“No Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, you greedy little bitch. Now get your ass back in the kitchen and help your mother do the dishes.”

Okay, so not quite the warmth of the popular lie that became a holiday tradition after Francis P Church wrote his famous reply as an editorial in New York’s Sun back in 1897. But those were simpler times. Readers were thrilled with the editorial and repeatedly asked the paper to reprint it each year, which it did sporadically until the 1920s, when it was finally an annual feature until the paper folded in 1950. The lesson here is not that the world needs Santa, but rather that liars never prosper. Whether or not to admit to the little ones that Santa is but a joke, and at what age you should break the bad news, is a debate that has been going on for over a century, if not longer.

Oh, damn, Was I suppose to post a spoiler alert first? Never mind, the Easter Bunny will be exceptionally generous to you next year.

It seems every year someone gets called Scrooge or a Grinch for telling kids the truth. This year it was a second grade teacher in New York who, during a geography lesson about the North Pole, told her class of 7 and 8 year-olds there is no Santa. The community, and then the country, was outraged. Except for those who live in Chicago where a news anchor on the local FOX affiliate at the end of a segment about children’s unreasonable gift expectations announced there is no Santa on air. FOX celebrated the season by chastising the news anchor for telling the truth, something FOX tries to avoid at all costs.

Those two events prompted this post, which originally was going to jump on the bandwagon and call for the bastards’ heads. Until I started reading the responses, editorials, and comments posted on the web. There are a lot of people in the world who should just never be allowed to breed. Even when I first heard about the incident in New York I kinda thought, well, by the age of eight that’s really no big deal. By then kids should already know that Santa is a fake. But over and over again I read the comments of outraged parents whose kids were in the fourth grade, nine years-old, twelve years-old . . . and they all still believed in Santa.

Child psychologists refuse to be pinned down to an age, but all agree when your kid starts asking if Santa is real, it’s time to fess up and tell the truth. That makes sense. But if you have a twelve year-old who still believes in Santa, you’ve got a real problem on your hands. And the kid has a dipstick for a parent. Sure he will grow up to be a fan of Bill O’Reilly, but the kid has already been marked as a loser by his classmates, and that’s an opinion that will stay with him his entire life. The myth of Santa is nice. Allowing your child who is old enough to have started growing hair to believe in fairy tales is not.

At least in the Christian world, whether you are a practicing one or not, how and when you found out Santa was a big lie is a memory we all share. If you were one of the slow kids, you probably found out when all of your classmates laughed at you when you started talking about Santa’s upcoming visit. If you were one of the advanced kids, you got to share you new found knowledge with all the other kiddies and ruin their holiday too. Older siblings are notorious for spreading the bad news. And cheapskate parents tired of having to fork out for extra presents from ‘Santa’ do their part in bringing truth to the children of the world too.

My folks never had the Santa talk with me. They never had the sex talk either. But then considering even before I learned Santa was a hoax I’d already discovered the joys of playing doctor with the cute little blonde boy next door, neither discussion would probably have been comfortable for them. I didn’t find out about the big Xmas lie from either of my brothers either. I have two who were born in the same year as I was – for three months we are all the same age each year – so we all tended to discover life’s truths about the same time. But I beat them to the Santa thing. I probably also beat them to the joys of the kid next door thing too.

Parents think they are more sly than they really are. And also think their kids are dumber than they really are. As Christmas time neared each year, mine would place the garage off limits. No problemo, it’s not like the garage held anything of interest anyway. But tell a kid he can’t do something and that quickly becomes a beacon that just will not fade. At the age of five I snuck into the garage for no better reason than I was not suppose to be there.

With three boys to provide Christmas memories to, and a generous set of parents, there was a huge shelf stuffed full of toys. Sweet! Possibly proving that I really was as dumb as my parents thought I was, I failed to make the connection between the stash of toys and the upcoming holiday. Logic never stood a chance regardless of my IQ, ‘cuz among all the worthless crap filling the shelves was a real cool yellow Cocoa Cola delivery truck. The back of the truck was open and filled with tiny little wood trays, each filled with little coke bottles, just like the real delivery trucks. What? Just ‘cuz I’m gay you thought I had my young heart set on an Easy-Bake Oven?

Christmas Eve rolled around (bless my folks they allowed us to open our presents the night before Christmas) and things would have been cool if that damn truck, now wrapped in colorful paper, had a tag that said “From Dad & Mom,” But nope, instead it was “From Santa.”

Busted.

I kept mum and didn’t tell my brothers, preferring to quietly laugh at their foolishness for another year. Besides, the damn truck was killer so who cared where it came from. Better yet, it gave me a new game to play with my next door neighbor. Huh. I think I just figured out where the plot line and dialogue comes from in porn.

Another year passed, my folks played their Santa trick again, my brothers continued to believe, and I couldn’t tell you what I got for Christmas that year. But I can tell you I moved on from the blonde kid to the little Italian boy who lived on the opposite side of our house. He wasn’t quite as willing as the blonde to drop trou, and I learned another universal truth. I also learned I much preferred a challenge, and dark dusky skin to lily white shades. That was a lesson of far greater importance than learning Santa was a myth.

Eventually my brothers figured out the truth about Santa too. And my parents quit making references to the big fat guy in red and quit forging his signature to gifts, though no one ever said anything about it. I returned the favor when I decided I was gay by never having ‘the talk’ with them, and as with the truth about Santa, we all just ignore that the myth that I’m a straight man is as big of a falsehood.

Many years later at Christmas, my kid brother, who knows me far too well, asked me to not tell his six year-old son that there was no Santa Claus. He asked nicely so I went along with his wishes. I told my nephew Santa was gay instead.