Santa: You Better Watch Out!

This post was inspired by my friend @tarazkp in his recent post. For more clarity you may want to read his before reading mine. Normally I would simply comment beneath his post, but I have too much to say about the Santa issue and I find my comments getting longer and longer as my posts become fewer. My muse is a lazy bastard!

My slot in the crazy scheme called life was relatively unique. I was born very late in my parent's life. My two sisters were grown and nearly ready to move out. I was the baby of the tribe and so I was indulged and treated much like a beloved pet. With so many aunts, my mother and my sisters my feet hardly touched the ground. For whatever reason the whole family toyed with my innocence and led me to believe in the fairy tale world.

When I lost a tooth, I put it under my pillow and the tooth fairy always left a silver dollar. My dad loved Las Vegas and so always had a ready supply.

At Easter, the Easter Bunny not only hid eggs, he sometimes left a baby chick or even stayed behind to live with me until this tiny tot usually played him to death. It distressed me but my parents thought it was cute.

Santa was a whole 'nother issue. I was one of those kids who cried when put on Santas lap. I didn't much care for Santa. I was a boisterous child, full of piss and vinegar, always pushing my envelope and getting into trouble. I didn't get spanked much, but I did get switched. When I was naughty, my mother would make a big deal of cutting off a willowy branch, slowly removing the leaves in front of me. I knew I was in trouble and often begged for mercy. Sometimes I got it. Sometimes not.

When Christmas rolled around, Mom would sing Santa Claus is Coming to Town, you know the one: "You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout," etc. Even before there were security cameras everywhere I knew Santa spied on me and knew when I was naughty or nice. He also had a dossier of my activity that he checked at least twice before deciding I'd get candy or coal in my Christmas stocking. Though I didn't like him, I still believed in him.

Part of why I continued to believe is that my parents went to great lengths to perpetuate the myth. I had to write a Christmas letter and put it in the fireplace on December 6th, which they told me was Santa's birthday. In the morning, the letter would be gone and there would be several candies lying in the fireplace that they told me fell out of his sack when he came down the chimney, as well as a tiny Christmas tree.

On Christmas eve, when I was manically excited and unable to sleep, while my mother either read to me or sang a lullaby, my father would sneak outside and throw gravel on the roof at which point my mother would say that it sounded like Santa had arrived and that I'd better be quiet and go to sleep or he wouldn't leave me any presents. Then she would leave the room.

So immersed was I in this fiction that when I was in 3rd grade, when I was 8 years old, I got in an argument with a 4th grader in the playground. He said Santa didn't exist. I told him he was a liar. He said my parents were the liars. I gave him a bloody nose.

It got ugly after that. I had to go to the principal's office and he called my parents. We had a meeting and they told me the truth. My parents were liars.

I didn't much care about losing Santa. The conversation shifted to the Easter Bunny, which I much preferred, but the answer was the same. Tooth fairy? No! What about God? Oh, well, God exists. Yeah, right! The whole fairy tale world was now lost to me forever.

I never trusted or believed what my parents told me again and I projected that skepticism to the rest of the world. I am not a believer. I am a truth seeker.

Most people I've told this story simply shrug it off. It hardly seems traumatic to them at all, just part of growing up. I had some counseling in my 20s and then again in my 30's and at one point I was instructed to write down the "watershed" moments in my life, things that happened to me that affected me, changing my world view or the direction my life was taking. This was number one on the list.

Worse things have happened to me since then, for sure. My father had a heart attack and died the very next year and my mother fell apart. I've gotten divorced, my house burned down with everything in it, I broke my leg in 5 places, my business crashed and burned in the economic collapse and I've had a mild heart attack. More bad things to come, I'm sure. But losing Santa was losing my innocence and life has never been as quite as wondrous and promising as it was before that.

My advice: Always be honest with your children. Don't toy with them or lie to them, especially to protect them from reality.

I don't blame my parents. They were a product of their times. I never loved them as much after that and I guess that's just the karmic price they (and I) had to pay for their ignorance.

Images: Pixabay