When I was seven, I seriously thought I could travel to Luke Skywalker's galaxy and be a Jedi with him when I grew up.

Leah figured out at something about Santa Claus at age four that I hadn't realized until I was in my twenties.

To most kids, Santa Claus is an awesome guy who brings you presents. Not to me. When I was about 4 years old and realized that the Christmas song lyrics said, "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake," I realized that Santa was a Peeping Tom who spied on me at night. I made my mom put blankets over my bedroom window (the sheer curtains didn't provide enough protection) so that Santa wouldn't come watch me while I was sleeping. And nothing they said would make me believe any differently.

When Santa came to my preschool, I wouldn't go near him at all. I thought how stupid these other kids were for sitting on the perv's lap! Didn't they know that he spied on them while they were sleeping?

I have no idea why my parents didn't just tell me then that he wasn't real. It would've made Christmastime much easier for me.

Barrett schemes a plan to befriend the animals.

When I was a small child, I was obsessed with the TV show "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams." I loved the way Adams "had a special kind of way" with the animals, and how they would "walk right up to him as if he were a natural part of the wilderness."

As much as I wanted the same ability for myself, I knew that I didn't have this particular talent, and I realized that few (if any) people did. Still, I also realized that there must have been some Hollywood trick to getting the animals in the TV show to be so trusting and friendly. The secret, I surmised, was costumes.

I figured that when the camera showed a raccoon or a skunk walking up to Adams, that there must in fact be a sort of "stunt Adams" standing behind him off camera. The "stunt Adams" would obviously be dressed up as a skunk or a raccoon, and that is what the animal was responding to, not the actor Dan Haggerty.

If only I could get my hands on a set of animal costumes like that, I could also befriend all of the wild animals – squirrels, birds, and such – in my own neighborhood. The idea seemed so flawless that I finally broke down and asked my mom to make me a raccoon costume. When she asked why I wanted one, I laid out my plan for her. She just laughed, shook her head, and walked away.

I felt not only insulted, but disappointed. My plans were thwarted, and I never realized my dream of becoming the next Grizzly Adams.

Nicola is happy to have not lived on the fifteenth floor of an apartment complex when Santa came to visit:

It was Christmas-time in Canada, and I was acting like a little shit. I was an awful hellion of a five-year-old, and my parents were fed up with my wanton and admittedly quite amusing behavior. Mall Santas and a nearby birthday had all but eradicated my fear of the big red man's displeasure, and my mother was forced to get creative to earn some peace. She concocted an elaborate note from an insider elf from the North Pole tipping me off to my bad-list status, coated it in glitter, and left it conspicuously in my bedroom for me to discover, along with an open window, abandoned scarf and big wet boot-prints.

The fact that I believed it isn't proof alone that I was a dumb kid. I was five. Jesus Christ would have believed it at five. No, I had to take my idiocy that extra step. In my excitement over receiving a letter from an actual, real elf, I naturally began to investigate and speculate about the event. I concluded that the glitter on the letter and envelope must be pixie dust, since the closest supernatural analogy I could think up was the sparkly stuff Tinkerbell shed in Peter Pan. Suddenly, I was alight with a beautiful idea, since we all know what pixie dust and happy thoughts do to people.

I scraped all that stuff off and applied liberally. I even ate a handful, to make absolutely certain it would work. Then I opened my second-story bedroom window, looked out into the snow-swaddled night, shut my eyes to better focus my gleeful imagining of a future as a superhero, and flew. Into a tree branch, and then into the ground, for this is reality and pain is the price of stupidity.

Barret attempts to unveil the true identity of the Easter Bunny:

I was about five years old when I first brilliantly deduced that the Easter Bunny was actually a 10-year-old black kid.

I knew that there were holes in the traditional Easter Bunny story. Santa Claus I could understand. Magic reindeer? Fine. But the idea that a bunny somehow delivered candy was, in a word, ridiculous. How did he carry it? Rabbits don't even have hands. And while Santa Claus purportedly had elves to build his toys, no one ever mentioned where the Easter Bunny's candy came from. I had assume that, like most things in my world, it came from Kmart. How does the Easter Bunny buy candy at Kmart? The whole concept of the Easter Bunny was deeply flawed, and the adults who told it to me were obviously idiots.

One day around Easter time I was watching the news on TV, and they showed some Easter celebrations -- maybe a parade or something, I don't remember exactly. But at some point, the camera focused on an African-American boy, about 10 years old, wearing a pink bunny costume. At that point, everything clicked. THIS was the REAL Easter Bunny.

It made perfect sense. A bunny would not be able to buy candy at Kmart and bring it to people's houses. But a kid dressed as a bunny could pull it off. I had figured out what no adult ever could. Immediately I began spreading the Good News.

Not one person ever believed what I told them. Which was frustrating. I held the truth in the palm of my hand, and no one would simply accept what I was offering. Clearly, I had my work cut out for me. No one ever said that the life of a prophet was easy.