What, you mean Santa isn’t real?

I’m never sure when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I’ll always remember when I… I’m never sure when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I’ll always remember when I stopped believing in Humpty Hump.

Let me back up. I have a feeling this might get messy.

Santa, that beloved fat man, always struck me as a little iffy. Maybe not when I was little, but I believed in a lot of things when I was little. I was convinced that the Loch Ness monster – Nessie to her fans, of I which I was one – was real, I thought the discovery of Bigfoot a mere matter of time and I was pretty sure I would become a bounty hunter as an adult. Reality was a little fuzzy for me, but I overcame.

Santa, however, did not. It was at a lunch table in elementary school where my friends and I – in between trying to make each other throw up by opening our mouths while chewing – had “the talk.”

What my friends and I did at the lunch table that day, eating our pizza or our brought lunches or shoving snack cakes into our mouths trying to force one kid to vomit, was an attempt to find out, right there and right then, in fifth grade, the existence of Santa Claus.

I totally wish this story could now become like some distant cousin of “Goonies” and I could write about running away from home and finding pirates and some kind of weird mutant and learning about myself at the same time but, no, that didn’t happen. Or did it? No, no, absolutely not.

All that happened was one of us talked about how he had asked his parents if Santa had existed, and they came clean and told him it was all a lie. Well, they didn’t say lie, but I’m pretty sure he did. And then we all admitted that we had heard stuff, we had seen stuff, Santa’s handwriting was distressingly similar to our parent’s handwriting, you know, the whole deal. We came up with conclusive, irrefutable proof at that table that the jig was up. There was no Santa.

Walking home that day should have felt like a victory lap, but instead it felt like the Long March, except Mao wasn’t there. I had known about it before we said it out loud, but I just didn’t want to say it. Saying something doesn’t exist means a lot more than just thinking the same thing. Words make it feel real, and making Santa feel fake made me feel horrible.

When you’re a kid, you’re not stupid; you simply aren’t as tall as you will be one day. As you get older, though, you start to realize that the more you are aware of things being childlike, the less of a child you become. It’s a transient state, and you notice that when you stop believing in stuff like Santa, other things change for you as well. The world of being a kid is one that cannot bear self-examination, and so when I admitted that I knew Santa was, at best, a well-intentioned hoax, that’s when I stopped being a kid. That’s a weird feeling to deal with, which just made it worse when “The Humpty Dance” came out and totally ruined me.

Humpty Hump was the king to me for a brief, strange period in my life. I thought the song was hilarious, and Humpty’s delivery was perfect. Maybe I never bought the album, but I certainly got excited when I saw the video, particularly because of the severe tragedy Humpty Hump had to fight through to become the Burger-King-loving, fat-lady-loving, rhyme-loving MC we all know and love.

The accident that I’m talking about was what Humpty claimed forced him to wear his fake nose. As a teenage employee in Burger King, he said he burned off his nose in the fryer bin, thus deforming him but not taking away his need to rhyme or dance “like MC Hammer on crack.” This blew me away. “Really? He melted off his nose? Wow! He’s like Dr. Doom.”

Except Humpty wasn’t like Dr. Doom. His real name was Shock G – well, I guess his real name is Gregory Jacobs – and he wasn’t disfigured, and he wasn’t burned and I’m not sure if he liked the ladies big or not, but I was devastated when I found out the truth.

It felt like elementary school again, unwrapping the mysteries of Santa and stripping away childhood and all of its mysterious joys and replacing them with the always-dull reality of adulthood. It took the fiction of Humpty away and just left me with a guy with a cape and a fake nose over a real nose.

I think what we all want is to feel excitement over the world, to believe that outlandish, improbable and even impossible things happen. I think we want to believe in fat guys in chimneys and scarred rappers and monsters in Scottish lochs, but life always shows us that things don’t work out that way. But I always want to fall for things like that, to feel stupid for believing in things, because it’s when you stop hoping that life will be amazing and strange and beautiful that it will stop being amazing and strange and beautiful.

E-mail kjs34@pitt.edu while limping to the side like your leg was broken.