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.

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.