The end of Magical Thinking

Did your family hold the tradition of Father Christmas/Santa Claus/Saint Nicholas?

“What’s a moment you really noticed yourself change?” I asked my eight- year- old son recently. Without hesitation he answered: “When you finally told me that Santa isn’t real. Everything was different.” 

This child had been trying to unpick the mystery of Santa since he was two years old. It wasn’t just Santa that he was suss on, it was all of the magical beings that delight so many of us when we’re young. He wasn’t having a bar of the Easter Bunny, and thought the Tooth Fairy was a phony.

And it’s not like we were bad at doing the behind the scenes work. We half ate carrots, left silly notes and paid the going rate for front teeth, but his suspicions grew year on year and increased in sophistication. 

“How on earth could a tiny fairy carry a huge coin?” 

“These footprints are clearly made of flour not snow.”

“If Santa’s real, why haven’t I got the ipad I asked for?” 

He would write letters to the tooth fairy to try and outwit her/him:

Dear Tooth Fairy,

If you are real, please don’t give me money. Give me a super rare Pokemon GX card.

My mum and dad could never get that card so it will mean you are real.

We kept up the game for many years, partly because we were worried about him breaking his little sister’s heart – unlike him, she lived for fairies and giant chocolate giving rabbits. 

But mostly because he would run away whenever he sensed we might give him a real answer to his questions. Even though he wanted to know, there was a part of him that didn’t. A part of him that understood there was a big world-wide game at play, that others didn’t question, and that (apart from the iPad) delivered the goods!
 

But one night on a long car trip as his sister slept beside him, he spoke out of the darkness in a slow and serious voice:

“Mum. Please tell me the truth - is Santa real?”

I felt a knot in my throat because this was obviously the moment. He was strapped in, with nowhere to run even if he wanted to. So, quietly, gently, and with a mixture of relief and sadness his father and I spent the next two hours answering logistical questions about how it all worked.

We had to tell him when exactly we put presents out, when the eggs were hidden and where his baby teeth were now. We watched him take it all in.

The silences were long, and heavy and he told us it made him feel sad and weird to know this new information.

We told him he now had a new role. From now on, he would be part of the magic and would share the job of keeping the magic alive for his younger sister and other children in our lives.  

He takes this new role very seriously, pretending to go to sleep with his sister on Christmas Eve and then hopping out of bed to chew on the carrots and put presents under the tree. Perhaps there is magic in this? Magic in the care he takes when sprinkling the flour, and the glee he feels when his Sister is none the wiser. It’s a sign of a job well done.

When I asked him the question about change, I would never have predicted that this would have been his answer, but as we talked more, I realised that this moment marked the end of his magical thinking. It was a shift like no other that he’d experienced. It was bittersweet.

Aside from perhaps the Loch Ness monster and sightings of UFO’s the world becomes very, very normal once you know that Santa is just an older man, dressed up in a big red suit.