When i was a child, i believed autopilot really worked like in the movie Airplane, that it was an inflatable dummy.
My parents didn’t specifically tell me if Santa Clause was real or make-believe. They wanted me to come to my own conclusion, I guess. My dad is a rationalist person, and my mom’s from a culture that doesn’t traditionally celebrate Christmas.
So what I believed was that the appearance of presents on Christmas was an unsolved mystery, and Santa Clause was just a hypothesis to explain it.
I suspected the real explanation probably involved the tree working as an antenna for some kind of cosmic energy that triggered the appearance of presents. Perhaps in ancient and more superstitious times they discovered this phenomenon by accident and continued to put up the tree ever since.
When I was a kid my dad would often pull up the NORAD Santa tracker on Christmas Eve, and that combined with seeing the film War Games at way too young of an age had me believing in Santa for much longer than I should have because “why else would the federal government devote so much money to tracking him?” I think it was specifically seeing the exact same animation of him being welcomed into a country by a pair of fighter jets for the third year in a row that finally killed that line of reasoning (because obviously the NORAD Santa tracker site is shot with television cameras or something)
Kid logic is wild
I believed my hair would blow away with sufficient wind. And it basically did, it just took 30 more years
I thought Salvatia must be the poorest country in the world if even their army has to go around begging for money.
That hiding candy (or other things people wanted) was a universal property of grandmothers.
English is not my first language, but I had heard the expression “search all nooks and crannies”, but thought the last word was grannies - cranny is an unusual word.
Now,my own grandmother was in the habit of hiding candy for us to find. I thought the expression existed because all grannies hid things. Search all nooks and grannies!
I now have the hilarious image in my head of a toddler giving their granny a pat down (image of one in case the term isn’t familiar to everyone), thanks! 😂
One of my brothers was friends with a pair of twins named Eric and Ryan, but I thought that they were a single entity that somehow had two bodies known as American Ryan
