Losing Santa

I am so gosh-dern proud of my little nephew, I could vomit.

Yessiree, my sister’s oldest, Michael James Curry (10 years old), just announced that he no longer believes in Santa Claus. And to that I say, “Right on!”

Not that I’m against this Christmas tradition, but once the kids start getting up into double-digit ages, I worry about them hanging on to the fantasy too long because, you know, being a teenager who still believes in Santa is like being that middle-aged divorcée cruising for college girls in the under-25 clubs.

Of course, 10 is a natural age for a kid to become an asantheist, so it’s not just the fact that my nephew stopped believing that makes me proud, but how he stopped believing, which was by keen detective work—a sting actually, some real Hardy Boys shit.

See a few weeks ago, the boy lost a tooth. But instead of telling his parents, he just placed it under his pillow in secrecy and waited to see if this Tooth Fairy person would stop by to deposit a nickel. Alas, no Tooth Fairy arrived, and thus the jig was up. (He probably concluded—if I know my nephew—that the Tooth Fairy is a construct of the adult overseers who make up stories about magical, gift-bearing beings to keep the kid-masses emotionally opiated.)

Shortly after, Michael revealed his epiphany to his mother, Barbara, my sister. They were in the car coming home from Nonna’s. Barb was driving, Michael was in the passenger seat and his younger brother James, 7, was in the back seat.

“I know there’s no Tooth Fairy,” Michael stated, out of the blue. And this is why I love this kid. He’s such a bright, inquisitive little snot-nose know-it-all, you just can’t help but adore him.

“What makes you say that?” Barb asked.

“Because I put a tooth under the pillow, and the Tooth Fairy never came.”

My sister was dumbfounded. She searched for a response but could find none. James, however, had a perfectly reasonable explanation.

“Maybe the Tooth Fairy was on vacation,” he spouted from the backseat, a comment that snapped Barb out of her funk.

“We’ll talk about this later, Michael,” she said, not wanting to give little James any ideas.

Afterward, when they were alone, my sister ’fessed up to the depressing truth. Michael nodded his head and smirked, “I know there’s no Easter Bunny or Santa, either,” he declared.

Now, I know a lot of parents worry about the day when their children stop believing in Santa. They worry that the magic will disappear from their kids’ lives, leaving only this humdrum world with all its humdrum crumbs to look forward to. But I don’t see it that way. I think that when you lose your Santa fantasy, you are replacing one kind of magic for another. That’s how it was when I stopped believing, anyway. I was around the same age as Michael. Like him, I was already a santgnostic, looking for some evidence either way. I just couldn’t decide which was more unlikely, that a fat man on a sleigh delivered presents to all the children on the planet in the middle of the night, or that the entire story was contrived and every adult in the world was in on the conspiracy.

Then one fateful Christmas Eve, I was awakened by a commotion. I looked out my bedroom window and saw my parents lugging in the booty. Finally I had my proof. There was no Santa, definitively! But what I felt was not sadness; rather, it was great relief, and power—the power of knowledge—and best of all, a sense of passage, maturation, of graduation from child to adult.

I think that’s how it is with a lot of kids. I think that’s what’s going on when they have their after-school pow-wows in their tree forts, smoking cigarettes and jabbering ’bout how Santa is a construct of the parental overseers devised to keep kids emotionally opiated. Having that knowledge makes them feel superior to their parents, who still believe they believe in Father Christmas, and who could never imagine that their kids sneak cigarettes and unravel conspiracy theories in tree forts. For me, those days were every bit as magical as the Santa fantasy days.

My nephew seems to agree. I phoned him yesterday to ask if he was saddened by the revelation that Santa did not exist.

“I don’t mind,” he said, “as long as I get to stay home for Christmas and be with my family. That’s really the main part.”

See why I adore this boy? Any other kid would say something like, “Hey, man, I don’t care if Christmas presents are made by elves or by child slaves in Ecuadorian sweatshops so long as there’s a bicycle and a bunch of video games under my tree come Dec. 25.”

“Great attitude, Michael,” I said, “You’re truly a wise kid. So tell me, are you mad you were lied to about Santa.”
“Nah, it’s just tradition, like Mom said.”

“Have you learned any lessons from this experience?” I asked.

“Well, um—I’m not sure how to explain it,” he stammered, trying to form the idea. “Some things that seem possible are sometimes not possible, and sometimes things aren’t true even when you are told they are true,”

“Do you mean, Don’t believe everything you’re told?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s it—that’s right,” he answered. “From now on I’m not going to believe something just because someone said it to me.”

I am so gosh-dern proud of my little nephew, I could vomit.    

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