At a dinner party I attended a few years ago, a librarian who looked like Vincent Schiavelli, the subway spirit in the movie Ghost, asked me apropos of nothing, “When you have kids some day, are you going to pretend you’re Santa?”
“Yes, of course,” I said blithely.
“Isn’t that lying?” he said, with surprising anger. “You’re going to let them think that a man with a weight problem is going to slip down your chimney and drop off presents?” I had only spoken several words to this relative stranger. “You’ve agreed to this?” he asked my husband.
“Yes,” Jacob said, of our unborn children’s Christmas future.
Why this man cared, I don't know. But this part of parenting was something my husband Jake and I had already discussed. We would raise our kids Jewish but they'd get Santa. It was a given. It was important to me.
I believed in Santa for longer than most children, a pixie fiction that affected me enough that I wrote one of my college application essays about him. “Ah, the classic tension between faith and science,” said my English teacher Mr. Scott as he perused it, but the essay wasn’t allegorical. The poet Coleridge would probably call my whimsical meditation my “willing suspension of disbelief,” but that’s not exactly accurate, either. For me, there was no disbelief to suspend. I believed in him literally, not symbolically.
I had grown up watching Miracle on 34th Street and Santa Claus: the Movie (I learned the word “puce” from it). My parents read The Polar Express to my sisters and me in July. I researched St. Nicholas of Myra. My father clipped newspaper articles for me about how Santa Claus actually lives in Finland, not the North Pole. At one time, I had a xerox copy of the 1897 editorial “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” tacked to my bulletin board. Had the Santa tracker been around when I was a child, I would have been up late watching him fly from continent to continent, too.
I was savvy enough to know that the guy who stopped by the Filipino potlucks every Christmas wasn’t him. One year, some kid swore it was our pediatric dentist Dr. Hutchinson, an athletic man, who had wrapped his torso with pillows to fill out the costume.
I learned from my encylopedia research that the popular Santa with the sanguine complexion and the matching suit was popularized by Coca Cola. Like every kid in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, I sat on the lap of the “Jolly Old Elf,” and picked out some age-appropriate toy from the black sack, like a teddy bear or a pack of Uno cards. Though I knew that that Santa was fake, I pretended, anyway, for the Polaroid opp and for the other younger kids in line.
When my friend Anna said, “If Santa were real, why didn’t he get me tickets to Disneyland?”
I countered, “I think he knows you were testing him.”
And that was that. And so it went.
The real Santa, I asserted, was invisible. For whatever reason, though I didn’t believe in the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny, I thought Santa Claus was as real as the gifts that showed up under our plastic tree.
I suppose I should have figured it out earlier. There were clues: Like that time I left a Lion bar for Santa and the “Thank you. Love, SC” underneath my note had generous loops that looked uncannily like my dad’s signature. Or that year Santa knew to drop off our presents the day before we flew home to the Philippines, ten days before Christmas. Or that December a neighbor received a box of crackers and a Voltron that she didn’t even want.
But, my parents made it easy to ignore the signs. My sisters and I didn’t get Christmas gifts from our parents. Instead, when we saw something we liked at Toy Town in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, my parents would say, “Ask for it from Santa.” They would even add, “We can’t afford that. Ask Santa.”
When we got the big ticket items like the Barbie Dreamhouse; the latest US toys like Tuba-Ruba and Popples; or perfect presents, like the chocolate and Reader’s Digest I received in 1991, we thanked Santa. It wasn't just about the gifts.
It was the letters, too. I wrote him notes that our father mailed – real postage stamps on letters to nowhere! – at the Saudi post office. (Some of them, like the one I wrote him during the Gulf War, must have been painful to read.) When I was 6, I left a letter on my desk, imagining that it would float off on a road of glitter (my mother called it “stardust”) into Santa’s hands – just like in the movies. Never mind that I penned it in March.
They didn't take credit for any of it and, even when I should have been too old to have to ask my mother if Santa were real, she kissed the top of my head tenderly: “I thought you already knew.”
As I recall that moment, I laugh at the sentimentality of it all, how I wept into a pillow afterwards. But, as a parent now, I’m grateful for it, for their encouraging us to believe in the impossible, for keeping that hope going.
Years later, I would ask my mother why they worked as hard as they did to keep Santa alive. Why didn’t they write their names on our amazing gifts? We would have loved the presents just the same.
“We wanted to give you something to look forward to,” she said. “It’s nice to have magic sometimes.” – Rappler.com
Kristine Sydney was born in the Philippines, raised in Saudi Arabia, and has studied and worked in the United States for the last 23 years. She teaches high school English at a private school in Rhode Island. Follow her on Twitter at @kosheradobo.
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