I am almost positive that no one under the age of fifteen reads my articles or is even my friend on Facebook, but just in case you found this anyway and have gotten this far, just know that the rest of this article is about taxes and coffee and you won’t like it.

Are they gone? Okay, so anyway, I thought I would share the story about how I found out that Santa wasn’t real. I seriously can’t remember how old I was, but I couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven, which I think is pretty late as it is. It was Christmas time, obviously and I was looking for some wrapping paper to wrap presents I had probably made at school for my family. I knew that there was a specific bin my mom kept the paper and tape and scissors in, so it’s not even like I was snooping where I shouldn’t have been. I shuffled through my options and stumbled across a jolly print of Santa smiling with rosy cheeks and presents. It took me as long as cutting out the size of paper I needed before I thought to myself, "hey this actually looks very familiar, but no other presents under the tree are wrapped in this paper". The more I stared at it, the more suspicious I became, and I suddenly had some kind of brain blast Jimmy Neutron style. This was no ordinary paper; this was the same wrapping paper Santa had used last year. Santa wrapping paper was always different from our wrapping paper because it came from the North Pole, duh.

I sat there in disbelief, mostly trying to figure out how the hell my mom got her hands on some real, authentic wrapping paper from the North Pole. I went out to the kitchen where my mom was making dinner and jokingly confronted her about it, kind of fishing for an excuse but mostly hoping she just had some kind of in with the fat man himself and that’s why we had the paper. She just sank down to me and said that she was sorry that I had to find out in such an “awful” way (bless her heart), but that Santa was in fact, a made up character. Suddenly, everything made sense. Mind you, I already found out about the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny due to some parental slip-ups but I neglected to make the correlation that Santa was also a hoax because I am simply oblivious. I burst into ugly tears and squeezed my mom, truly under the impression that my whole life had been a lie and that the death of Santa was the true beginning of my adulthood.

I was in a funk the next few days leading up to the big day, still depressed but trying to hold it together for my brothers, whose happiness and joy made me sick. How could they be so blind? Our own parents had been lying to us for years and they were too busy playing with Legos to realize it! They were also eight and six, but whatever. We still made cookies for Santa and wrote him a note, but I did it with less pizazz than my usual jolly self. Come Christmas morning, opening my present from Santa was rough. I also realized that the fancy “Love, Santa” script was my mom’s handwriting. I was in awe. I actually couldn’t believe that my parents could pull off the masterful façade without my knowing, and the fact that I was convinced that my parents didn’t eat the cookies and drink the milk is extremely comical to me today. Obviously, Christmas that year was still fun, though I was jealous my little brothers still got to believe. So I ruined it the next year and told them the truth because I am an awful big sister and found happiness in their woe from time to time.