I heard a bunch of whining phone-ins on the radio yesterday. Each one whinging about how their childhoods were ruined by their misguided and delusional parents who taught them to believe in the Santa fairy tale. Wimpering over their lack of coping skills which they needed to deal with the harsh realities of life, like paying credit cards and making their own beds.
There were some grumblings of litigation.
The callers were mostly in their twenties and thirties and still living in their parent's basements after their second or third divorce. Hungover and sunburned from their Mexican holidays, they were returning to face the reality of having to buy their own Christmas presents and being reminded by their broke and exhausted parents that there really is no big elf to do it for them.
They blamed mater and pater for perpetuating the myth in the first place.
Oh good grief I thought. " Do we need helmets for this too? Must we always be saved from ourselves?
As I drove along listeing to the radio I recalled my own childhood Santa memory.
This is my tale of how I found out the truth about Santa.
I must have been around 6, I know for some pretentious worldly toddlers that might seem old by today's standards, but we were slow then.
It was early December in Calgary and 55 years ago people didn't start decorating and filling the stores with seasonal stuff until the middle of December. But the kids in my neighbourhood had started to talk about the big event. We began to make up a list of the things we wanted for Christmas. Our lists were filled with things that we saw our friends may have had and that we had seen in the Eaton's or Sears' catalogues. We didn't have a TV so there were no ads yet.
Shopping trips downtown had drawn us to the the toy department of the big stores and enormous Christmas window displays of toy trains and sweet dolls with silky vinyl hair.
We were nudged by our parents to add things to our lists that they could afford to let us believe might come our way. I never dreamt of scarves or mittens, but of fancy white leather figure skates.
We cut out the pictures and glued them into our scrap books. Every kid had a scrap book. We used Elmer's clear yellow glue in the glass bottle with the red rubber top and pencil crayons to decorate the pages with our drawings of mistletoe, Christmas trees and cotton wool snow balls. We made miles of paper chains to decorate the tree.
I can't remember wanting anything in particular enough to put it in the scrapbook but I obliged my mother and wiled away many gloomy dark December afternoons creating these pages. We cut out old Christmas cards together and created scenes that I remember to this day.
We had Christmas plays and we could say the word 'Christmas' outloud and not pretend it was something else. We had Jewish friends who also glued cotton balls and sparkles to their scrap book pages and filled it full of things they wanted.
Usually there was a project at school to create something that would forever be a family heirloom and most golden of gifts. This year the girls were making knitting needle and yarn holders out of Quaker Oat cereal containers. The Quaker Oat company sold their oat cereal in a six inch diameter tube in those days. There was a sleeve of poster paper to be fitted around the container and lots of tissue glued on that and thick layers of sparkle and yarn samples upon that. The knitting holders required many days to dry as one can imagine with the amounts of glue we used. Keeping the secret of this magnificent gift was an enormous responsibility
One day I argued with my mother over something and I was so mad that I told her I was NOT going to give her the knitting container that I had made. I heard myself reveal the secret and I was helpless to retrieve the words.
By some miracle my mother had forgotten what I had said and was as surprised at the gift as I had hoped she would be on Christmas morning.
My family's church, Chalmers Presbyterian had begun the ersatz religious hype of Christmas, little paper displays of wise men, donkeys, diamond shaped yellow stars, shepherds with sheep and crooks and the nativity scene decorated the basement where the Sunday school was held.
There was always a White elephant sale about the second week of December and I took my hard earned coins to the sale and bought the gifts I would give my family members. I bought my mother a slightly cracked plastic ivory palm tree brooch and a huge bottle of lovely pink coloured acne cream, for my father, a pair of knee high red golf socks, and for my sister a golden book of the Happy Bunny with only a few wrinkled pages.
The excitment of Christmas glowed in my happy little soul as I wrapped the gifts and hid them under my bed.
Roles were announced for the Christmas concert at school and we practiced our lines and sang the carols every morning after singing God Save the Queen and saluting the flag. I was a tall child so the role of one of the villagers was always mine. I don't think I have ever seen that role reprised anywhere since, but my teacher managed to help me believe that this was a critical character.
On an evening after dinner just before the third week of December we would pile into the 1949 blue Chrysler sedan to go to the tree lots to buy the family Christmas tree. In the trunk would be yards of rope and old sheets to put between the tree and the car roof top.
We always tried to choose the perfect tree, almost always falling short of that goal and bringing home a tree with a huge bald spot. Of course it had to be carefully measured , then shortened as the trunk sawn flat many times then nailed to the 2x4's which would hold it up. The tree was set out to thaw on the back porch waiting for the lower branches to gracefully open out and for the sap to drip onto the mat before it was allowed to come into the house bringing its lovely foresty smell of spruce.
The approach of Christmas was definitely in the air, I know that a day didn't go by when I didn't think of it. There was baking to do with my mum, decorating sugar cookies for the school Christmas tea and bake sale.
Then came the evening that we went shopping for new shoes. New fancy shoes happened twice a year. Just before Christmas and just before Easter. Christmas shoes were always black maryjanes with a strap and some kind of decoration. We had neighbours that owned a shoe store downtown. After Dad came home from work we would drive downtown, awed at all the hanging Christmas lights. The store would be filled with other little kids, all playing in the foot xray machine. Our mother had been a nurse and she was deathly respectful and afraid of xrays so we were not allowed to go anywhere near it. I loved the smell of new shoes and rode home with my nose buried in them.
The final and most important event of our Christmas social season was the Christmas party in the church basement where Santa was the guest of honour.
The smell of wet wool rose from the radiators where people had hung their winter coats to dry. Puddles formed around the winter boots on the floor from the melting snow.
My sister and I were all dressed up in our homemade red velvet dresses with the lace collars and our new shoes. The excitement level was nearing hysteria, a few fights had broken out among the boys and some of the girls looked feverish with red cheeks and glassy eyes.
Finally, to a great fanfare of ringing bells Santa arrived dragging a huge brown potato sack, lumpy with gifts. He was magnificent in his red velvet suit, the exasct same colour as my dress.
I felt like royalty.
A long line up formed and each child climbed onto his knee and shyly told him their secret desire.
Finally my turn was near, I scanned Santa from head to toe, admiring his wonderful elfish self perched way up high on the Christmas throne.
His shoes, black and shiny, looked familiar. They looked very familiar. My dad had shoes like that.
I climbed on Santa's knee. Santa warpped me in his arms and said. "Hello little girl, what would you like for Christmas." Santa had an Austalian accent. My dad had an Australian accent.
I looked up and into Santa's eyes. They looked like my dad's eyes. His cheeks sported an unearthly bright red glow, almost the same as my mother's lipstick.
Santa said,"Well, Deed you have a happy Christmas."
Gee Santa knew my nickname!
On the way home I heard my parents talking with low voices in the front seat. They were concerned that they had outed Santa to me.
But, I was so happy, I was probably the luckiest kid in the world.
I think I figured it out...Santa was my dad.
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