Mysterical-E

The Hell You Say

Musings on the 2011 Holiday Season

I’m up north and up far enough that we get pretty chilly and usually snowy weather, and that causes a person to notice the recent December holidays. I don’t mean to insinuate that you more tropical types don’t do so, that was just a lead in to what I want to write about.

Santa Claus is on my mind today. The jolly old fellow who tours the world at impossible speeds delivering unbelievable quantities of toys to good little kids. (Never mind that that role is played by other characters in other seasons in some world families―and is neglected altogether in others.)

In my “when I was a kid” family, we did have Santa Claus. Our version was mostly based on the poem, A Visit from Saint Nicholas, so we children were to be snug in our beds by midnight, though I recall having to ask what “sugar-plums” are. I don’t remember the answer, but visions of them, which the poem claims should have danced through my head didn’t really do so. We can blame that on hard times during the Great Depression, perhaps.

One year “The Old Fellow” actually visited our house, red suit and all. Not exactly “dressed all in fur,” as poem had it, but plenty close enough. The night was cold and we lived in a tiny Rocky Mountain town, so what Santa mainly did was stand by our space-heater and rub his mittened hands together. He also did a little staring at the stove-pipe, which I thought to be rather curious. Afterward I asked why he was so fascinated, and Mother explained that he may have been wondering how he could get down a small chimney like that. I was quite alarmed, until she added that he could also enter through doors, and even had a key that would fit all the front doors in the world. (She wrote a very cute song that included that information, but perhaps I hadn’t heard it yet. Or maybe the song came later, and she felt she had to include it in the lyrics in case other kids were also worried about the matter.) I was being fed clear-cut impossibilities, but you know how it is when you’re dealing with the young and innocent.

Dad had brought home a nickel candy bar (nickel ones were the largest back then), and Mom cut it in two, then cut one of the halves into enough pieces for us kids to savor―this may have been while there still were only two of us―the other half of the bar going onto a shelf for Santa to eat when he came back after we were sound asleep. In the morning, that half was, indeed, gone, showing that Santa had been there.There were also some toys and things to confirm this. (Sorry I recall so few of them; I have no excuse: the economy would have kept the assortment from being much of a burden on the memory. Maybe that was the year a brother and I received “aviator helmets,” imitating the ones aviators of that time had to wear because most airplanes’ cockpits were open to the weather. The caps kept our ears warm when we went out to play in the snow.)

Some years later (well, perhaps only two years), when a neighbor kid in California told us that Santa Claus was a myth, I had to contradict him, though I’m inclined to believe him today. He claimed the toys were furnished by one’s parents. I can’t imagine, now, how my folks managed to afford whatever it was we used to get. But back in 1937, his theory about where those gifts came from might have made sense if it hadn’t been for the half candy bar―definitely gone by morning, proving beyond a doubt that Santa Claus had been there to eat it.

By 1939, when Montgomery Ward gave away free copies of Robert L. May’s poem, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (precursor to his much shorter―and far more often remembered―song of the same name), I had begun to understand the actual situation, being then a full ten years old. Our move to the coast was due to Dad’s finding a job there, so the folks must have felt a bit richer, though I can’t recall what we kids got. Wait, maybe I can―in part: a globe of the world. No, I guess that must have showed up in 1936; I do get details mixed up.

Flip forward to when my spouse and I had kids of our own. She was more or less similarly raised, so we preserved the Santa Claus legend for them, only revealing the truth “when they were old enough to understand it,” or whatever reason we gave ourselves. In their innocence, one of them understood the red-suited guy’s name to be Santa Clock, and another Santa Closet. The cute names didn’t last, I fear. One daughter learned early that there was no such person, and went without Santa for a year (though not without toys, which she knew were furnished by parents) only to resume belief the following year. That last phenomenon explains a lot about how people vote and how they worship, and all that, but in such a nebulous way that I don’t think I can write a best-seller on it; maybe you can? Or maybe it’s just the “Peter Pan” effect: one is supposed to believe in the story for the sake of the characters in it, who are always disappointed when somebody doesn’t believe in them. Maybe they even die. Think how the original Rudolph must have felt when, in the movie “Olive, the Other Reindeer,” (featuring a dog as Olive) somebody accused the Rudolph legend of being an urban myth. Well, actually, I’ve heard that the line is in the movie, but I haven’t actually seen the movie yet, so I can’t be sure. Anyhow, let’s put it this way: We don’t want Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Kinsey Millhone or Sherlock Holmes to feel bad or possibly even die, do we? Of course not. So let’s all believe in them, just as hard as we can!

On the other hand, we might do Holmes a considerable favor by not believing in Moriarty. All together now: “Moriarty doesn’t exist; Moriarty doesn’t exist; Moriarty doesn’t exist; Moriarty doesn’t exist; …”

There now. Don’t you feel better for having done such a good deed? And in plenty of time to count for next Christmas, too. We’ll all get lots of toys.