I believed in Santa Claus until the seventh grade. It was my grandmother who inadvertently destroyed my childhood love, kind of like someone running over your bicycle. My parents had decided to let me travel by myself for the first time, so I flew down to Florida to spend spring break with her and my grandfather. She and I were driving around in their white Cadillac De Ville, en route to the Handy Way gas station to pick up, what I considered to be, the best slice of pizza out there. On the way, we were talking about Christmas and how they were going to come visit us for the holidays and how much fun we would have.
“You’re still going along with the whole Santa Claus deal for your little brother, aren’t you?” She asked, as we hit a stoplight. I felt like all the ice cream in the entire world had just melted.
“Huh?” I said.
“Ronnie still believes in that stuff, so you need to go along with it just for a little while longer. Don’t ruin it for him.”
Ruin what!?
“Okay I won’t,” I replied. I could have cried.
I’d had my doubts of course; I knew there were disputes as to who was the real guy, but I still remained somewhat convinced of his existence. Every year, my dad would take my little brother and I outside on Christmas Eve to look for Santa in the sky. Typically, we saw only a giant patch of black nothing, but one year we happened to observe something fly by and it absolutely wasn’t a plane. A plane moved quickly; it soared high up in the atmosphere. This object whisked steadily through the air, and, if you listened really closely, it tinkled.
“That was him!” My dad exclaimed, as if there were any doubt in my mind. I presumed the whipping movement was the reindeer legs swishing around, and I also spotted a flickering light at the very front (Rudolph’s nose). In all likelihood, it was merely a flock of crows crossing by a streetlight, but then again, what would explain the tinkle?
Another year, it snowed on Christmas, and we went outside in the morning and there were hoof prints on the roof. A little trail of them leading right up to the chimney. At the time, I wasn’t skeptical enough to notice the fact that there probably weren’t enough to account for a whole sleigh of reindeer. This was more the mark of one magical animal, or one human attempting to make a mock interpretation. But I didn’t analyze it so critically then. I just knew it was Santa. My dad was afraid of heights, so I didn’t believe he would’ve had the courage, and my mom wouldn’t have bothered.
On top of all this, my dad told me there was an elf named Timmy—the chief guy that determined whether or not you received presents versus coal—who would call our house every year around Christmas time and discuss our behavior with my father.
“It’s Timmy!” My dad would yell out shortly after answering the phone.
My little brother and I would sneak beside the door of my parents’ bedroom to try and overhear the conversation. We were always extremely worried about our status on the good or bad list. My dad would say things like “Ronnie needs to do a better job of making his bed? I agree with you on that one, Timmy.” Or, “Courtney’s been too sassy with her mother? Yep. We’ve told her. We warned her.”
Busted.
If there was no Santa Claus, then whose elf was on the line with all this completely accurate information?
And of course there was the other proof: the Christmas cookies we left out that were eaten in the morning. The magic feeling in the air around the holidays. The gift lists mailed directly to the North Pole. The post office would have never in a million years been involved in such a scam. It was a government-run organization. Things just didn’t add up; there were too many question marks. Therefore, I could never be 100% sure Santa Claus was a fraud until my grandmother officially whacked the dream down with her imagination ax.
The revelation of Santa Claus was the first significant moment in my life were something I believed in turned out to be false. Sure, the spuriousness of the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy had come out earlier, but I wasn’t all that attached to them. They didn’t give me as many presents, and they didn’t have so many stories about them. Their validity was always open to discussion. Not Santa though. Santa knew me and everything about me.
When Santa disintegrated, the world lost a little bit of its magic. I was upset not because I’d been deceived or because there wasn’t an old man in a red suit ruining around the North Pole, rather it was that life became less imaginative, less enchanting. Reindeer really couldn’t fly. I never needed a scientific explanation for it, I just wanted them to be up there in the air and to know that I might also accomplish wonderful feats. In my dreams, I could fly by waving my arms around in the air like I was swimming; once I was as high as I wanted, I would just float. I tried this method when I was awake, and not surprisingly, it proved ineffective. But I hoped one day it might.
On Christmas Eve every year, CNBC and other news stations had these briefs where they tracked Santa Claus and where he was in the world at any given moment. They’d say things like, “It appears the weather’s clear in the North Pole today, perfect for reindeer-flying,” or, “Looks like he’s just landed in China; he’s running right on time.” Why did they do this if there was no Santa Claus? Kids didn’t watch CNBC. My dad followed it regularly because of the stock market, so he would always call me to watch what they were saying; that was the only reason I knew about it. Why would a bunch of guys in business suits and glasses waste their time trailing some imaginary man around the world if there was nobody at all? It would be the biggest hoax of all time. Santa Claus must exist then; he had to. I still had faith. Life was much more exuberant when you believed in fairy tales.
Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.