The console "N64" that I found under my parents bed when I was 10-13? Santa either dropped it off early or my mother got it for him to give me – after all, he didn't actually know me. The kids on my bus who told me there was no Santa Claus? They were no authorities – they were fellow kids. My father confirming it? He was just being mean....




I didn't believe anyone until I heard Phoebe Cates' extremely weird, extremely dark monologue in Gremlins about her father dressing up as Santa Claus, slipping, breaking his neck and getting stuck in his family's chimney for days. Maybe it was the morbidity, maybe it was her delivery, maybe it was the fact that I was so entranced by that movie about impossibly cute, music-playing, English-understanding, upright guinea pigs with Persian cat eyes little munchkins that turned into havoc-wreaking monsters, that I was willing to accept anything it threw at me. When Cates ended her monologue with, "And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus," that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus.