I was a very skeptical, practical child – so it says a lot about the “magic” of Christmas that I fully bought into the Santa Claus thing. Even after some of my friends stopped believing in first and second grade, I clung fast.
“In Little House on the Prairie, they have a visitor come to their house on Christmas who actually saw Santa!” I remember telling my best friend. “He talked to him and everything, Kate! And those books are true, so that means Santa is really real. It’s proof.”
(I was concerned enough about the practicality that I asked my mother, who worked at a nonprofit, if Santa Claus got grant money to pay for all of the gifts, but I was still a die-hard believer.)
By the time I turned 8, though, my childhood sense of wonder had faded away and I accepted, one by one, that the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and finally Santa Claus were all not real.
Christmas was still fun and all – I got presents and time off from school and a big box of summer sausage and cheese from my Wisconsin grandparents – but it never felt quite the same as it did in my earliest years, when everything felt so exciting and special.
When I had my own kids, years later, I went along with the whole Santa myth. We wrote notes and baked cookies to leave for Santa with a glass of milk. We hung stockings. We even put out carrots for the reindeer. It was lovely, and it did seem to bring back some of those old feelings and memories from my own childhood.
But what was different, of course, was that now I was the one who had to make the magic.
Christmas Eve became a time of stress and little sleep as I had to wait out my extremely keyed-up and not-at-all-sleepy children, and then, once they had finally succumbed to sleep, wrap all of the “Santa presents” in special paper, crumble some cookie bits onto the plate, pour the glass of milk down the sink, take a bite out of the carrot, stuff the stockings for the entire family, and write notes in which I tried to disguise my handwriting.
Was it worth it? Of course. Absolutely. There is not a much better feeling than happy, grateful kids on Christmas while you smile and chug coffee.
And when my kids, many years apart, stopped believing in Santa, it was kind of bittersweet. Just as it did when I myself stopped believing, it changes the holiday, lets a little bit of magic out of it, just like air from a balloon.
I miss the days of the kids making lists for Santa or taking them to the mall for Santa pictures, where they would whisper their secret wishes into his ear. There is no mystery anymore about what they want.
If my Facebook algorithm were not already offering me up links to various articles, all titled some iteration of, “The Hottest TikTok Products to Make Your Kid Think You’re the Coolest Mom This Christmas,” my kids themselves are sending me carefully curated wish lists on Amazon.
I once drove to Hattiesburg to get the perfect Christmas present for my older daughter, so just clicking “add to cart” seems … anticlimactic somehow.
But the upside is … I don’t have to stay up until 2 a.m. wrapping presents and pretending to eat cookies and carrots. Instead, we can get into our PJs and watch a movie. We still bake cookies. We still hang stockings. We still hang our favorite sentimental ornaments every year. The traditions are changing, but they’re still there.
And honestly, that’s magic enough for me.