No one wants to be the bad guy who informs a little kid there is no Santa. Santa is the glitter of Christmas, a harmless deception that adds excitement and even solicits good behavior for a few weeks in the days leading up to Christmas. But even our best intentions on the Santa playing field can be flattened by the neighbor kid or a TV show or a well-meaning person, and once the Santa bubble is burst, it's hard to reinflate.
Years ago, when my children were all under six, we had one of those Santa-flattening experiences. Most of the extended family was gathered at my parents' home, and the house almost rocked with the usual hoopla.The men were sitting around deep in conversation in the living room. The kitchen, always the women's domain, watched them unloading bags of their trademark recipes while the children ran here and there and generally were underfoot.
My three kids had just participated in a Christmas pagent at church. My son Matt had been an angel with a gold tinsel halo, something in real life I never saw above his little noggin.
Sarah, the oldest and wisest because she was nearly six, waxed eloquent to the other children on the subject of Santa and gifts. My nephew Dan, also six, was listening to her Santa saga and sagely agreeing, and it was clear he loved Santa with true belief in his heart.
Christmas Eve dinner was everything one could hope for. The table groaned under the turkey, potatoes, casseroles, salads, relishes, and breads. My dad issued his yearly complaint to my mother, "Why don't you cook this way all year?" and the rest of us just enjoyed the great good and being home for Christmas. The children, seated at a child-sized table not far from the adults, were also enjoying themselves.
Then somewhere between the second helpings of turkey and dressing and the advent of the desserts, we all heard a loud and painful wail commence. One's first thought was that one of the kids had cut themselves or had been punched in the face by a cousin or a sibling. It was neither.
It was our nephew Dan who at six was looking otherwise very sharp in his turtleneck sweater and little sport jacket and polished dress shoes, and he was crying the cry of the abandoned. His tears were literally jumping off of his little face. It was painful to watch, and immediately all those recently celebrating adults were leaning over the kids' table, trying to figure out the problem, asking queations and making the situation generally more stressful.
Dan's father gruffly asked him what was the matter.
"Santa's dead!!" the little guy wailed.
"Who told you that?" his dad asked.
"They did!" little Dan answered pointing to the guilty ones.
"They" were my three children still sitting at the little peoples' table. They looked as shocked by the whole fiasco as the adults.
That's when I got involved. A few questions later we learned that four-year-old Rachel's Sunday School teacher had recently explained to her little flock that St. Nicholas was a very good man who did kind things for people, including leaving them gifts, but that he was dead. In fact, he had been dead for many years, and today it was the moms and dads who carried out the gift-giving tradition on Christmas morning. A bit understated, but basically true.
The topic of Santa arriving on Christmas Eve had been the hot topic at the kids' table. New knowledge on the topic from a Sunday School teacher carried a lot of weight. It also presented me with a problem that needed to be solved very quickly: how to continue the Santa myth for one and all, and still not contradict the Sunday School teacher.
I must admit I thought more quickly on my feet in the good old days than I do now. I simply explained to all of the children that St. Nicholas and Santa were two different people. One really lived and then died. The other lives at the North Pole and still takes his yearly reindeer-led trek across the world to deliver gifts to good little boys and girls. It was the kind of lie that ranks right up there with the Easter Bunny and woodland trolls. The explanation seemed to do the trick as adults and children both resumed eating. Later, the dead St. Nicholas vanished from our minds as we tore into the mountain of gifts beneath the Christmas tree.
Over the years, all of the children stopped believing that Santa really came down their chimney. It had to happen sometime, but when it did, it caused me to be a little sad and retrospective as I remembered believing in Santa as a child and then not believing.
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