A big, inflatable Easter Bunny that we saw tonight on our walk (like this) is what got me thinking about this story. |
I was in second or third grade and there were a lot of rumors going around school about whether or not Santa Claus was real or make believe and I just had to know the truth. So I started hounding my parents for answers. I was begging them to tell me the truth. They were convinced that I was still too young to know the truth so they kept telling me, "of course Santa Claus is real."
I still wasn't convinced, even after all of the assurances that Santa Claus was real so I started explaining the very logical and practical reasons about why it was so important that I get to the bottom of this Santa Claus issue. I explained to my parents that if I spent the rest of my life believing that Santa Claus was in fact real, when I have children of my own, I won't buy them gifts because I assume that Santa would bring them and if it turns out that there is no Santa Claus, my kids won't have gifts at Christmas! Even at age 6 or 7 I was already aware of what a bad mother that would make me one day!
I was a pretty smart kid, huh? My dad thought so too and was pretty impressed with my logical reasoning. Just as he was about to give in and tell me the truth about Santa Claus, I said to him, "Now I know the Easter Bunny is real, but I'm just not sure about Santa Claus."
That's when my dad knew I was definitely not at the maturity level to know the truth about Santa Claus. A man delivering gifts to the homes of children seemed very skeptical to me, yet, a bunny, hopping from house to house delivering eggs and Easter Baskets seemed perfectly logical.
I'm pretty sure I learned the truth about Santa Claus that year anyway, when I caught my parents putting my brother's race track together around the tree on Christmas Eve. They tried to say something like "Santa delivered it but we had to put it together," but I wasn't buying it. After all, I was way too smart for that. ;)
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