<p>People look at me a little askance when I tell them I am a believer. Even my wife thinks I am a little nuts (for many reasons in addition to this). But I am. When my son would ask if Santa Clause was actually real, I could tell him with a straight face that <em>I</em> believed there <em>is</em> a Santa.</p>
<p>When I was a young child, Christmas had a magic to it that no other day of the year had. It was the night Santa came and brought gifts. It was hard to get to sleep that night and it was hard to stay in bed until that time my parents said I could get up and go look. It’s hard to describe that magic, but it was real.</p>
<p>But then I thought I got smart. I thought I knew the real secret of Santa. I went along with what I thought was a charade. But the magic disappeared completely from Christmas. The day was not so special after all. Sure, I got the same gifts as before, but they did not seem as magical as they had. We still had Christmas dinner, sometimes with big crowds of relatives and friends, but I really missed the way I had felt as a younger child.</p>
<p>With kids of my own, that magic reappeared. Santa became real again, and I realized that maybe I had been wrong. Santa began to revisit, bringing gifts, and the cookies and milk disappeared overnight. Christmas day became special again.</p>
<p>It helped me realize that some of the most real things are things that you cannot see or explain. But it all made sense. How can Santa visit so many homes in one night and make so many kids happy? It’s not impossible when Santa has so many people willing - for that one night - to help the old guy. We all could accomplish the “impossible” if we had hundreds of millions of helpers. How could he not be real?</p>
<p>I remember as a somewhat cynical 9 year old watching Walter Cronkite on the old B&W tv - and I was willing to briefly suspend “disbelief” when he showed Norad tracking Santa on the radar… it felt good to believe…</p>
<p>Did you see a recent news article about a teacher being suspended (I forget the actual wording, sorry) for telling the class that Santa was NOT real/true? It is hard to believe a teacher would do that with young kids. Then I read the opposing viewpoint that said (paraphrasing) “why should the teacher be in trouble for telling the class essentially the truth?” But hey, anyone in their right mind knows that young kids believe in Santa and it isn’t the teacher’s place to suspend that belief. Plus besides right or wrong, anyone who enjoys working with kids (I used to teach young kids) would not want to rob them from this childhood magic. :(</p>
<p>When I was 5, we opened gifts with many of my cousins who all believed in Santa. Our parents hired a professional Santa and we “caught” Santa putting the toys under the tree on Christmas Eve. That totally confirmed our belief in Santa and made Christmas really special.</p>
<p>Funny story: I “played Santa” one night for the parents of one of my son’s friends who had a houseful of kids and relatives and relatives’ kids. On Christmas Eve, I was to park down the street, go to the basement door, which was to have been left unlocked, find a Santa suit and a sack full of toys, put it on, and sneak upstairs into the house and be “caught” bringing gifts.</p>
<p>I thought I knew where the family lived, so I drove there, parked the car, and headed for the house. It had snowed quite heavily, so I was plowing my way through deep snow, and because of the ice underneath, slid down their steeply sloping driveway. I got up, brushed off the snow, and started trudging through the snow around the side of the house looking for the basement door. When I found it, it was locked… Perhaps it was another door… I went around the house, trying to get in. A window perhaps…?</p>
<p>Hmmm…</p>
<p>I pulled out my cell phone and could not get a signal. I continued around the side of the house, leaving an obvious path through the snow, until I could get a signal, then realized I had no idea what the telephone number could be.</p>
<p>I gave up and went back to the car. As I drove away, I saw another house that I suddenly knew was the correct one.</p>
<p>I had been trying to break into the wrong house!</p>
<p>Digmedia, I’m terrified of you. Between your IM episodes and Santa, you’re dangerous. LOL!!!</p>
<p>I think the one event that changed the next four years of my life was - after my parents died in June, and I had been in the state run institution for six months, had handled everything as well as could be expected, but, on Christmas, seeing strangers drive up to the dormatory in the middle of the day, deliver wrapped presents, and having some of those presents given to me bearing the impersonal labels “girl, age 10-14” etc. was the cruelest blow of all. Somehow that was 100x worse than all that had come before. It’s not that I still believed in Santa, it was more the institutionalization and bureaucratic processing of Christmas, and the realization that no one knew your name anymore, and you didn’t belong to anyone anymore. Reduced to just “girl, age 10-14”. Thankfully, I think the human mind issues sort of an anesthetic to help us forget the unthinkable and the unbearable, so I’ve forgotten nearly all of the substance of those years, but never, ever have I forgotten the day I received beautifully wrapped Christmas presents with tags to “girl, age X”. I don’t even remember opening them - or if I did open them, I didn’t want whatever was inside. I think I just laid them aside or gave them to some other equally lost young lady. It wasn’t the fault of the nice people who were trying to help and who could not possibly know the pain their gift tag caused, and it wasn’t the fault of the overworked staff, but it was horrible. </p>
<p>Christmas in my house is an absolute hilarious party. I still hide ALL the presents - some of them under lock and key, actually (because she looks for them), and wait until D is asleep, and then finish any remaining wrapping, and put them under a tree that is always entirely too large, smells too good and is way over-decorated. Then I make sure her stocking is totally stuffed full of goodies. It’s a process that takes all night and usually I do not go to bed at all between December 23 - 25, and the fun and hilarity of Christmas morning is well worth the work and lack of sleep. And I still pretend I have no clue at all how all of those presents got into the house and under the tree, etc.</p>
<p>Latetoschool
hugs to that little girl whose name wasn’t on the tags.
I am so happy for you that you have taken back the wonder of the holidays in the present.
best wishes for the holidays</p>
<p>There is still a part of me that wants to believe. The wonder and awe of believing in something that wonderful! Those are such happy and wonderful memories. When D was little, we always had a Santa come and pass out the gifts. She had to stay in the den with our guests (we lived far from family) until she heard the jingle bells and Santa walked into to room carrying a large (or 2 or 3) sack(s) with all the kids’ toys. She still remembers that. Now, with no small children around, it is very different. Oh, for those days of pure belief! I miss that. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah to all!</p>
<p>Oh, Latetoschool how alone you must have felt! And to think that just a couple of weeks ago I took a couple of tags off of the Christmas tree at our church and bought a couple of presents for a “boy, age 6”, and a “girl, age 10”. It never ocurred to me that they might not put the names of the kids on the presents! Oh, I so hope they don’t give those kids the presents with those tags on them!</p>
<p>Mstee, please don’t feel bad and please don’t worry. We do the EXACT same thing - what choice is there? You have to pull the tag off the tree destined for an anonymous recipient, and there is no way to have the name in advance, and there is no other way for the church support staff to get the gifts to the best matched recipients in that scenario, and, I am certain the tags will be replaced with actual names.</p>
<p>In my situation, there was no choice either really - the people who decided to donate gifts to the parentless were just being kind and had no possible way to know names, and, the staff at the children’s home were too overworked to be able to sort out gifts and put actual names on - they had enough to do, plus they were working their eight hour shifts on Christmas - no one meant any harm, and, in the majority of situations - actually I would bet in almost all other situations - it wouldn’t bother the recipient at all - most children I am certain are very pleased and happy to receive a gift and the contents are so exciting they probably do not notice the tags.</p>
<p>In my case, I’d lost everything just months before (parents, home, church, even my school changed) and this just intersected at the worst time, in the worst possible way. It would have been far, far better if there were no presents at all. The gifts you provided, the end recipient is almost certainly not in the same situation, and in any case the parents or caregivers will almost certainly put names on.</p>
<p>Please don’t feel bad because you did something so wonderful. Along the way there were some very wonderful, kind people who reached a hand out to me at just the perfect time, it’s just that their gifts weren’t the kind that you can put in a box, wrap, and fix with a proper name tag :)</p>
<p>Mstee - another thought - I have since learned how very difficult it is to get names on gifts when trying to do something nice. A few years ago when I worked for a traditional employer, I had a staff of 20 persons reporting, and I set a policy that we would not do office gift exchange - instead, assigned three people to go find a family who could not have a Christmas through no fault of their own, and we would provide their Christmas. </p>
<p>Well, my staff found such a family, with four small children. Terrible story, that - parents were dying - anyway, sat down with all 20 employees, and we mapped out a strategy to buy the gifts. The plan was that teams of people were assigned per child, and they were to buy, wrap, and label the gifts with child’s age and gender, and collect them in the office until the day we would go as a group to deliver. Names were intentionally left off because we knew it was possible that one child would end up with ten gifts, and another child perhaps only one, depending on how effectively each team executed the buying process - or - if the team was assigned to buy for, say, the six year old boy, but instead found a “can’t pass up” perfect gift for the 10 year old girl, well, you can see that we ended up with this tangled mess of gifts. </p>
<p>Well - on the morning we were to deliver, we had an absolute MESS, trying to quickly decide which child would receive which gifts, making sure the distribution of gifts balanced nicely, and then getting the correct names on the gifts. It was almost a disaster - we ended up having to quickly put everything on an Excel spreadsheet, and then running a sort of assembly line situation. We finally got it correctly organized but it took some real teamwork, and then we were actually late getting out of the office with all the gifts. </p>
<p>So, I wouldn’t worry if gifts end up with genders and ages only and no names - it’s hard to do it any other way, most of the time.</p>
<p>I only had one sibling, a very special sister. We lost her to leukemia when she was 32, many years ago. She always believed in Santa. Why? Because she was told when she was 7 that if she didn’t believe, he wouldn’t come anymore. She always believed, and every year until she died she had presents under the tree from Santa. Sadly, I didn’t believe and didn’t get presents from Santa after that :). I always miss her this time of year. She made Christmas special.</p>
</p>
it felt good to believe…</p>