Did you ever believe in Santa Claus?

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I'm wondering what difference Asperger's/autism makes in belief in this common lie parents tell children around Christmastime.

I did believe in Santa as a kid, in fact for longer than my NT sister!! I even believed it in the face of an engineer's take on Santa, basically stating that he'd be squashed to pink goop with the acceleration his sleigh would need to get to all the world's houses in time!! I thought he worked through magic making the normal laws of physics not apply to him! Today, even though I know for a fact Santa doesn't really exist, I still find it fun to act like he does. It makes a nice motivation to be good towards others as opposed to selfish!

Did you ever believe in Santa Claus, or in magic, as a kid? I guess you could say I'm bringing this up in October so people have a little more time to redeem themselves if they haven't been so nice...

You mean Santa doesn't really exist? Please say it isn't so!

Yes, I believed in Santa Claus.

I even think that autistic children believe more often in Santa, because very often they are highly naiv as children.

No. That is mostly my parents' doing. They were very staunchly religious folk who equated Santa Claus with anti-religious sentiment and perversion of the holy holiday.

If you ask me, Santa Claus is a way better imaginary fellow to believe in. All christian fundamentalism will get you is a lifetime of feeling sh***y about yourself in hopes the (imaginary) afterlife will improve things.

The Santa Claus story never made sense to me as a kid. All my presents had labels on them saying who they were from. None of them were actually from Santa himself; so I assumed Santa was just a guy who worked for the Post Office who delivered parcels while wearing a funny red costume.

As I grew a little older I realised that Christians swapped one make believe character for another as they grew up. Instead of presents at Christmas for being "good" they get an afterlife in some fictional place they call heaven.

Yep I did. I believed in him for so long that my parents had to tell me that he didn't exist. I didn't work it out for myself. I was quite upset that they lied to me.

I was the last in my elementary school class (the entire class, not just the classroom) to find out that he didn't exist.

No, I didn't. I even marched up to my mom at age 5 (when I finally worked it out) to announce that of course he couldn't be real. And then I was pissed that people had lied to me.

I was a weird kid. At least my mom admitted the truth but asked me to keep it on the DL, for the sake of my sister.

My own kids are questioning now, and the older one (age 8 ) is wavering. I never held Santa (and presents) above them as a threat in order to extort good behavior, unlike their other relatives. I just presented him as the spirit of Christmas.

Yes, for quite a long time actually. Until I was about 12.

My mother had to tell me he wasn't real.

I believed the myth of a kindly grandfather figure who rewarded good children, until I learned about pedophiles ("... He sees you when you're sleeping; He knows when you're awake ..."); sweatshops (where third-world children were paid starvation wages - if they're paid at all - and forced to manufacture toys for first-world children); and animal cruelty (making 8 or 9 reindeer drag a sleigh filled with millions of tons of toys around the world in 24 hours).

That's when I grew up.

To be honest: I don't remember. I really don't know.

I think I remember that I never really cared, though.

My Santa Claus drives a brown truck and wears a brown uniform that says UPS. He comes whenever I want him to and is not restricted to the 25th of December.

My parents always labeled a present 'from Santa' so I was quite happy to believe them for a while... although I suspect I was always a bit sceptical - I clearly remember staying up all night to catch him out.

I can't actually remember the when I stopped believing.. I think it was probably just an 'oh, that makes sense' moment that I no longer remember.

I believed up until I was about 5. Then I saw my grandmother coming to the house with big bags of presents just before christmas day, and I thought to myself "hmmmmmmm....."

Yep. I believed everything grown ups told me. I even missed all the hints about him not being real and I still thought "Oh Santa uses other peoples wrapping paper" "Oh parents buy toys and Santa gives it to you." I have found Christmas presents in the attic and dad told me they were Christmas presents. I didn't get the hint at age four. Let's see, when I was about seven or eight I found wrapping paper we didn't even use to wrap our own presents and there were presents wrapped in that paper that were from Santa. When I was six, i saw our family Christmas photo album from that year and I saw that Santa had already came and there were all the grown ups in them and I thought then Santa had already came and they all met him while us kids were in bed and they all took pictures after he left. My father and grandfather also built me a dollhouse while we were visiting them out in Montana and they built it in his garage and my brother and I watched them cutting boards. I didn't even notice we had the thing on top when we went home and there I saw it on Christmas day and it was from Santa but my parents said they brought it back and made it. I thought they helped him because there be no way he could fit it down the chimney so they made it for him and he gave it to me when he arrived. Also I never got everything I wanted and my friend got The Little Mermaid fish aquarium I wanted and my brother's friend got Sonic the hedgehog doll he also wanted. We had both asked for those things and instead our friends got them. I just thought Santa made a mistake and he also made mistakes every year giving me stuff because he never followed my wishlist. He only like gave me one or two items from it and the rest were not on the wishlist but I liked those presents anyway. Mom would tell me he has to save toys for the other kids or else he will run out and some kids will be sad Santa didn't come to their house. But I just thought if he could fit all these presents in his sack, he should be able to make me all the toys I want and could fit those in there too and give them to me and he still wouldn't run out.

Then when I was nine, one of my best friends told me and I felt relieved. That explained everything and all the mistakes he had made over the years. But I still believed in him for fun until age 15. I also figured out if he wasn't real, then the Easter bunny couldn't be either nor the tooth fairy.

I did believe in him just as much as the other children did. I stopped believing in him when I was about 9. Nobody told me really, I just kind of stopped believing in him all of a sudden, and I think my parents knew that because they started to not act like there was a Santa, so I kind of used common sense and thought, ''oh right, Santa was just a thing to make Christmas more magical for the little children.'' And I didn't think about it after that. But I still had to play along with all the Santa thing to my younger cousins (who were all NTs) because they still strongly believed in him.