Santa Kelis

Santa Claus won’t be coming down the chimney in Kelis’ household. The singer’s four-month-old son Knight will grow up knowing that the jolly man with the white beard and red suit is nothing more than a popular fallacy.

“I don’t think I’m gonna teach my kid about Santa,” Kelis reveals to staging-rapup.kinsta.cloud. “I feel like it’s a completely useless tale.” Despite her strong opinion on the subject, she has no intentions of stifling her son’s whimsical thoughts. “I’m all about fairy tales and I love a great story so I want [Knight] to have a wild imagination, but the thing about Santa, I just don’t get it. I feel like I have enough fantasy going on.”

Compared to his peers, Knight may be hip to the game and dismiss the notion that his Christmas gifts come off a sleigh, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be in the holiday spirit—when he’s old enough, of course. “He’s too young to really like the presents and the tree, none of that really matters to him right now,” Kelis explains. “I think the most he’s gonna do, and it’s more for myself, he’s probably gonna start wearing antlers every day from now until Christmas. And I might paint his nose red just because it tickles me. It was a hectic year, but starting next year I’ll do more stuff, like do the Christmas card with him on it.”

Kelis, whose mother is of Puerto Rican descent, spent most of her childhood Christmases immersed in Hispanic traditions. “[We had] pernil and we always had coquito,” she says. “We celebrated Noche Buena, which is Christmas Eve, and we usually got little trinket gifts on January 6, which is Three Kings Day. Other than that, we just always had big family dinners. It was fun.”

–Georgette Cline