Potential disaster, turned into proud moment

This might be a little long, but I am proud of my oldest.TLDR: Told my son there was no Santa, and he had an amazing reaction to it after a couple days.I have 2 boys, my oldest is 6. He really wanted a Nintendo Switch for Xmas this year. My wife and I informed him that we can't afford that, and his response was that Santa would bring one. We tried to tell him that Santa doesn't bring Switches, but it somehow twisted in his head that Santa wouldn't bring him a Switch because he was a bad kid. This led to several weeks of him punishing himself for every little mistake he made. He would cry and say he didn't deserve certain things (like other toys or even blankets and pillows to sleep on). It took us a while to piece together what was going on, and its relation to Santa.One night, after 2 particularly hard conversations with him, my wife and I decided to tell him the truth about Santa. We told him that Santa Claus was based on a real man that lived long ago who wanted to express God's love in sending Jesus by giving gifts and helping people. It was a hard talk to have, and we were both nervous about telling him the truth. As you could guess, he was mad at us. I'm not sure I'll ever forget the hurt in his voice when he said, "You tricked me!" So we let it sit, nervous that we had just shattered out little boy's innocence.A couple days later, he asked us what we can do to help people. We asked him to explain, and he told us he wanted to be like St Nicholas and help people who needed it. He wants to make bags of food and hand them out to people on the offramp or stop lights. He wanted to go to an event our church holds where they give parents in the community free gifts for their children.I am so proud of him. You try as a parent to plant little seeds of generosity in your child, and hope that they will show some day. I'm grateful that day was so early in his life.Edit: I just wanted to clarify also, that I really didn't want to teach our kids about a magic fat man who sneaks around at night anyway. It was an accidental thing that came about because of his preschool and us not correcting soon enough. via /r/Parenting http://bit.ly/2T9Dwg5