Being The Fourth Sunday In Advent

I believed in Santa Claus for a lot longer than many of my peers did.

This was due to a potent combination of two factors: my mother did a superb job of hiding gifts and maintaining the Santa Myth, and I never wanted to know the “truth” behind any myth. To this very day, I am one of the only people at my office who, when we do the Secret Santa thing at this time of year, emphatically does not want to know who drew my name. Likewise, I never reveal whose name I drew. What fun is there in knowing such a thing in advance? I have been told over the years that most of my friends and family members engaged in all sorts of skulduggery to ascertain what gifts they were to receive and from whom. I know of one fellow who would belly-crawl like an assassin through the house and ferret out the hiding place where gifts had been secreted. This is alien to my personality. I was, after all, the child who sobbed when the little old man behind the curtain was revealed to be the trickster behind the Wizard of Oz.

In 1970, when I was ten years old, I was sitting in the school lunch room with my classmates one December day when the topic of Santa came up. The subject was timely since Christmas was about a week away, and my table was clattering with discussion about possible gifts and disappointments. One of my friends winked at the others and looked at me with a sly expression.

“I guess Santa’s going to bring you something?” he cooed.

I looked up and saw the others watching me, many wearing sneers on their freckled faces. I chewed whatever I had in my mouth and swallowed and nodded. “Yes. I asked for a tether-ball set.”

The table erupted with hoots and howls. “Man, there ain’t no Santa!” said one classmate.

“It’s your parents, don’t you know that?” asked another

I shook my head, my face hot. “No. No, my mother wouldn’t do that. I asked her one time if Santa was real, and she said he is. She wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Well, she’s lyin’ to you now, boy,” guffawed one boy, whom I disliked already. “You’re such a baby — believin’ in Santy Claus at your age! Man, what a baby!” The others joined in and laughed me to scorn. I arose, took my tray to the window, came back to the table and got my jacket, and left the cafeteria.

They followed me outside. The boy whom I disliked, who had become my own personal Scut Farkus decades before I would ever hear that infamous name, shoved me from behind. “Bet you believe in the Easter Bunny, too, dontcha, baby?”

I punched him, and he head-butted me in the stomach, and we dropped to the ground and flailed around in the frozen needles of dead grass until a teacher came over and pulled us apart. On the way back to class when the bell rang, my tormentors were still jeering at me, the foolish baby who still believed in Santa. How could I make them believe? How could I describe the stillness of Christmas Eves at my little house, with my sister and I eager to go to bed lest, as Mother warned every year, our noise startled Rudolph and made him veer away from our neighborhood? How could I communicate the feeling of complete awe that overtook as we awakened on Christmas morning and raced together to the little tree, silver icicles dancing in the air, and stood before it, gazing on the toys that had not been there the night before, and my mother’s eyes wide in shared amazement, shaking her head at the miracle of Santa having come to a small, shabby house that didn’t even have a chimney? Oh, and the eggnog had been drunk, and the cookie was now only crumbs, and the margarine tub full of Quaker Oats (for Rudolph and Company) was empty…oh, how could I speak of such wonders to the sneering, mocking faces of those who sat in the classes with me?

That afternoon, I arrived home and found a note from my mother, She and my sister had walked the few blocks downtown to do some Christmas shopping. I settled in at the kitchen table to do some homework, and was there an hour or so later when I heard a noise outside.

Figuring it was Mother and Sissy returning, I peeked out the window just in time to see my sister trot into the little lean-to garage, which, having no car, we used for storage. She was carrying a tether-ball set.

My life changed at that moment.

Somehow I fought off the funk within a few days and was able to put on a good show of enjoying Christmastime. But in the secret chamber of my heart, I was pulverized beyond repair.

Not only had my jerk classmates been proven correct, but the proving had taken place mere hours after I had waded into battle to protect my mother’s honor and the holy concept of Santa Claus. The timing and the truth were powerful hammers, and they beat a chorus on me for some time afterwards.

In less than two weeks, I would turn eleven. And that year, the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy one, would be the year that I would attend church with a school chum and hear, for the first time, the gospel story in a way that I understood.

The old branches drop off, and new ones grow in to replace them. The old paths become overgrown and impassable, and new ones open up before us, and we walk down their wide avenues with eager gait and swinging arms.

But sometimes, we limp as we go, and the old wounds never heal.

A Merry Christmas to you all.

~ S.K. Orr