I believed my hair would blow away with sufficient wind. And it basically did, it just took 30 more years

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.

I thought that you would get your grandparents by just going into a train station and picking some random (preferably older person) to be your grandparent.

I was convinced that my parents had done that for me, and that’s why I had grandparents.

I thought Salvatia must be the poorest country in the world if even their army has to go around begging for money.

The USA was the moral leader the world. But I watched CNN as a kid so…

I hadn’t had “the talk” and assembled my own understanding about marriage = “the ability to touch each other’s private parts.”

I remember thinking, at the age of probably 8 or 10ish, that a bride and a groom, after they were married, in their fancy full wedding outfits would stand on either side of the sink (specifically in my house’s upstairs crappy bathroom with mildewy tile) and expose themselves to each other, and then the bride would reach across the sink and “tag” touch the groom’s crotch and then pull her dress up, and… at that point I didn’t really understand what she would “have” under her wedding dress, but I did assume the groom would reach over and basically “tag you’re it” style touch her, at which point the act would conclude.

I didn’t have a name for this act, but I was pretty sure this is what adults all did immediately after marriage, one time only. I didn’t associate it with babies or anything, more a rite of passage.

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 used to think that there was a country called Cyclopedia, that was full of all kinds of fascinating things. I had a book all about it called “In Cyclopedia”.

I thought propeller planes worked by spinning so fast that they temporarily moved the gravity out of the way so the plane could fly.

Not me but really funny - when my mom was little she thought white people weren’t real. She thought they were made up for tv

When adults said things like “In this day and age, nobody says please and thankyou any more”, I misinterpreted “this day and age” as “The Stayan Age”, which was our current age, which obviously followed on from Bronze Age, Iron Age etc.

That adults had it figured out.

That average people actually care about anything but themselves.

That there is justice in the world.

I used to think those coins in the fountain at the mall were just money people wanted to get rid of. One day, little me tried getting away with a skirt full of coins and got in trouble.

I mean, to be fair, a coin on the ground is fair game, and they don’t make these “unspoken rules” clear enough, so I couldn’t imagine a coin in a fountain not being free to just pick up.

I’m gonna sound so stupid, but I thought checks just gave you free money. I thought my parents were wasting a check by writing such a small amount, and ask them something like why not write a bigger number?

Then they explained that you need money in the bank to work. I was too young to even be embarrassed, I was just like ok cool, didn’t even realize how dumb I was.

In my defence, I was like 9 and I just arrived in the US and never heard of a “check” before.

I grew up with a family that didn’t have a lot of luxuries when I was young. We had three channels on TV, so we didn’t spend a lot of time watching TV. So I didn’t get to watch a lot of pop culture content for about the first 7 or 8 years of my life.

So one of the first memories I have as a kid is in hearing music on the radio, record player, cassette player or any sound system … I understood that it was previously recorded and performed by other people somewhere else.

What I thought was that all the sounds were generated by human voices. Guitars? Pianos? Trumpets? Brass sounds? Violins? even Drums or percussion. I thought all of it was people just making sounds with their voices.

I’m Indigenous Canadian so my parents didn’t have musical instruments, a couple of uncles played the guitar and fiddle … but by the time I was young, they no longer played these instruments and had them. I never knew or understood musical instruments really until I was about 8, 9 or ten. Up until then, I just thought all music was just people with amazing and unusual human voices.