I believed in Santa Claus until I was 13 years old.

I don’t mean to say I truly thought, deep down, that a portly man with a beard and a sleigh crept into my house at midnight on Christmas Eve night until I was 13 years old (though I did truly believe that longer than most), but I did purport to believe in him until then. You see, that was the first year my parents finally slipped up on the whole Santa thing.

They were, until then, perfect at executing the illusion, but that year, I was looking for something in their closet a little before the holiday and stumbled upon a kit of optical illusions. I assumed immediately that it was a gift for me, but then on Christmas morning, I opened a box labeled “from Santa” (complete with different wrapping paper, label, and handwriting). It was that kit. Now, I may well have known prior to this moment that Santa wasn’t real, but in that moment of proof, my heart sank like the Titanic. I was almost in tears. For several years after this, my parents kept up the charade, but eventually, once my sister and I were both in high school (she is two years my junior), they stopped altogether.

Despite this, my sister and I still try to keep it up. I still try my darndest to be in bed by midnight on Christmas Eve, despite my average bed time being something more like 2 a.m. My sister and I still insist that my mother label a few things as from Santa, that she not put anything in our stockings until that night. We only ceased laying out cookies for the old man a few years ago.

Why do I do these things if I no longer believe the myth to be “real?"

Well, I suppose it’s because, for me, knowledge and belief are two very different things. I can believe something to be true that I know to be false, and I can refuse to believe something that I know to be true. We do this sort of mental juxtapositioning all the time. We refuse to accept a diagnosis of a nasty disease. We search for evidence of Elvis and of Bigfoot. Most notably, we have religion.

While yes, of course, many followers of the world’s religions truly feel they know their respective doctrines to be true, but many follow because it brings them comfort in times of trouble and gives them a way to understand things that they otherwise could not. For some people, religion provides the only way to get through the loss of a child or a friend. For others, religion may do the opposite.

For me, personally, religion, in the sense of belief in something, some sort of higher power or whatever, does nothing. It makes me feel actually emptier, as though the purpose of my life and existence has been stripped and replaced with a puppet scheme of a god of some sort.

There are beliefs I hold in other things that produce the same feelings of comfort and belonging and purpose in me that religion produces in some people, I’d imagine. I believe in science, or rather, I know science to be true in the way others know their religious beliefs to be true. I can argue the objectivity of that claim, but then I could easily counter it with a metaphysical argument, leading us down an endless rabbit hole that helps absolutely no one.

I believe in magic. I insist on picking up every decent stick I find to try to cast a spell. I believe in love: absolute, unconditional love, in many forms. I believe in the good of humanity, no matter how much evidence to the contrary I am faced with. I believe in ritual, that doing something a certain way at a regular time (putting up a Christmas tree, for example) will have a certain result (a feeling of warmth and light that little else can produce). And so I guess I believe in Santa Claus.

I believe in the power of a myth about an old gift-bearing man to bring people together. I believe in the power of flying reindeer to defy our understanding of time and space. I believe in the power of elves and of weird magnetic forces that render a massive factory at the North Pole invisible to the naked eye. I may know all of these things to be false, know them to be impossible, and have proof to negate their truth. But I believe in them all the same. And frankly, so far as my belief harms no one else, I think that’s a darn beautiful thing.