Santa Claus

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about my daughter and her love of books. Normally, this would be a great thing to a parent. In the age of X-Boxes and i-Pods, when everything is electronic and shiny and instantaneous, reading a plain old book can seem pretty dull to an eight-year-old. Not so for her. She reads more than I do.

All that reading included Snow Day, in which her father went ahead and wrote that Santa was not real and that flying reindeer and sleighs and Christmas magic was all a lie. The sudden realization that she’d either had or was about to read that chapter bonged into my head late one night, which resulted in me sneaking into her bedroom and mangling a copy of my own book. I wasn’t sure if she’d gotten that far into the novel or not, wasn’t sure if she still believed or didn’t, and wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it.

Now I know. Sort of.

It is Christmas week. My house is abuzz in last minute shopping, frantic wrapping, and the sugar-induced spasms of two small children who can barely contain themselves. They are both awash in the sheer beauty of Christmas. It’s the lights and the singing and the promise of two school-free weeks, the gifts that are on the way and the Happy Birthday Jesus.

Every year I fear the joy of Christmas will abandon me, that the pressures of having to buy and do will get transform me from Linus telling everyone about the real meaning of Christmas to Scrooge telling everyone to just leave him alone. But my kids keep me believing and my insides soft. Children can have that affect on you.

My son is six, that perfect age when the line between magic and fact is nonexistent. To him, Santa is just as real as anyone else. Flying reindeer? Of course! He’s seen a platypus, so why not flying reindeer? Platypuses are weird.

I’ve seen no apparent changes in my daughter’s behavior. She seems as excited as ever, and she’s mentioned Santa often. I think we’re in the clear, for this year anyway.

And it shouldn’t matter. I know this. Sooner or later, the truth will come out. Besides, Christmas isn’t really about Santa at all. It’s a fact my kids know deep down, evidenced by the carols they sang at the Christmas pageant at church and the birthday cake they’ve made for Jesus.

But I also know this—it does matter. For my daughter, it matters much. Her diabetes has forced her to grow up long before she should. She knows life isn’t fair and that this world can be just as cold as it can be warm. She is not the boisterous child her brother is. She ponders and thinks. Just like me.

I’ve seen her thinking a lot over the past weeks.

She’ll say it’s nothing or that she was just looking at the lights on the tree, but there’s more. With her, there’s always more.

Sometimes I think she read that chapter in Snow Day after all and she’s just figuring things out on her own. And that she doesn’t really believe in Santa anymore, but she wants to. She wants to hold on.

I hope she does.

Her letter to Santa sits here on my desk at work (I told her I’d mail it, and I couldn’t very well stash it at the house. I’ve learned my lesson). Included were the usual eight-year-old little girl’s wishes, along with some that drifted much more into God’s territory to grant than jolly old Saint Nick’s.

There is a P.S. at the end, though—

“I’ll have cookies for you on Christmas Eve and also a list of questions. I need you to fill them out please. I love you.”

I don’t know what those questions will be, but I guarantee you this: I’m bringing my A game.

When my daughter climbed onto my lap a few weeks ago and asked if she could read my novel, I said she absolutely could. There was nothing in those pages that could be considered inappropriate for eight-year-olds—no cussing, no sex, no murder. And as she’d already gone through just about every book on the shelf of her room, she had nothing to read.

For a week I watched her curled up on the sofa with brow furrowed. She was the perfect reader, the epitome of the audience every writer desires. She laughed much. Cried some. She pondered and asked questions and underlined her favorite parts.

And it was during all of that when I began thinking about how I was such a wonderful father, fostering in my child a love for words and books and stories. How I was expanding her mind and giving her proof that any dream could be attained with the right amount of work and faith. Yes, a wonderful father. Perfect but for my fallen nature.

Looking back, it seems appropriate that a few nights ago I would be brought back down to earth in such a sudden way. There is a great amount of danger in thinking too less of yourself, but the greater danger lies in thinking too much. Wonderful fathers do not dash the sense of magic and possibility that is inherent in their children. And yet that is exactly what I believe I’ve done.

It began late at night, in that dimness of mind when wakefulness and sleep melt into one another. I was settled in bed, eyes closed, when a thought that perhaps for days had been boring its way to the front of my thick head finally broke through.

It was the afterword. I had written about Santa Claus in the afterword.

About how he wasn’t real.

I threw the covers back and sat up. How could I be so stupid? How could I have forgotten that? Yes, every child must at some point be confronted with that horrible and inevitable truth. It is often the first baby steps on the road to adulthood. But this way? Having to read it in a book your father’s written? There, in black and white, told by the man who has told you over and over that people who don’t believe in Santa are wrong?

My mind seemed to fold in on itself. Men tend to think of problems in terms of solutions. How something went wrong and why doesn’t matter as long as it’s fixed. And I had to fix this. Now.

And that is why I did what just hours before I would have sworn was unthinkable, an act that was so vile and so contrary to everything I believed in that in the process of its commission I felt part savage and part Nazi:

I took my knife into my daughter’s bedroom, opened the copy of my book that lay on her nightstand, and very carefully cut out the afterword.

I set the book back on the nightstand exactly as I’d found it. My daughter, immersed in a sleep of innocence the likes of which I would never enjoy again, never stirred. The only thing that kept me from taking a shower to try and wash all the failure off was the fact that her belief was intact.

Back to bed. Settled into my pillow, covers over me. I said a prayer of both thanks and forgiveness and waited for God to tell me everything would be okay.

He didn’t tell me.

Because I shot up in bed again when another thought managed to finally puncture my thick brain.

Why do writers include things in an afterword?

Because they’ve mentioned them in the book itself.

I hadn’t just mentioned Santa’s imaginary existence in passing. I’d written an entire chapter about it.

Out of bed. Back to my daughter’s room. I looked at the placement of her bookmark.

She’d read that chapter about two days prior.

And that is where things stand as of now. She hasn’t mentioned Santa. I haven’t either. And she seems fine, has even begun a Christmas list.

But I wonder. I wonder what this Christmas will bring. I wonder if I’ll walk into her room one December night and find her in tears. And I wonder what I’ll say.

Holding on to Santa

Encouraging a young reader and epic dad fail

Connect