I still remember when my sister broke the news. We were downstairs in the basement of our childhood home, watching the Simpsons. During a commercial break, my sister leaned over and said, “There’s something I need to tell you.” 

I looked at her, seriously. 

“Santa isn’t real,” she said. “It’s just mom and dad bringing down the presents.”

I said nothing, turning back to the TV. The commercial break ended, and we returned to watching The Simpsons. It was the episode where Homer is downhill skiing. He starts losing control as he picks up speed. He tries to recall what the ski instructor taught him earlier that day, but his thoughts quickly turn to having seen his neighbour Ned Flanders in a skin-tight ski suit. As he flaunts the new suit, Flanders famously says to Homer, “It feels like I’m wearing nothing at all!” 

As Homer continues to pick up speed, he can’t get the image of Flanders’ perfectly sculpted ass out of his head. He grimaces.

“Stupid sexy Flanders.”

When I looked up that episode to see when it aired, it was the year 2000, which means I was 12 years old when my sister revealed the cataclysmic life-changing news about Santa. I think we can agree that 12 is probably a little old to be believing in Santa Claus, but also that it’s kind of beautiful that my parents and my sister let me go on believing for as long as they possibly could before it became, like, really socially unacceptable.

Like, you would probably assume that having received said news, any reasonable 12 year-old would spend a few days mourning the inevitable loss of their childhood and then move on. Dear reader, this was not the case. I continued believing in Santa until I was 17 years old. 

With every passing year, I insisted that we keep the tradition alive: demanding that all of us kids sleep under the tree to see if we could catch Santa in the act, even going so far as to leave him cookies and a glass of milk (though by that time, my parents had gently suggested that Santa might enjoy a splash of Bailey’s).

I imagine that psychologists would have a field day with this particular childhood obsession, which, when I look back, feels a little embarrassing. But, then, I consider why it was I stopped at the age of 17 believing in Santa. What was happening at that time?

When I was 17, I decided to pursue a career as a pastor in a conservative Evangelical Christian denomination. While most girls my age were getting high and sneaking out to have sex with their boyfriends, I rebelled against my parents by becoming a raging fundamentalist. 

When I announced to my church friends that I wanted to become a pastor, they told me women pastors just didn’t exist. For a lot of people this lack of support and outright discrimination might kill your dreams, setting you on a different path, maybe even turn you against the career you’d been hoping to pursue. But, what my fundy friends didn’t know was that I had 17 years under my proverbial chastity belt believing in “something that didn’t exist.” I just blinked and went ahead and applied to become a pastor anyway. 

It turns out that believing in something that really probably doesn’t exist, well it turns out this is a critical skill for anyone wanting to go to seminary. After four years, I graduated from the Canadian prairie bible college known as “Bridalquest”. I was unmarried (spoiler alert, I never really had a problem with the girls dorms being separate from the boys). I went on to pursue a master’s in theology at a much more reputable and accredited university. I was ordained an Anglican priest and a year into my first parish, I came out. 

Once again, friends and mentors from my fundy days wrote to tell me being gay was nothing more than make-believe. This time, I realized that between believing in Santa Claus and believing in the God of white Chrisitan Evangelicals, that I actually had a combined 34 years of believing in “something that didn’t exist,” that is, a mythical old white man with a beard who keeps a running list of your bad behaviour. 

There’s a line from the Christmas carol, “Santa Claus is coming to town.” It goes, “He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” 

Is it Santa? Is it God? I mean . . . 6/7.

By sharing this story tonight, I don’t in any way want to underplay the very real discrimination that we experience as queer people both as we seek out career paths and as we make ourselves known in the world. I was blissfully naive for a lot of those years, and there were still some really shitty things that happened that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. 

I want to say, though, that there is something beautiful, something queer about believing in Santa Claus or whatever mythical story it was for you in your childhood. That something beautiful, that something queer is the ability to imagine a world, an existence for ourselves that others might not be able to or might not be willing to picture for themselves. This is our holiday magic.