Page A4 The Joan De Arc Crusader / Thursday, December 24, 2015

Front Page A1 / Editorials A2 / Sports A3 / Crossword A5

Letting go of Santa on Joan De Arc
By J. Bueker

     I’m unsure now exactly how and when my belief in Santa Claus ultimately expired, although I remain fairly certain it was a gradual process rather than a sudden epiphany.
     For the purposes of this reminiscence, let us set aside the romantic notion of Santa somehow being real in some sense, made immortal by the wonderful “Yes, Virginia” editorial. I’m talking here about an actual, flesh and blood, flying-around-with-reindeer human male adroit at maneuvering through chimneys and delivering toys and other assorted goodies to countless millions of children in a matter of hours across the surface of the entire planet. That Santa.
     While I suspect my de-Santaization was a slow dawning of enlightenment, it was not necessarily a desirable one. I distinctly recall a conversation on the topic that I once had with my father, when I was perhaps 8 or 9 years of age. I confided in Carl that while I was beginning to have serious doubts about the reality of the Easter Bunny, I was still quite persuaded that Santa was the real deal. He chuckled at this observation, much to my consternation, but the conversation did demonstrate an emerging skepticism on my part regarding the reality of magical holiday entities. The Tooth Fairy was probably also beginning to seem a bit implausible, but Santa was very hard to let go of. Christmas was my favorite day of the year, and the jolly old elf was part and parcel of the whole shebang.
     Besides which, the evidence for Santa was compelling. Not only did gifts materialize under the tree and yummy treats fill our stockings without fail each and every Christmas morning, but we also had actual visual confirmation of St. Nick. He made appearances at Westown Shopping City, Chris-Town Mall, and countless other venues around town for weeks before the big day. It somehow never occurred to me that the guy was spending an inordinate amount of time in Phoenix when there were so many other cities and shopping centers to visit.
    My profound belief in the reality of Santa was vividly illustrated by an incident in downtown Glendale in probably 1965 or thereabouts. While strolling the area and shopping one day that December with my mother and siblings, I spotted Santy on the sidewalk across the street ringing a bell, smiling broadly, and waving at all passersby. Mother turned to me and asked if I wanted to walk over and talk to him, and reiterate my wish list for that Christmas. I however was absolutely terrified and steadfastly refused to go anywhere near the guy. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was so afraid, but clearly Santa was all too real for this boy. We left Mr. Kringle undisturbed and went on our way.
     And while I don’t remember my parents ever playing up the Santa Claus idea all that much, they really didn’t need to. The culture was positively saturated with it. He appeared in endless TV commercials drinking Coca-Cola, riding around on electric razors, and sitting behind the wheel of the latest shiny new Chevrolet. His grinning reddened countenance graced countless magazines and books and shopping displays and dolls and toys and songs and God knows what else for many weeks approaching the Yuletide. You certainly didn’t see the Easter Bunny or Great Pumpkin plastered all over the media in this manner. Santa Claus was (and is) supremely iconic.
     Slowly but surely however, the doubts started creeping in. For one thing, we didn’t even have a chimney and fireplace at 3219, so exactly how did Santa gain access to our living room to deposit the gifts under the tree? I remember my father having a handy rationalization for this concern along the lines of “He has a key” or “He uses the window, dummy.” But after a while, questions about the logistics of the whole undertaking started to become rather overwhelming and only explainable through appeals to magic. And after one reaches a certain age, magic doesn’t really cut it anymore.
     Of course the final and unequivocal nail in the Santa-belief coffin is when you start finding your gifts secretly stashed around the house weeks or even months before Christmas. A memorable example of this for me was Christmas 1970.
     I probably had no legitimate reason to be digging around in my mother’s bedroom closet that autumn, but in any case I was rather surprised to discover a brand-new Jason refractor telescope there, perched on the closet shelf and obscured by various other boxes and items of clothing. It turned out that Father had acquired the telescope for us using gift points he had accumulated at work and the decision had been taken to upgrade from my older telescope with this more powerful and sophisticated device.
     Now I’m sure by 1970 that my belief in Santa Claus was already tenuous at best, but here was definitive proof that the whole thing was a complete sham. A defining moment of my life had arrived; I had begun my final ascent into adulthood (which some would argue is still ongoing).
     I was so excited by my discovery of this gift that I invited my neighbor and pal Tom Neff, who entertained a similar interest in astronomy, to hop the fence over to 3219 and check out my new scope-to-be.  We had to very carefully extract the box from the closet to examine the instrument, and then restore it to its exact location and configuration behind those other boxes and such. I knew it would spoil things for Mum and Dad if they found out I was hip to the new scope, and more importantly, I would probably get in trouble for digging through their closets in the master bedroom. In any case, I made sure to act appropriately surprised and delighted on Christmas Morning when the new telescope was unveiled.
    But December 25 would never be quite the same again.   

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ JDA

Front Page A1 / Editorials A2 / Sports A3 / Crossword A5