**Warning**This blog post is for adults only. Kids, please check with your parents before reading any further.
Caleb has been suspicious/skeptical of the whole Santa thing for a few years now. He's nine and last week he confronted me about it again and told me over and over how he really needs and wants to know and how much it is totally stressing him out to not know. I tiptoed around the answer and never was straight with him. I had a hard time trying to understand how it was "totally stressing him out"...I can't remember being nine and being totally stressed out about whether or not Santa Claus was real. Anyway, after talking it over with a few friends and with Dave, at length, we decided to go ahead and tell him the truth.
SO, I sat down with Caleb the other night and brought up the subject and told him that his dad and I decided he was ready to know the full truth of the matter and so on and so forth. Well, his reaction was totally unexpected. For some reason I thought he would just purse his lips together, narrow his eyes, and nod his head while saying "Hmmmm, I thought so." Uh, no. He barely held back the tears and said things like (and I quote):
I can't believe this.
It just can't be true.
Christmas will never be the same again.
Christmas is ruined now.
All the magic is gone.
I just can't believe it.
I can't believe this is happening.
All the while he's shaking his head back and forth and trying not to cry.
My very loving and nurturing reply sounded something like this:
Uhhhh,
Ummm,
Uhhhh,
Ohhhh,
(but in my head I was saying, "This is all Dave's fault.")
Of course I immediately felt horrible, like I'd completely ruined his childhood. I reminded him that he had interrogated me endlessly the week before and that he had demanded to know the truth. I asked him if he wanted us to just keep lying to him every time he asked us about Santa like that and he said, "Yes, I wish you would've never told me the truth. It was fun to just always hope and wonder if he was real or not and now that's ruined." He said the next time he asks me something along those lines to just say to him, "Caleb, remember our talk?" and he made the little quote signs with his finger when he said "our talk".
I also told him that his brothers (even Sam who is 11) don't know the truth about Santa---Caleb interrupted me right here and said, "DON'T TELL THEM!" I guess he was trying to protect them from having their childhoods completely ruined, too. I reassured him that I had no such plans: Peter is too young and Sam, who is NOT too young, probably already knows but likes to pretend anyway.
He only started perking up when I told him that now that he knows, he can help us "play" Santa and help set out the gifts and stuff on Christmas Eve. He was really excited about the idea of eating the cookies that we leave out for Santa, too. The only downside to this is that eating the cookies was MY favorite part of being Santa. I guess I'll have to relinquish that as a consequence for ruining his childhood...
3 comments:
You're such a terrible parent. I can't believe you.
That just shows that we, as parents, NEVER make the right decisions. I'm sure Caleb will be telling this story when he is 30. It did give me a mighty good chuckle to start off my day, so some good came out of the whole thing.
My friend had almost this exact thing happen to her a couple of years ago. I believe her daughter was 10 or 11 at the time. The daughter was also very distraught when my friend told her the truth and also told her mom that she would have preferred her to lie! I can tell Nathan suspects. Maybe even knows outright. He wants me to tell him that the tooth fairy isn't real, but he doesn't want me to tell him about the Easter bunny (who really doesn't have any significance, except to hide eggs in our house) and Santa Claus.
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