How Is Santa Still Alive?
I expected Google to kill him—will AI?
We have a kindergartener these days, and now that we’re in the Christmas season, she has come home from school with some interesting questions about Christmas and the various characters that pop up around the holiday.
I am going to refrain from sharing here about how we intend to handle Santa Claus with our kids, as it isn’t really the point of what I want to explore here.
So far this season, questions about Santa haven’t come up much, but the other day Maggie did ask me why we don’t have an elf at our house like some of her friends at school do. It took everything in me to simply say something like, “Well everyone has their own ways of celebrating Christmas,” instead of saying, “The elf of the shelf is a bastardization of all things Christmas and each one of them should be thrown in a pile and burned.” God granted me grace and patience at an opportune time for her sake and mine.
But all of this had me thinking about something I haven’t really thought about before.
How is the myth of Santa Claus still alive in 2025 for anyone over the age of like…five?
I wondered this first because of the advent of AI use in popular culture. I entered “is santa real” in a handful of the most popular generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc.), and all of their answers would spoil the imaginations of children around the world.
So then I tried plain ol’ Google. “Surely,” I thought, “Google will have some kind of cheeky, kid-friendly response at the top and then real answers tucked away someplace. Nope. It also told the truth about the jolly old fellow right at the top of the results.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics in 2021, 97% of kids from ages three though 18 have some kind of internet access.
So I ask again: How is the myth of Santa Claus still alive?
I remember when I still believed in Santa Claus in the late 1990s, I spent much of Christmas Eve refreshing Netscape Navigator on the NORAD Tracks Santa webpage, surely clogging up our dial-up connection for the whole day. If Google would have existed then, you better believe I would have gone looking for the truth.
It would be nearly impossible to do some kind of study on if kids are disbelieving in Santa earlier today than they did 20 or 40 years ago. Logic would suggest that they are disbelieving earlier, because of the early age at which so many are given unfettered internet access, but it’s hard to know in an empirical way!
So I guess I want to ask you, dear reader. Among the kids you know—your own, ones in your school, etc.—is belief in Santa still alive and well? Have you seen kids disbelieve sooner than before? I’m curious!
My own ambivalence aside, as a parent who isn’t sure how far to take it, I don’t wish for the death of the myth at all. Santa is a fun feature of the holiday. I just wonder how much longer he’s got.
My 9 year old still believes in Santa, as does the 5yo. No clue how my 9yo is still believing, but she's smart enough that I know she could figure it out if she truly wanted. She jokes about how she thinks we're the tooth fairy.
She doesn't have access to Google, and she goes to a tiny private school. I'm sure all of that helps. I also read her stories about Santa and observe how some things are myth and legend, and she definitely notices that movies and books all portray Santa differently.
I'm glad she's still holding onto magic and make believe. There's too much cynicism in this world and we don't value imagination and fantasy enough.
Contrarian take: I think belief in Santa and the sneaky elves parents spend so much time and effort setting up for their kids will remain strong. This is one of the ironies of secular disenchantment; when all the myth and mystery has been evacuated, something deep in the human soul and psyche yearns for it all the more. I wonder if parents, having lost any sense of magic and mystery, feel a sense of obligation and responsibility to keep a bit of it alive for their children.