gradual run rather than a sudden 'oh'. I suspect this is because it's not really something you think about in between Christmases. One Christmas it makes sense to you, the next one you've grown up a bit more, your mind has matured and the next time you think about Santa it's obviously false.

My strongest memory of the whole experience was having an argument about it with my classmates (yes, I was that kid). My parents got many angry calls from other parents about my destroying the Santa myth for their kids.

I tend to think that Santa is a beguiling belief to inculcate in your children because it adds to the fantasy of Christmas. Parents remember the 'magic' of it themselves, and somewhat relive it through their children's eyes. Thus someone spoiling it is not only potentially upsetting for the child, but also for the adult, since they've had x years of living it through their children taken away from them.

as a general rule, children are adequately equipped to create fantasies of their own without their parents' intervention.

Kids may not have any shortage of fantasies they come up with on their own, but there's a big difference between a self created fantasy and one everyone else your age around you believes in, and cultural artefacts (books, songs, movies) push at you.

I considered the existence of Santa a definitive proof that the paranormal/magic exists and not everything in the world is in the domain of science (and was slightly puzzled that the adults don't see it that way).

No conspiracies, but for a long time I've been very prone to wishful thinking. I'm not really sure if believing in Santa actually influenced that. I don't remember finding out the truth as a big revelation, though - no influence on my worldview or on trust for my parents.

(I've been raised without religion.)

To answer my own question, I personally figured out that the whole Santa story was a lie around the age of six or so, but I continued to believe in belief, that it was right or appropriate that young children be encouraged to believe in Santa Claus. I never confronted my parents about it, but we held an "I know you know I know" understanding, and I continued to prop up my younger sister's belief for years afterward. It wasn't until years later, after my sister had stopped believing, that I started to wonder why adults would want children to believe in Santa Claus, and whether their reasons for it were actually good.

I don't think it ever really encouraged me to question adults' motives so much as learning to question adults motives led me to question it. I was a bit surprised when I started to learn how traumatic the discovery can be for children, since my own realization never seemed like a big deal to me.

finding it cute to see one's children believing ridiculous things

I personally find it horrifying that almost no one finds this in particular horrifying. Bestowing ridiculous (and possibly harmful) beliefs on one's children for one's own amusement strikes me as the sort of moral violation that is a mild step in the direction of Mind Rape (which I happen to think is worse than the other kind).

I was lucky and my parents never told me any of the Traditional Lies growing up, so I've only encountered this from the outside. I don't know if that's made me more or less sensitive to the practice, but I can't help but compare toying with a child's mind for your own amusement/convenience in that way to other sorts of abuse.

I never believed that other kids believed in Santa. At about the typical age when kids find out I was incredulous that they had ever believed, and was ultimately horrified when convinced.

I'm slightly embarrassed. I actually thought I had been around 6 or 7 years old, but now found out that I had been nine. I found it out by "altruistically" wishing for world peace, which the all-powerful Santa should have been able to provide. I only got a game called Game of Peace (Looking it up right now, I found out that it was published in 1993, so I can't have been younger than 9 at the time). That's when I definitely stopped believing (Although my parents could have probably convinced me that Santa existed, but wasn't all-powerful, if they had bothered).

I was at school, and started a conversation with another kid about Santa, and he said, "Santa's just your parents." And that made sense to me, and I said, "Oh." And I didn't believe in Santa any more. I don't remember any particular emotional reaction; it just seemed like an obvious answer I hadn't previously noticed.

I told my younger sibling that Santa Claus was real:

• Santa is the person who brings us the presents.
• Our parents bring us the presents.
• Our parents are real.

Therefore, Santa Claus is real.

I don't remember how I found out the truth, but this is how she found out, when she asked me.

Growing up as a moderate Jew, I never really gave Santa or the Easter Bunny much thought. My parents pretended to believe in the Tooth Fairy, but I started losing teeth late, around age 10, and by then I could tell pretty easily that they were pretending. I felt vaguely smug about not having been taken in by common myths when people in middle school swapped stories about when they found out Santa wasn't real, but I don't think it was that important.

One thing that did bother me was teaching Bible stories in Sunday school, as a college student supervising fifth-graders. My peers and I generally agreed that stories about miracles in the Bible weren't literally historical, and the kids very earnestly wanted to know whether the stuff we were teaching them about was "real." I didn't want to just say "no," because I thought it wouldn't capture my real outlook on the stories -- I was afraid that the kids would hear my "no, it's not real" and translate that to "and so it's fake and it's not worth paying attention to."

For me, at the time, the stories were "real" in that they conveyed hopes and morals that I thought were worth having -- part of why I have a strong idealist, altruist side today is because when I was a kid I uncritically swallowed stories about my mythic ancestors and started trying to emulate them. I thought, on balance, it would probably be good for these kids if they swallowed the stories too. They spend most of their time in a liberal, scientific culture, so sooner or later they would all probably figure out that the stories aren't historically accurate, and that particular false belief wouldn't do any lasting harm in terms of their ability to predict how a current-events scenario might play out. None of them are going to vote for politicians, e.g., who promise to make the sun stop in the sky so that they can finish a battle.

Still, I wonder to what extent it will hurt them to find out that someone who they trusted to tell them the truth about their world manipulated them instead. I know I was really upset when I found out about how history really works. Paternalism is a little less ugly when it's practiced on 10-year-olds instead of adults, but it's still something to be very cautious about.

About a month ago I wrote about Santa stories I grew up with in the context of a childhood filled with "tall tales" of varying levels of obviousness.

Compare responses here to responses on the Reddit thread.

When I was of an age to believe in Santa Claus, I found it quite easy to believe in something just because I wanted to believe in it. I knew my parents wanted me to believe in Santa, so I did that. I ended up believing in Santa longer than they intended and they finally had to tell me he wasn't real when I was 9. It didn't upset me particularly, but I didn't like the idea of lying to my brothers. My parents had a solution: I would help be Santa for them, which would result in them getting better Christmas presents, because I knew exactly what they wanted. This worked out great for the rest of the time that they believed.

I never told my parents I had figured it out. I had younger siblings and the tradition seemed harmless, so I just played along with it. It didn't dawn on me at the time how much coordination across all of society went into the deception, so the realization didn't really seem all that special.

My earliest memory regarding Santa includes knowledge that Santa was not "really" real, but something that we were supposed to pretend. I don't know where or when I picked that up, but I don't think the deception negatively affected me.

On the other hand, my mother is a Methodist Pastor, and the God deception had a much deeper impact on me. I recognized that it was not fiction in the same sense---that my parents believed it, and it was a great source of internal conflict that I couldn't accept God's existence as they could.

My folks raised us in borderline-fundamentalist Christianity, which made the Santa myth nearly as much of a non-starter as I expect it was for those commenters who were raised Orthodox Jewish.

If and when I have children of my own, I intend to use the Santa myth as an exercise in invisible-dragon baiting, nothing more.

I don't remember the point in my development where I could tell the difference between make-believe and actual beliefs that something is factually true or false.. I don't think I was scarred by being misled about Santa by my parents, but I think I was pretty much a non-rational being for at least the first 18 years of my life. My main reason for not trusting people was probably that my Dad was violent, controlling and depressive, so a position on Santa one way or the other is not likely to be the most significant factor there.

However, for some reason, I've eventually coalesced into a collection of mind-parts that really don't like lying. To the point where I just couldn't tell my kids that there was a Santa (and even though I am a theist of sorts, and was "more wrong" than I am now when my kids were young, I couldn't tell them there was a God - only that I believed there was and it was OK to make up your own mind about it.)

Funny thing is, my wife is an atheist, but she wanted them to believe in Santa. [shrug]

If you want to ask conspiracy theorists about this, I'd probably try the http://abovetopsecret.com/ forum.

There was this rule my parents had where I couldn't tell other kids that Santa was fake. I think I ended up overestimating how many of my peers knew Santa was fake and weren't just playing along for the sake of fulfilling their parent's wishes.

I stopped believing in Santa Claus at age seven, probably shortly after Christmas, when my older brother told me he didn't exist. I was very upset and cried at the time. But a year later, as Christmas approached I had a very "special," superior feeling from knowing something my parents didn't know I knew. I think it was on the same Christmas day when I was eight that I informed them I knew he wasn't real. Mysteriously, after this he no longer gave me any presents, though I think the total number was unaffected.

I don't recall having any conscious sense of having learned any more general lesson from this experience. It didn't lead me to stop believing in God since I never had, my parents being atheists. I suppose it might have made it easier to understand how others could believe in God or other things without objective foundation but, again, have no conscious recollection of its having played that role.

Seems to me you probably can't learn much from individual anecdotes about the causal relations being asked about here.

I don't remember believing in Santa Claus. I don't remember how exactly I came to disbelieve. I do remember a conversation with my mother (I can't have been more than five) in which I stated my disbelief and she asked me not to share it with my younger brother, so that he could believe for another year or so. I don't remember any great emotional upheaval. I also don't think my parents went to any particular lengths to preserve the delusion.

I am still angry at my parents for lying to me.  My parents were quite the authoritarians so aside from other things, it was instilled in me that lying was bad and yet they committed the ultimate lie against kids by perpetrating the Santa myth.  Years later when I asked them why they gave the usual excuses are let kids be kids and have magic in their life but then that is encouraging delusion.  Oh and of course there is the 'but its tradition' excuse.  Well just because its tradition doesn't mean its right.  A long time ago the god king would have sex with the priestess and then be sacrificed for the benefit of the crops.  This was a tradition, should we bring this back?  I know that some of you will read this and think oh she is just a bitter old bag but for me it was extremely sad to not realise that there was no magic in the world.  At an early age I had already been subjected to harsh parenting and this magic was my escape and also my hope that there was perhaps a better life out there.  I feel that if you want to help create a better world for your kids to live in then don't feed them delusion and don't lie to them.

As far as I know, it didn't do a thing to help me develop as a rationalist. (Indeed, I wouldn't even say that I'm a rationalist now, merely "rationalism-curious".) But I do know that I was pretty damn upset, and later in life I think it contributed to my deciding that premeditated lying to your children is fucked up — especially when it's this premeditated — and that I wasn't going to tell my children Santa was real if I ever had any. (This might end up being a moot point, as I become less certain with each passing year that I'll ever even have children.)

I remember the first time I told my mom that I was seriously considering not telling my children that Santa was real. She got so upset — far more than I expected — that it made me wonder if this was how some atheists felt coming out to their religious parents. It was one of the few times in my life that she acted like I wasn't just wrong, but actually a bad person, for thinking what I thought. (I'm not sure that she actually thought that I was being a bad person, just reporting on how she behaved.) Mom loves Christmas more than almost anything else, and she has extremely fond memories of how it felt to believe in Santa as a child. She couldn't believe that I would deny my children the magic and wonder of believing in Santa.

I gave a reply that I thought would be at least somewhat persuasive: "If you need to tell your kids about Santa to give them a sense of magic and wonder, you're doing it wrong." (Or perhaps I said "If you need to lie to your kid") She was completely unmoved. Knowing what I know about her, I think it simply went in one ear and out the other. I think she was too busy being indignant and aghast to even digest what I had said, let alone consider whether I even might have had a point.

I don't think I'll bring it up with her again. I think if I ever have a kid someday, I'll just let Mom be shocked when she eventually discovers that my kid does not and has never believed in Santa, and she wasn't even present to witness me not lie to them.

The oldest of six children, I felt good about being initiated into my first adult secret society. Had I been one of the younger children I might have resented older siblings who'd held out on me.

I was also a little saddened that the world might be a little less magical than I'd assumed.

On the whole I was cool with it.

I figured out the non-existence of Santa Claus when I was about 5, I don't remember how. Someone posing as Santa visited a relative's Christmas party I was at and gave the children gifts and the local news in my city tracks "Santa's current location" on the weather radar periodically on Christmas Eve, which kind of made it a pink goo moment for me. I was angry and confused, but mostly kept this to myself. From this experience I concluded that my parents were not completely reliable and that society has a significant disrespect for children, although I did not make much use of this information until years later. I summary of my thoughts on child deception can be found here.

For anyone who wants to know how conspiracy theorists responded to the question, the thread is here, although there are not many replies yet.

Well, the Santa deception wasn't used on me. The false belief I held was that nobody actually takes Santa seriously. And also that I was bought in a store, which made me wonder where the store got me. Although I didn't take that one too seriously either, finding out the truth was still pretty disturbing. You mean he... she... they... EWWW! (Yeah, I got better.)

(Meme) Penis goes where?

My parents did not tell me about Santa, my friends didn't seem to take him seriously, and I got way to pessimistic and world weary for my own good before the age of eight, which still seems to be an issue now. lots of other factors were involved though, so the signal / noise ratio is infinitesimal. When I have kids, I want to them to be rational and see the world for what it really is, but I am willing to take a few liberties to avoid depressing them for a decade. It will not involve trying to get them to accept a fictional deity who offers to give people whatever they want (but only if mom and dad could theoretically afford it), but I am not sure how to do this.

If all else fails, I will just be copying the dad from Calvin and Hobbes and encouraging my kids to read science fiction. I would also like to teach them to get along with other people, but first I need to figure out myself.

Count me as another one who was irked at being lied to.

I don't remember a clear time when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I do remember some of the hints along the way. I especially remember how my parents would ask me what Santa Claus was bringing for Christmas and giving them coy answers, to see if Santa could know what I wanted even if I didn't tell him.

It didn't bother me whether or not Santa Claus was real, and I played along when my sister asked my parents. I knew who the real agent behind Santa Claus, was, though, and in third grade made sure to carefully explain to my parents why Santa should bring me chickens for Christmas. I couldn't maintain plausible deniability any longer, though, when my father took me out to clear away ground for construction of a coop on Christmas Eve.

This reminds me of the whole lies-to-children method of teaching. I think it prepared me for when people are actually wrong. When I took a Frequentist statistics class, it never occurred to me that it was anything other than an approximation for Bayesian statistics. It also meant that I had less trouble when they taught me about waveform collapse.

I don't think it did affect me in any noticeable way. I ended up becoming an atheist, but I don't remember Santa having anything to do with it. My brother, who had the same Santa experiences, is still religious.

Did it make me trust my parents less? Not really, though that might just be because my parents were so transparent about it. In our house, it was always more like, "Of course Santa is real, wink wink" then a real deception. (Still didn't figure it out till I was six, though..)

I already partly explained my own experience in another comment on LW, but I'll give a bit more of details there.

The first point I've to emphasis on is that my parents told me a slightly different version of the usual Santa Claus story : they didn't include the "only nice children have presents" part. They told me it was part of the standard version, but they told me that was just said to make children behave, that I would have presents even if I misbehaved, but that I still should be a nice boy, not for having presents, but because being nice is worthy in itself.

The rest of story was told on my comment on A Rationalist's Tale which I copy-paste here since it's short enough : « Since I'm born in an atheist family and never believed in God, I lack any similar experience, and somehow, I regret it, because that experience must definitely be of a great help to change your mind about other topics. The closest experience I have to this is the Santa Claus thing, but I was such a young child that I only have confuse memory about how I started to doubt. But the process looks similar : there is nice Santa Claus person that gives me present, I start to doubt it's real and feel bad because I don't want the "magic of chirstmas" to go away, and then I realize that it's something even more "magical" than elves and flying Santa Claus going faster than light : it's the love of my parents, who spent days going from shop to shop to find the silly present I asked for in my letter to Santa Claus that the teacher gave them... it has the three phases : belief in something supernatural that makes you happy, doubt and feeling sad, and then realizing that reality makes you even more happy. But it's so lost in the mist of early childhood that it doesn't have the potency you describe. »

To conclude, I tend to think it had much more positive effects than negative effects to me, giving me an experience of rejecting previous beliefs, in a way that did no harm. But I've to insist on the "contraint-less" version of Santa Claus I was given. The version with threats (if you're not nice, Santa won't give you presents) sounds much more dangerous, because it can lead to thoughts like "oh well, since Santa doesn't exist, I don't have to be nice anymore" or "well, this Santa story was a conspiracy of adults to keep children quiet", which indeed can lead to conspiracy theorists later on. The key of the version I was told, which allow it to be efficient without much side-effects, is that it wasn't used as way to try to coerce me into a behavior.

What I find most interesting here is when the claim adapts itself in the face of evidence. A friend of mine at 6/7 saw his dad filling the stocking etc. and a group of us decided that the most likely solution was that Santa existed, but delegated certain of his activities to families in some cases, as he had so much on his plate.

More generally, I'm inclined to think it's harmless. If anything, I lean towards the 'helps develop rationality', but that's probably biased because I like Christmas.

I wrote about mine here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2/tell_your_rationalist_origin_story/1p9u

Penny Arcade has just published a strip on this subject.

Related: The Third Alternative, Is Santa Real?

Related on OB: Lying to Kids, Santa: naughty or nice

I wish this had been a front-page post, not just a discussion post. Is there a way to convert a discussion to a post, without losing comments?