Keep the magic or he should grow up now

[Glitterfish]

My DS is a lovely chatting outgoing boy but he is very innocent. He has just started secondary this year and seems to be settling in very well.

However in the last week he started mentioning Santa and asking where Elfie is. Now I thought he knew last year as he was talking about cost of his gift in advance and whether he should ask Santa or not and so assumed it was all over in terms of Santa but he was just keeping up a pretence (as kids do). He hasn't said much about Santa this year - one or 2 passing references but he was getting a bit upset yesterday and today that Elfie hadn't made an appearance yet.

What do I do?
YABU: Tell him now (and potentially ruin the magic of Christmas)
YANBU: Wait till after Christmas (although he may potentially mention something in school and face ridicule)

PS. We do have a very nice Elfie (wooden with handmade clothes so I don't mind it around :).

We're in ireland and kids here tend to believe later it seems in uk. My 11 year old still believes a s this year according to the class what's ap group it's about half n half. The plan is to tell them next spring
I think if he's gotten this far I'd let it continue now until after Xmas but it really isn't that unusual where we are for kids to believe later .

It sounds like it's time for a conversation, OP.

Year 7 boys can be brutal on this.

There's no need to lose the magic of Xmas. You can still opt to 'believe' at home and continue with the traditions. Maybe he could get involved in the placing of Elfie this year?

I'd be pretty annoyed if I was paying private school fees and their teaching of critical reasoning skills was poor enough that an 11 year old still believes in magical flying reindeer circumnavigating the globe in one night...

You might, but I'm not!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have no issues with an 11 year old believing in the magic.

I'm sure visiting Lapland helped.

I'd bet my life he knows but wants to keep the family traditions going. My 16 and 26 year olds still shout "he's been!" When they go downstairs on Christmas morning and discover the filled stockings on the fireplace

My step kids are teens and still believe. Or they are doing a very good job of pretending for their mum’s sake. My husband asked me if he should tell them and I said no, they’ll figure it out. (No ASN). He mentioned the possibility of a bullying thing at secondary school too, and I reasoned that they can probably navigate a few cringeworthy convos about it. Secondary school is a lot of navigating cringe. I really think it’s best just left. Leaving it also means leaving Elfie. But obviously he should still come down from the loft as a Christmas decoration - because that is literally what he is.

My dog definitely believes in Father Christmas who brings her treats and maybe a new coat or soft blanket.

Oh yes! the ''He's BEEN!!'' {with jokes around that !} love that!

I'm guessing they don't specialise in the sciences.

If there is a bubble to be burst do it now.
We had DH’s secondary age nephew (no additional needs) trying to hide tears on Christmas Day last year because he’d told his friends what Santa had got him and they absolutely ridiculed him. He kept saying how he couldn’t believe Santa wasn’t real. I felt so sorry for him actually (as well as shocked and glad I hadn’t been the one to let slip because until then I had assumed it was just an act that he believed it).

@Glitterfish of course they know. DS still couldn't believe I thought he still believed in it when I approached the subject.
I think it's us parents doing the fairy story as we don't really want to do big DC's stuff yet 😂

Ha ha me and my brother do this still even though we're 36 and 39 and both married living in our own places - we text it to the family group chat with our parents 🤣

Oh dear God, you sound insufferable. It's a bit of fun FFS.

I have to say that absolutely none of these issues would arise if adults stopped lying to small children — who are programmed to believe what their parents say — and insisting that a highly commercialised magical being is real. It’s totally unnecessary. Children are good at pretending and can enjoy going along with the game from a very young age. They don’t need to be told it’s real.

My son is ten.
He thinks it's Santa buying all the presents because he knows/thinks there is no way I could afford them 😂
It's such simple child logic

My kids are 21, 19 and 14. They've known for years that it's not real, yet we still have to out the plate out for Santa and the reindeer and watch the norad Santa tracker. We just all love Christmas!🎄

Jesus Christ. Lighten up!! It’s a bit of magic at Christmas time, why are you using it as an excuse to have a dig at a school?!

It’s an opportune point to share that one of my happiest Christmas memories is that of stridently, aged four, upbraiding another girl for believing in Santa, only for the whole classroom to fall deathly silent at my exasperated outburst. In retrospect, I believe I gave the rest of my class the gift of scepticism that Christmas.

Because it's ridiculous for a child on the cusp of puberty to still believe in a fairy story and we wouldn't think it was cute if it was any other fairy story. Unlike most religions, it's very easily disprovable and any child over the age of 7/8 should see obvious holes. It indicates that they a) Have no understanding of cultures other than their own and don't realise that different countries have different magical beings who bring gifts on different days, or don't even celebrate Christmas at all, b) Are unaware of the large parts of the world where many children are living in absolute poverty, yet Santa won't even be dropping off a decent meal for them and b) Have a seriously shaky understanding of physics, time and distance.

All normal and adorable when you are 5, not in the slightest bit when you are 5 years off sitting your GCSEs and should have a bit of understanding of the world, and you'd expect in a fee-paying school they would have a really good grounding in the basics, including scientific method, by the age of 11.

Playing along with it for fun or the benefit of younger siblings is one thing, but genuinely thinking it's a real thing is worrying and I'd be concerned about my child if they did.

But if you encourage your children to believe in Santa, you are nonetheless encouraging them to believe in a Christian saint. There aren't separate Santas catering to individual belief systems.

One of the reasons why we as a family have had such fun with continuing Christmas traditions is because it has always been ‘make believe’ - a fantastic story to tell and read and follow and all become children in playing our part in.

We never tried to insist that Father Christmas was real, any more than any of the other role plays my dc revelled in over the years were real. But role play and suspended disbelief is fantastic fun and one is never too old for it.

Oh come on! The red-jacketed Coca Cola Santa who lives at the North Pole is absolutely nothing to do with the Christian saint (Nicholas or Claus). He is an entirely secular and commercial figure.

Put him in charge of the Elfie tradition, get him to move it about and create scenarios. He then learns the truth gently, and the tradition carries on (or not because it's a pain in the butt having to keep moving the flipping elf about).

He might start questioning who puts the work in for the rest of the stuff too if you are lucky

We told our autistic 11 year old that belief can be a matter of choice, it's not always about what you consider the science says. Don't get into discussions with people at school about whether Santa exists, just keep quiet and keep your own council. You wouldn't and shouldn't quiz a religious child on why they believe what they believe and we all understand that different people believe different things, so this is not a discussion you need to have.

At home we gradually brought them in with a nudge and a wink but without ever sitting them down and telling them it's lie. You can't take back bursting the bubble whereas if you don't confirm, they can hang onto the choice of believing as long as they need to - sometimes long after the science is stacking up against.

You can be a bit more nuanced about that. Santa is a cultural construct made from many sources, only one of which is the Christian legend of St Nicholas of Myra. There’s also something rather obviously Odinic about a bearded wanderer visiting houses to judge whether the inhabitants have been virtuous or not, for instance.

Christian religious authorities have violently resented Father Christmas for being secular/pagan/fun since at least the fifteenth century.