When Did You Stop Believing in Santa?

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You can either say that I’m a slow learner or that I’m hopelessly naive. I believed in Santa until I was 9 years old. Even then I still held out a slight glimpse of hope that maybe, just maybe, Santa could still be real.

When I was young my parents would somehow manage to decorate the whole living room in one night without ever waking me and tell me that Santa did it during the night. I’m not too proud of this, but Christmas morning when I was 8 years old and still obliviously wide-eyed, I took a tape measure out and measured the footprints on the carpet in our living room and compared them to my parent’s shoes before even glancing at the presents. What can I say? I read a lot of Nancy Drew back then and I was determined to catch jolly old Saint Nick.

When I was 9 years old my mom finally came clean about the decorations after I accused Santa of ripping off my dad’s design styles.

Nowadays I’ve met 4-year-olds who’ve rolled their eyes at me when I asked them what they’re hoping Santa will bring them for Christmas. Hanging around parents who are still seriously stressed out about their kids finding out that Santa’s not real doesn’t really happen anymore, but it’s not hard to understand why some parents still want their kids to believe in Santa Claus and the magic of Christmas. In a practical sense, it’s great for teaching kids geography and cultural diversity – trying to track Santa’s journey across the globe in one night and stopping in every country.

Here’s the question of the season.

How old were you when you realized that Santa’s not real?

Most of us living in Beijing are in apartments and even those of us living in villas don’t always have chimneys.

’Tis the season to be jolly. ’Tis also the season for the serious debate of how, logistically speaking, one fat man can make his way around the world and sneak into homes, bypassing state-of-the-art alarm systems and hyperactive family pets.

Photos: unsplash, giphy, Pexels

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