At first I planned on posting this on Christmas Eve or Christmas, but then I decided this was best posted a day or two after. Best to wait until after the days of celebration were over.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't hate Santa or anything. I'm not against the tradition of believing in Santa. Though I am against trying to force children to believe in Santa if they don't believe in him.
I don't think it's wrong to ask children not to ruin the magic of Santa and Christmas for other children or anything like that. Maybe even recruit them to help the adults make the magic happen for other children.
But definitely don't try to force children into believing in the jolly fat man if they don't believe in the man in red that brings happiness and cheer to children that've been good all year.
Here's my story about not believing in Santa, and how my disbelief as a child was handled.
Growing up, my genetic cesspool was abusive and neglectful, but for some strange reason, there were specific things they went above and beyond to try to do right, or at least somewhat right?
Santa was one of these things.
For as long as I can remember, I just never believed in Santa. Unfortunately, I was often too clever for my own good when it came to some things. (However, sometimes it also saved me.)
I'm not sure all the reasons why I didn't believe in Santa. Maybe it was because someone came to my house dressed as Santa to see me, and I didn't understand why I had a personal Santa visit as well as seeing Santa at the malls in the "big city" (see, technically I grew up just outside of Kansas City in a small town that is only a short drive away), as well as at a few small (but big to the town) events around our town.
Why was Santa visiting me personally? I wasn't special. In fact, the fact that I wasn't special was being drilled into me every single day. I was lesser than the other kids. The other kids made sure I knew it, and the genetic cesspool I was born into also made sure I knew it.
So...why was Santa in my house? And why was the genetic cesspool acting so damn excited and friendly towards Santa? And encouraging Santa to interact with me? It was confusing as all hell, and made absolutely no sense to me at all. It felt wrong and it made me suspicious and distrustful of the situation. (The second year that I had a personal visit from Santa, I recognized the person in the Santa suit as a person in my life, and also as the person that had been the Santa in my house the year before. Which made things even stranger.)
But even before then, in the months leading up to Christmas, I remember being told about Santa, them trying to psych me up for Christmas. Get me all excited. Teach me about Santa and all that. Even before the strange personal visit from Santa, I didn't believe in Santa.
Maybe it was the fact that I was constantly being made to believe I was a bad child, and yet being told to just think about all the presents I was going to get from Santa. Because those two things greatly conflicted in my poor young brain. Santa didn't give bad kids presents, he brought them lumps of coal, but somehow I was gonna get lots of presents, even though I was a bad kid. Ouch. My poor little child brain.
However, as much as even that headache-inducing conflict in my brain confused me, I don't think that's what did it, either. Sure, it likely contributed, as did the strange personal Santa visit. But neither of those things by themselves, or even together in combination, were enough to have kept me from believing. No. I think the they both contributed, but the thing that really did it for me, that they just reinforced, was something that may make most of you laugh, and actually had nothing to do with my genetic cesspool directly.
So, Jada, what was it, then? The main singular thing that made you not believe in Santa?
Simple!
We didn't have a fireplace.
How the hell was Mr. Jolly Fatass supposed to get into the house to deliver presents without a fireplace? I asked this question often, and I asked this question to many people individually. Not only did everyone have different answers, but the answers varied day to day, even when asking the same person a day or two later.
Here's just handful of the dozens upon dozens, if not outright hundreds of different explanations I was given:
"Oh, well, see, when you don't have a fireplace, he comes in through the vent in the bathroom."
"He comes in through the vent above the kitchen stove."
"He comes up through the toilet if you don't have a fireplace."
"He drops a magic pebble on the roof and it turns into a chimney and a fireplace opens up in the house and he comes down into the house and leaves the presents under the tree and then he leaves up the chimney and the fireplace disappears when he's done."
"He comes in using the hidden spare key outside the house." (During my entire life there was never a spare key hidden outside the house. Ever.)
"He comes in through the mail slot in the door." (Our house didn't have a mail slot in the door.)
"He comes in through the keyhole in the door." (I would point out that you can't see through the keyhole in the door.)
Of course, I would point out the flaws in all of these explanations, and they would be forcefully argued/defended to me. To the point that I would start to be yelled at (usually turning into being outright screamed at for hours) and/or punished. (Punishments primarily included but were not limited to my ass being slapped/beaten raw -- no, not spanking, we're talking beyond that -- and other punishment that I won't elaborate on other than to call it "false imprisonment" for now and to say that my genetic cesspool would be serving 5-15 years in prison if not more if they were caught doing that to a child in our current day in age.)
Finally, they decided that I'd be yelled at and punished for not believing in Santa, but they'd no longer try to gaslight me into believing that there was some magical way that he would get into our house, as obviously there was no way to convince me that Santa had some magical way of coming into houses without chimneys. Everything I'd been read, all the stories, they all firmly told of Santa coming down the chimney. Through the fireplace.
Later on we did get a wood burning stove, but I quickly pointed out that the chimney was very narrow and there was a glass door that could only be opened from the outside. And as there was already a working system in place at that point in time, any attempts to try to argue that Santa could somehow magically make our wood burning stove's chimney work for delivering presents were quickly abandoned in favor of our already working system.
I did start pretending to believe in Santa. Surprisingly, it wasn't to avoid the yelling or the punishments.
See, to me, back then, I was very, very young. How young? We're talking three and four years old. Yes, we're talking that young. (I was taught to read at a very young age as well, so I was very aware, as I've gotten older, I've also come to notice that kids that suffer a lot of emotional abuse going up seem to have much more developed thought processes.) To me, it seemed like they were trying so hard to make Christmas good for me, and that Santa was really really important for making Christmas good. So I was being bad. So I pretended they convinced me that Santa was real. But I couldn't let go of all the illogical methods for how Santa would get into our house.
It sort of became a compromise, though an unspoken one.
I pretended to believe Santa was real and that I believed in Santa, and they pretended that Santa called the house, and then I'd be bundled up and taken on a long car ride to go look at Christmas lights. After all, I wasn't allowed to see Santa! So I got to go for a long car ride (I've always been one for car rides, so for me that was a big win.) and look at Christmas lights for an hour or two while presents were very hurriedly wrapped and put under the Christmas tree while I was out of the house on my Christmas Eve car ride.
So Christmas consisted of personal Santa visits and Christmas Eve car rides so Santa could come over and deliver presents since we didn't have a chimney.
Thankfully, the personal Santa visits stopped when I was around six, but they stopped because the person dressing up as Santa walked out of my life. Don't get me wrong, it was a good thing, but it was shitty way that it was done. He was in and out of my life, and it was very turbulent and Goddamn adults really need to get their shit together and stop dragging children through minefields full of adult bullshit.
As for my pretend belief in Santa, well, I was forced to keep pretending he was real until I was about thirteen years old. Even when all the other kids had long been told the truth about Ol' Kris Kringle, and were happily mocking those that hadn't been told, or those that still clung to those beliefs, I was forced to continue pretending to believe.
I wasn't one of those kids that went around telling other kids that Santa didn't exist. If they wanted to believe, that was their business. But oh boy, when other kids realized I was forced to pretend that Santa was real (by the genetic cesspool's over the top production and behavior, especially around other people), boy did that get me bullied to Hell and back over Santa and Christmas.
The Christmas that I was fourteen, I'd had to have some teeth removed earlier in the month to prepare for braces I'd be getting a few months later. It was then that I stood up and said enough was enough, I was fourteen years old, about to have braces, and should be entering high school soon, it was time to stop.
That resulted in a lot of yelling. Screaming. Fighting. Getting grounded and all that. (By 'grounded' we're not talking about how kids typically get grounded, but I'm not getting into the details of that right now.) It was a major issue, but I did escape it.
It would've probably been revisited and a major issue again the next year when I was fifteen, but by then I was dating the man that I'm now married to and have been with for over thirteen years now.
As I said earlier in this post, when I was much younger, I thought they were trying really hard to make Christmas good for me, and I was being bad. As I grew older, I came to realize that it wasn't about making Christmas good for me at all, rather it was about making them good parents by forcing me to believe in Santa. Because children are supposed to believe in Santa. My belief in Santa was crucial to them being good parents.
Honestly, I am kind of amazed that they stopped trying to gaslight and punish me into believing that he came into our chimney-less house through some magical means or even using a hidden spare key that didn't exist. The fact that they gave up that part is just absolutely astonishing.
My genetic cesspool made Christmas into a massive nightmare for me. There are some traditions I grew up with that are rather important to me, but overall, Christmas traditions tended to be all about things to do to me or ways to humiliate me in front of other people. Ways to punish me. Things of that nature. There were precious, intimate moments, tucked away here and there within my Christmas nightmares, however, and those are the traditions that my husband and I try to preserve. Some of them we don't have the ability to yet, but once we have the means, I think we will.
There are also some new traditions we'd like to start, and some we already have.
I think what we did this Christmas weekend will likely become a tradition: Drinking and watching bad movies. It was rather enjoyable.
Anyways, that's my story about never believing in Santa and how my genetic cesspool handled "the situation" caused by it.
I plan on sharing other Christmas related stories. Some are of a similar nature to this one, others are the more intimate and precious moments that I treasure and carry on as traditions even though I refuse to have the genetic cesspool be an active part of my life or celebrations anymore.
So there you have it! Way more than you ever wanted to know about me and Christmas.
