What's after Santa?

January 22, 2022 12:05 PM

If you are a post-Santa house, when & how did it happen? And what traditions did you change afterwards?
posted by wenestvedt to Human Relations (19 answers total)

My son (8 at the time) had kind of known, but I had been avoiding his questions ("What do you think?") Finally, at Christmas morning breakfast, he had had enough and just asked flat out "Do you and Mom buy the gifts from Santa?" I had known it was coming sooner or later, so I had thought about what I wanted to say. I told him, "When I spend an hour at the toy store choosing the perfect toy for you, then I'm Santa. When Mom picks out the exact right gift and wraps it up beautifully, then she's Santa. When you work all day to make a beautiful craft to give away, then you're Santa. Santa is everybody." He needed a moment to process it, but ultimately he took it really well. He still talks sometimes about how Santa is "real" in that way.

Traditions haven't changed much - we still put out the gifts after he's in bed on Christmas Eve, label some some presents from Santa, leave out milk and cookies, etc. We all like that stuff and it's still fun to do even once the cat is out of the bag.
posted by pocams at 12:33 PM on January 22, 2022 [31 favorites]

It happened because my kid, about 8ish, had been asking, and I'd been deflecting, and then he really asked me quite seriously and I felt like that was the moment to answer honestly. He cried, very non-dramatically, which broke my heart. And then we didn't change much...and it even surprised me that he would put out a snack for Santa well into his teens, just because. Also, my kid really got it that you don't wreck it for smaller kids, and was always great about playing along whenever necessary.
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:39 PM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

It was kind of a relief to us since we like to travel somewhere warm over the holidays but didn't want to stealthily bring presents with us to open on Christmas morning and deal with bringing them back. Which meant Christmas morning was always at home.

Being post-Santa has opened up that opportunity to leave earlier but then COVID came along and messed all that up so we're still at home on the 25th. Oh well.
posted by JoeZydeco at 12:50 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Are there other kids? When my oldest figured it out, I told him that means now *you* are Santa! You have to help me fill the stockings, eat the cookies and put out all the gifts from Santa, to keep things going with his little brother. He was very pleased with that explanation and enjoyed being Santa for a few more years.
posted by Ochre,Hugh at 1:50 PM on January 22, 2022 [14 favorites]

At around age 8 my daughter found the not-very-well-hidden gifts from Santa (wrapped with "from Santa" on the gift tag) prior to Christmas morning and figured it out from there. She was mad... "you LIED to me?" and it made me feel bad enough that I don't know if I would have done the whole Santa thing again if we'd had another kid.

One good thing that lead to was the ability to move our immediate family Christmas to Christmas Eve. We had 16 things to do on Christmas Day, including a non-negotiable breakfast at my husband's grandparents, followed by a whole 'nother non-negotiable feast at his mother's house right after, plus stuff with my family after that. Our Christmas morning was always a mad rush through opening our stuff at home, with no time to sit around and enjoy because we had to get ready to go to the family breakfast. As soon as the Santa stuff was out of the way, I immediately declared Christmas Eve was now gift opening night and we were able to enjoy our own Christmas celebration for the first time in many years.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 1:54 PM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

After I had to fess up and admit I had figured it out, I ended up having to do a lot more of the Christmas preparations, including decorating, stocking stuffing, etc. I knew it would change things for the worse to admit it (and it did!), but I was ah, stretching credibility to not admit the truth at my double digit age.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:38 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

We never did Santa. I was an adult before found out that kids in other families had actually believed that he was a real thing instead of just a folk tale. As far as I can tell, the only thing that functioned differently in our house hold was that we knew the presents in our stockings came from our parents. As soon as we were old enough to begin buying and giving presents in addition to receiving them, all of us including our parents hung up stockings, and we all filled each others'.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:53 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

For a couple years after my kid figured it out we just would treat gifts from mom and dad as "from Santa." As she got older they became "from Mom and Dad" or sometimes just from one of us, if it was clearly the sort of thing that particular parent would buy for the kid.

We only have the one kid so it was probably easier. I remember my older brothers sort of alternating between playing along with Santa for my sake and telling me outright I was an idiot for believing in him. With the one kid we were just like "yeah, ok, it was just a fun thing and now the fun thing is the spirit of Santa."
posted by bondcliff at 3:58 PM on January 22, 2022

My kid rejected Santa at around 6 or 7. I still do basically everything the same except saying “from santa” on packages.
posted by haptic_avenger at 5:50 PM on January 22, 2022

When I was a kid, Santa never brought wrapped gifts, just fun little things in our stockings. We were well into adulthood before the stockings just... stopped being filled.
posted by rakaidan at 7:57 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

As a child, we kept the whole thing going until I moved out. (I think I still got stockings from Santa whenever I was home for Christmas for another ten years after that.) We never really had a conversation about it - for some reason my impulse was to continue to play along until long after it was absolutely clear I wasn't being fooled. I know I've had entirely unfanciful discussions about it with my mom since, but probably not until I was in my mid twenties. That didn't hurt the ritual any. Same for the Easter Bunny. As a kid, getting to be in on it and play along was actually fun.

As an adult, I've become part of a family that has long celebrated a multi-faith solstice tradition that draws on a wide range of stories and invents their own rituals. (In recent years, the story of Osiris' death and resurrection plays a large role.) It continues to work even when everyone in the room is an adult. I'll never have kids, but broadening the tradition and including Santa as one myth among many would be pretty tempting. (They chose to start that way, so Santa was never real. No idea if the transition works or not.)
posted by eotvos at 5:41 AM on January 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

When my kid was about 4, he hilariously came to us with a series of arguments about the impossibility of Santa (he still is that kind of kid). As parents we accepted it and we were also careful to have a conversation with him about respecting other people's belief in Santa (one family friend maintained that belief until 14 (!) which was kind of mind boggling to us). In terms of traditions, we always had presents that were from "nobody" or from distant or estranged familiar members who had little interactions with us (which we bought) so it changed very little for us in terms of gifts or stockings. We also never used Santa as a coercive threat ("if you don't behave, Santa will bring you nothing") and we thankfully never did the deeply questionable "elf on the shelf" so behaviour has remained unchanged. We focus on the joy and generosity of spirit of the holiday along with seeing people and eating our special holiday foods.
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:31 AM on January 23, 2022

So, when I was 4 YEARS OLD, my dad completely blew the Santa myth for me. That year, on Xmas morning, I saw that Santa had eaten the milk and cookies but had also left me a note... and strangely, Santa's handwriting was identical to my dad's. The jig was up.

The note was also suspiciously agenda-driven ("please be nice to your mom in the new year"). At the time I was l was kind of insulted - I wasn't mean to my mom, and did my dad really think I was so stupid that I wouldn't clock the handwriting thing? In retrospect, that was the year my mother was diagnosed with cancer. My parents hadn't told me about it yet (didn't know how since I was so young), so "Santa's" agenda-driven note was clearly coming from a good place. I get it now.

At any rate, Santa was debunked for me much earlier than most but after that nothing changed except I didn't bother with the milk and cookies. I understood the holiday as a time where we celebrate the year gone by and give presents to our loved ones. We still did stockings for little gifts, and got a tree to decorate, and had people over on Xmas Day. I think if you can reframe Xmas to be a time of year in this spirit, it will still feel celebratory even if there's a little less "magic".

(And on the bright side you can get rid of that damn Elf on a Shelf, aka my nemesis. EOAS didn't come along till I was well into my 20s but goddamn I hate that damn Elf and when my stepkids were little my partner and I would hope and hope every year that THIS was the year his kids finally figured out Santa was fake so we could hurl that stupid Elf in the bin. His youngest held on till he was 11. Oof.)
posted by nayantara at 8:42 AM on January 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I also figured it out due to handwriting, but I kept up the ruse that I believed for a couple more years. That didn't matter much, as I have younger cousins, so all the kids received something from Santa at the joint get-togethers, anyway. The subsequent conversation -- when I let on that I knew and how -- is lost to memory, but that means it probably wasn't a big deal.

The only difference with other anecdotes here, perhaps, is that I'm in my 30s and I still get Santa gifts when I go home to visit (very tongue-in-cheek). I'll come downstairs, there's a stuffed stocking on the couch, parents will say, "Look what Santa brought!" and I'll gasp and say, "Aw, thanks, Santa!" and it'll be a chocolate orange or something with other candy treats. It's very funny, and it's touching that my parents still take the time to set it up. But I also just think my mom wants an excuse to use actually use the stocking for its intended purpose, instead of keeping it unused in a box until the end of time.
posted by lesser weasel at 4:21 PM on January 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't remember ever believing in Santa as a child. In my family, "Santa" is a game that everyone is in on -- the purpose of the game is for everyone to get presents for everyone else, while not taking credit for their specific presents. When I was little, my contribution was some kind of little handmade gift for each family member (I don't know if anyone told me to do that or if it just seemed logical at the time).

Obviously today the adults have a pretty good idea of who got which gift for whom, but we still say "whaaat? It's not from me, it's from Santa" if anyone tries to thank anyone, or we "thank Santa" instead of directly thanking other people. As an adult I think that this is a pretty wholesome way to emphasize that gift-giving should be selfless, and to discourage direct comparisons of whose gift was "better", more expensive, etc..

I'm an only child; encountering other children who literally did believe in Santa was a bit of a shock. My parents had to warn me not to give the game away. I was a very truthful child, so I think I may have scarred at least one playmate emotionally by mistake.
posted by confluency at 1:37 AM on January 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

When I was growing up, we were never formally a post-Santa house. One of my siblings is much younger than the rest so we had to keep it up for his sake. And now, if you ask my mother or any of my siblings whether Santa is real, we will all say yes. I think the only thing we changed was that we no longer put out the mince pie & port (and carrot for Rudolph) on Christmas Eve by the time the youngest was 12 or so. Otherwise, we carried on with Christmas stockings from my dad and other Santa-related family traditions every year until he died.
posted by plonkee at 2:36 AM on January 24, 2022

I don't remember the exact way that we became a post-Santa house - I figured it out before I admitted it, and I remember a year or so of willful denial on my own part. But eventually my brother also figured it out, and I don't remember that event in particular.

However, I do remember what happened in my family post-Santa, and have spoken about it before: instead of Santa, we all started getting presents from a guy named Sam Yakaboochie.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:53 AM on January 24, 2022

I'm an only child. I sorta caught on one year when I got up to go to the bathroom and Santa had been there, but my folks were *still up* and in the kitchen. I played along a lot longer than was probably reasonable, because I didn't want to lose the stockings and all the tradition. When it was finally acknowledged, it was explained to me that (and this still makes me cry) Santa is the spirit that lives in all of us, being generous and kind. So after that, everything in your stocking and any presents you didn't know you were getting were always from Santa. Like, the year my Dad has his eye on a new fishing reel but was going to buy it with his tax refund, and it showed up under the tree instead.
posted by ApathyGirl at 3:06 PM on January 24, 2022

Growing up my parents were careful to have the one big gift come with a blank FROM tag. It was implied that Santa provided, and later it was implied that your younger siblings didn't need to hear anything else about it. Eventually all the little ones got the message and my parents continued to not label the gifts from them until the days when they started dropping things off for the grandkids.
posted by Cris E at 7:38 AM on January 27, 2022