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.

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!

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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 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.

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 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'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 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.

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 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 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.)

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'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.