We don't do Santa with our kiddos. They get gifts from, like, real people only. They understand their gifts mostly come from stores (modulo, you know, hand-made things).

When the last year when then then-5yo started asking about it, we just said that, no, Santa wasn't real. He's just in books and stories and stuff like Mikey Mouse or Rosie Revere. We also said not to talk about that fact with friends because some parents pretend that Santa is real as a sort of game with their kids. But that we didn't really like that game, so we don't play it. The response was basically, "Oh. OK."

This is mostly about not lying to our kids, for us. We don't do the tooth fairy (though the eldest has gotten lost-a-tooth-money) or easter bunny (though we still hunt eggs) or any of that shit. We just, like, wanna be super straight with our kids all the time and not undermine their trust by perpetrating a multi-year hoax on them.

Not that finding out Santa isn't real broke my relationship with my parents or anything. IDK. It's just a hardline principle thing we decided.

And no shade on you if you do Santa with your kids. You gotta do you. This is just us doin' us.

@benhamill
We felt the same, but our daughter started believing in santa real hard, all by herself. We figured telling her would be much shittier parenting than pretending he was real in the first place…

@shadowfirebird Yeah. Society sort of assumes that every kid gets told the same thing about Santa.