My nine year old daughter still believes in Santa Claus

why now?

Let her find out for herself, but don't lie if she asks directly.

What do you mean there's no such thing as Santa?

Of course there is a Santa. I just saw him.

You don't see him if you don't believe in him.

Francis Church said it best when he wrote:



Dear Editor?-

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Jeremiah--

Exactly what worried you about your daughter's belief in Santa? Are you worried about her being teased by her friends? Do you think she "believes" to please her parents?

Re: My nine year old daughter still believes in Santa Claus


Why do that? I still believe in Santa!

tell her if you have to... but don't tell her there's no Easter Bunny....

I never was told about Santa, but I did believe in the tooth fairy.

Does the tooth fairy ever smile?

Definately your first question is yes.

Maybe on your second question.

Shawanga, I hope she is not precocious and uses "Santa Claus" as a synomym for "sugar daddy."

Jeremiah--

If I were you, I'd leave some evidence that simply cannot be ignored and then talk about these "clues" with good humor and great detachment. Let her come to the conventional "adult" conclusions and then congratulate her on her good sense and her good heart.

my daughters (8 soon to be 9) and (7) still believe in Santa Claus.

I will not tell them otherwise.

I don't think it does them any harm to continue to believe. I do encourage this belief when they tell me their friends told them there is no such thing as Santa. I just say "didn't you see him come into town last night on his Sleigh?" And their belief remains undaunted.

They are aware that some presents come from family, and some come from Santa. My youngest even got a bit of coal this year.

I like it that way. Children lose innocence too fast these days as it is, I won't be the one to help rip it away.

I volunteered with kids at an elementary school for years, and I never saw it get made into a big deal amongst them if someone still believed. It was of course a big topic of conversation among them for a few weeks a year, but no one really got hassled if they said they still believed... As a matter of fact, I pretty frequently saw some cute displays of concern among the non-believers to not spoil it for the ones who still believed. I wouldn't worry about it.

We wont do the santa thing..

(sigh)

though I loved the idea as a kid.

These are my thoughts as well. I don't see any reason to worry about it at all.

Yep, I agree, especially with cyphercat.

I thought, when the season started, that my kid didn't actually believe in Santa but just enjoyed everything around the Santa story and so didn't want to make it stop by indicating that she thought it wasn't true. As the season went on, I became less sure of that. I just played along.

She's 7, not 9, but the chatter in her classroom is evidently that Santa is real. One kid had great cachet because Santa actually opened the door to his room and said "Merry Christmas, ho-ho-ho," before disappearing, one Christmas Eve. (A dad? Made up from whole cloth? Who knows.)

At any rate, we ended up doing the whole thing. Milk and cookies for Santa, plus she gave him a present since, and I quote (from the note she wrote for Santa):

"I think it is really nice that you have brote gifts to children all over the world, pore or rich. So I want to give you somthing... a pensil to wiete you list with."

She didn't know what she wanted for Christmas (from Santa or anyone) up until the last minute, then wrote a letter to Santa saying what she wanted on Thursday afternoon. I couldn't find it in local stores, ordered it from eBay, paid for rush shipping, but it didn't arrive on time. Drat. So I changed over another present to be from Santa, and he wrote that he didn't get her letter in time to find that specific Webkinz (that she wanted) but that he has an elf working on it. Put some effort into figuring out how to wrap it in paper she didn't recognize. (The gift I ordered was wrapped by sender, so I didn't buy any special Santa giftwrap.) Ended up cobbling something together from plain white paper I'd bought by the roll for something else, overlaid with some clear cellophane with shiny red dots that had been used as tissue in a gift bag but I'd saved. Barely enough. (Microscope.)

Anyway, the point is just that I went to some effort this year to keep the Santa thing going. I'll follow her cues.