A belated Christmas story.

So I know this is a bit late, but the holiday season is not yet officially over and I thought it would be fun for an atheist blog to share a story about losing belief…in Santa Claus. Not an unusual occurence, except my story happened a little shall we say, late in life, and happened all at once, rather than the gradual realization most kids seem to come to that this shit can’t possibly be real. But don’t worry; it has a happy ending. Enjoy!

———————————————————————————————-

My parents were very good at the whole Santa Claus thing. My mother in particular. Santa Claus never used the same wrapping paper, never had the same handwriting — sometimes his presents appeared adorned in a pool of glitter, glitter which I imagined Santa Claus wielded like pixy dust and perhaps just fell from him wherever he walked. Furthermore, Santa Claus appeared to have particular powers of gift giving my mere mortal parents lacked. One incident in particular cemented by belief in Santa Claus. When I was about 7, I loved nothing more in the world than Little Mermaid anything. One item I wanted in particular was a Little Mermaid watch that had water on the inside, with a small Ariel that you could swirl about by flicking your wrist. My Mom looked for it earnestly but told me that it appeared as though they sold out and were no longer in production. For the record she was being honest; but she actually was able to find some still on sale somehow, after she had informed me I couldn’t expect to get one for Christmas. So of course, what a perfect gift to label as coming from Santa — and to this day you can still watch the home video of me rationalizing, in open-eyed awe, that “No one else could get this but Santa could.” That sealed the deal.

So the years go by and my understanding of Santa evolves a little, but my faith did not fundamentally alter. I have to emphasize that I thought I had a very sophisticated view of Santa Claus — first off, it wasn’t really Santa Claus, but the ghost of St. Nicholas, a historical figure (I guess I was showing my interests early), who was obviously the real Santa Claus. As for the reindeer, the sleigh, the chimney delivery system — I thought all of that was absurd, and was very impressed with myself that I knew better. I knew that the ghost of St. Nicholas simply appeared in the houses of children whenever he wanted to, did his shit and then left when he was done. I have to confess though that I still bought the idea that he ate the cookies, although I’m not sure how this squared with my idea of him being an essentially non-corporeal being — and it’s hilarious to think now how convincing all those crumbled cookies were to me, how for some reason it just seemed implausible to me that my father could have eaten them. But in any case, I was a true believer.

But by the time I was 11, most my friends were not. In particular my best friend wasn’t, and this Christmastime we ended up in a bit of a heated discussion about it one afternoon. A few days later I was telling my mother about the conversation, and how sad it was that my friend was losing faith in the truth her childlike instinct pointed her towards (as I child I sentimentalized childhood, which might have had something to do with all this), and emphasized that I would always know that St. Nicholas was real. “Well,” my mother hesitatingly started, “he is real in a sense.”

Continue reading…