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Right now, we do eaten cookies and Santa leaves a note for H. My parent's didn't do a lot of Santa stuff, but it's important to Tony because he grew up with Santa gifts, Santa pictures, and the cookies/note.

ETA: Santa has requested Oreo cookies this year, but I'm not sure he's getting them.

Santa will be present, and I plan on doing Elf on the Shelf next year when older, but for us LOs will always know why we celebrate Christmas and the religious aspect is #1.

We do Santa for fun and because it was a tradition we both had growing up. I won't lie to her about it if she asks, but I see no harm in letting her believe in the magic for awhile. Why not, every kid deserves to have a little magic in their life before the "real" stuff comes!

I'm super opposed to Elf on the Shelf, so that doesn't enter our house. Santa, for my three year old, is just another character. She doesn't have any conception of him bringing gifts or anything. I won't go out of my way to expose her to Santa lore, but I wouldn't go to lengths to keep it from her, either. But there will be no misleading her about him in a way that she'll 'find out' about later.

I'm also really concerned about the materialistic craziness of christmas, so we intentionally downplay gifts and all of that. We exchange a small number of fairly simple gifts, and we try to make some of them when possible. We mostly focus on family and spending time together.

At age 2, she started to be able to recognize santa as a guy who says "ho ho ho". But other than that she didn't know anything about him coming to our house or bringing gifts.

This year at age 3, she is starting to kinda understand, but we just haven't really pushed the issue. He's just a fun guy that helps celebrate christmas and helps bring toys to boys and girls who are in need (sick and sad is what we say). The other day the grocery store deli clerk asked her what she wanted Santa to bring her and my daughter was really confused. She didn't understand the question at all.

Edit- we also do not do Elf on the Shelf.

@sarac: This is kinda what we are trying to do too. Just keep it simple, just like how Superman is make believe and Mickey Mouse is pretend. I don't like the idea of bribing kids to be good to get gifts and I don't like the holiday to be all about consumerism and expecting gifts.

I would love to do a holiday advent of good deeds with her next year.

I think a lot of how you celebrate depends on how you grew up and there is no right or wrong way. We has friends who all did different things (St. Nicholas Day, Santa, no Santa, Santa as an idea/character but not a real person, celebrating the ephiphany with gifts, etc) ETA: my parents just told us every family has their own way of celebrating and the differences never bothered us in terms of why does Santa do this here and not there?

I grew up with Santa. He was definitely real in our house. He ate the cookies, Rudolph left us notes and sometimes he set up scavenger hunts outside with glitter, Santa had different wrapping paper and hand writing on his gifts. I found out he wasn't real in 5th grade...I remember thinking my mom was lying about it and that he was real. (My brother says it was one of the worst days of his childhood. Maybe the actual worst one.)

DH and I will definitely continue all of that with our kids. I'm torn about Elf on the Shelf though. We didn't grow up with it, and the elf itself creeps me out. And it doesn't really have any meaning to DH and I because it was never part of our Christmases. But I also think it would be a lot of fun, and I know I would enjoy thinking of things for the elf to do!

I'm torn about how to approach it. Luckily LO is only 16 months so I think we have some time. We do decorations, a tree, stockings, Santa will leave gifts. But I don't want to go overboard. I know there are websites that let you photoshop a picture of Santa in your living room and some people do letters from Santa, footprints by the fire place, etc. We won't be doing those things. We want there to be magic for LO surrounding the holiday season, but we don't want to go out of our way to convince her of Santa's existence. Oh, and no Elf on the Shelf.

Santa was "real", but my parents didn't go overboard to prove he was. We left cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve and presents appeared on Christmas morning, but that's about it. We did go visit Santa a couple of times at the mall.

I do not want to present Santa to my kids as if he is real. When I think back, my favorite parts of Christmas weren't Santa related, so I think it is totally possible to still have a magic holiday season without him. That doesn't mean we'll avoid Santa stuff either, I plan on explaining him like any other fable and fictional character.

We're going to do Santa. It took me awhile to come around to the concept. I imagine she will only believe until she's school aged....my nephew is 7 and I think he knows it's fake. We'll leave cookies and milk out, Santa will bring a couple of gifts. I think i'm going to get a kick out of it with E.

As far as the Elf, I just don't want to make more work for myself

I think minimal effort is my M.O.

We will definitely do Santa in our house. Growing up we wrote and mailed letters, asked for one special gift from Santa, left out milk and cookies (and carrots for the reindeer), and it was so much fun. Likewise with the Easter bunny, the Tooth Fairy, etc.

I wasn't upset when I found out they weren't real, and I never felt lied to or anything like that. It was all part of the holiday fun. I can't wait to do that stuff with my own kid(s)!

DH and I are trying to keep the holidays pretty low key in our house, so we are not going to go out of our way to introduce Santa but we'll probably follow LO's lead since I'm sure she'll pick up on it from other kids and our family members. We don't like Elf on a Shelf so we're going to avoid that if possible (although I may change my tune in a few years). LO is only 14 months so she has no idea about Santa right now but we will have to make some decisions next year.

I really loved Santa as a kid (we also got gifts from elves and Mrs Claus through the month of December, which I loved), but looking back, I feel like I was pretty spoiled. DH and I don't have a big house, and our parents are spoiling LO already in a way that my grandparents never did for me, so we don't really feel like we need to go overboard with Santa since our families are already acting like a whole crew of Santas for our family.

@youboots: Oh i like the activity idea! Tickets to the museum or something you can all enjoy. And probably something you would spend money on at some point in the year, anyways.

Last i checked, Santa has a big bag of toys for *all* the kids, not just *one* kid, LOL

If my kids hate me for not throwing grossly lavish holidays, then, well, I've obviously messed up somewhere along the way

I just remember this moment from over the summer because it was so cute and heartwarming.... We were leaving the beach one afternoon walking over the boardwalk back to the family shore house and an older man with a thick long white beard and a red tank top and santa hat rode by on a bike and my 2 year old niece was so amazed, her whole face lit up. We waved and said hello to "Santa" and she still talks about it 5 months later. "we saw Santa on the beach!"

For kids, characters like Santa are like celebrities and i think its a useful tool to teach a lot of lessons. Whether it be about charity, wishing (or praying for good things), behavior, just like one might use Daniel Tiger or Curious George to teach lessons.

We'll have Santa in our home for as long as LO chooses to believe. However, I will not let Santa take credit for the "special gift" each year. I still get gifts from "Santa" when I go to my parents house, though.

As far as Elf on a Shelf, its a fairly new concept and i'm not crazy about the mischief. Its fairly contradictory, I'm reporting back to Santa if you do something bad but you find me the next morning making snow angels on the counter in flour.

Santa was real growing up. I wrote a list to him. The night before Christmas I baked cookies for him. Christmas morning he would some of the cookies were eaten and some of the milk was gone. Gifts were signed from Santa. Mainly it was the unquestioning belief that Santa magically brought my favorite new toys.

We took pictures with Santa at the mall, but those Santas were easy to dismiss as fakes. In that case I knew Santa was more real than Mikey Mouse- a character in a suit. Santa'Santa's realness was on the same level as the Tooth Fairy, Sand Man, Boogeyman, and Easter Bunny.

I found out Santa was not real when I was 11. My 6th grade teacher told me. Learning he wasn't real was traumatic.

My husband didn't have Santa and our kids will not either.

If I were to try to recreate the magic of Santa, I would incorporate making Reindeer food that's sprinkled on the lawn and receiving letters from Santa. I wouldn't incorporate Naughty or Nice threats like Elf on the Shelf.

When I was a kid, Santa was real but I found out in kindergarten. I had already started to suspect that he couldn't be real, so I wasn't heartbroken or anything.

As for what we do now, neither my husband nor I are really into Christmas, mostly because neither of us are religious and where he comes from, they have St. Nicholas and the Père Noël but it seems much more scaled down than American Santa. We are currently living in Austria (I think the Christmas culture is similar to Germany) and our oldest will be 4 just after Christmas. This is the first year that he has kind of paid attention. We have never gotten into any of the typical Christmas things, but they do celebrate St. Nicholas at school -- he had his Nicholas party last Thursday where Nicholas showed up and they all got a bag of treats. I think, for now, it's really just going to be a school thing as I don't intended to introduce the idea of Santa at home. I kind of wish we could just completely forgo the entire idea of Christmas and do something else, but I guess my husband still likes the idea of some sort of celebration at that time of year.

@Greentea: that's an interesting idea! If I had my way, we would just jet off to a tropical location during Christmas week and call it done!

We'll do santa not to any over the top standard but why not. I think it adds to the magic of childhood.

I had no intentions of doing Elf on the Shelf but all the daycare kids do it and so does the daycare lady so I'm not going to leave DS out.

Santa was real growing up and it was one of my favorite aspects of childhood. I loved waking up early, running into my parents room, and then hurrying downstairs to see if Santa came. It was all so magical! We always left cookies and milk out for Santa and carrots for the reindeer.

I found out Santa wasn't real in kindergarten when some older kids on the bus told me. I wasn't upset. My mom made me feel like I was now a big girl who was in on the secret. She let me help do "Santa" things with my brother. To this day, she still writes "from, Santa" on all of our gifts.

I absolutely plan to do Santa with B. When he's old enough to question, I'll probably just tell him that Santa represents the spirit of giving. We aren't Christian, so Santa and all the secular traditions are how we celebrate Christmas. I will not be doing elf on the shelf because, well, ain't nobody got time for that.