Every parent has to decide for themselves what to tell their children about Santa Claus.
If you shared the classic Christmas story about the North Pole, Santa, his elves and reindeer, for how long do you keep up the charade and let them believe? It can be so fun to let them have those few extra years of magic, but at some point, they’ll be old enough to feel that it’s more about a betrayal of trust than the death of a childhood fantasy.
Finding the right age to drop the Santa-Isn’t-Real Truth Bomb can be tough. For mom Nikki Adams it didn’t come until her daughter was ten years old. Her daughter kept nagging her for the answer, almost as if in the back of her mind she knew her mom wasn’t telling the truth. So Adams finally decided to give her daughter what she wanted.
In a Facebook post to her friends after coming clean to her daughter, Adams wrote, “The time has finally come. Belle asked point blank about Santa and she’s been asking every day. So we were truthful and she may never speak to us again……especially when we lost our ever loving shit at the pictures on the right that she slid under the door to us…..#dontlaugh.” Adams also attached a photo to the post: a picture of an angry note her daughter had written her later and slid under her parents’ bedroom door.
The note says, “You have no idea what you just did. I really tried to believe. Everyone told me, ‘It’s your parents.’” I can’t believe you anymore. Is the Easter Bunny real? How ‘bout the Tooth Fairy, huh? You just ruined a 10-year-old child’s LIFE, thanks. Nothing will make me feel better. U lied to me about something I loved that BROKE my heart. #middlefingeremoji”.
As you can see, little Belle was pretty distraught. Luckily, her parents seem to feel pretty confident that she will get over it. Obviously, the rest of us know that the realization that Santa doesn’t really exist didn’t destroy our lives for long, though some of us certainly remember feeling betrayed or devastated over it.
