December 2018: Santa Claus
When I was a child I believed in Santa, and I believed in Santa until I was in the sixth grade. I was a very gullible child. The word teachers used to describe me in my report cards, those handwritten long checklists on carbon paper, was: enthusiastic. I could be enthusiastic about so many things! Enthusiasm for new ideas; recess; clapping the erasers out back behind the school; stuffed animals; library books; my classmates and their emotional landscapes; my family; my own handwriting on the page of wide ruled notebooks and the blue dashes bifurcating each thick line; birthdays; car rides; climbing trees; making shit up; getting attention; my pastel purple Huffy bicycle; my cousins; looking at myself in the mirror; the first day of school; Santa Claus.
I don’t remember when I was first told about Santa. I just remember believing it without a second thought. Once my brother stayed home sick from school, and when I walked in the door, he announced that the Easter Bunny wasn’t real. I wailed. “Really?” my mother sighs when she tells this story. “A giant Easter Bunny? With candy?” Yes. There were so many truths that I accepted as a child. It was true that mass was on Sundays. It was true that our guinea pig’s name was Squeakers, then Pih (a joint collaboration between me and my brother; we were so clever to drop the g from pig and find this new word!), then Squeakers again. It was true that when my parents fought it was best to go upstairs in my bedroom, because if you tried to watching television in the living room you wouldn’t be able to hear the television well, not without turning it up even more (the six o’ clock news; Peter Jennings; the Pennsylvania Lottery jingle) and turning the volume up loud, loud, loud while they were fighting would make my father angry. It was true that crayons melted if you left them in a closed tent in the backyard in the summer and forgot about them. And it was true that Santa came each Christmas with presents for the good little boys and girls.
When I asked how Santa would come to us if we did not have a chimney (we did not have a chimney), my mother said that Santa would use the back door. I can picture the back door in the three room cottage we lived when I was very small (it connected the side yard to the kitchen and had curtains my mother had sewn with roosters on them) and the back door in the row house (also in the kitchen, now leading to the small deck with the wooden stairs that lead down to the small yard). Squeakers/Pih’s cage was on the floor by the back door. She squeaked whenever someone came into the kitchen. On Christmas mornings when I woke up, excitement hammering in my chest, and raced to the living room to see the Christmas tree lights twinkling against the darkness of early dawn, the wrapped presents neatly stacked and accompanied by toys - toys! - from Santa, a bounty of magic. One year: a Barbie Fold and Fun House. Another year: a Play-Doh set featuring Burger King’s logo and little plastic molds to make little Play-Doh hamburgers and strings of yellow fries. Another year: a Nintendo (four families on our block got a Nintendo that year; Santa was absolutely real!) Another year: the pastel purple Huffy bicycle. Assembled and glowing and in our living room. The joy and absurdity of finding a new bicycle in our living room has never left me. Who wouldn’t want to believe in that?
I was sitting in art class in Mrs. Pekta’s art room in the sixth grade when my tablemates (Lindsay, Monroe, Brad) talked about Santa not being real. They talked about it with the cool knowledge that children on the cusp of adolescence try to talk about everything. I was wearing a navy blue hat with a fake sunflower on it, a la Blossom.
“I’ve heard him,” I said. “I’ve heard Santa in my house.”
Lindsay exchanged glances with Brad. Monroe looked at me with pity. I talked with absolute confidence, the sort of confidence that I still have today when talking about what I believe in, or what I want to believe in, or what I am going to fucking believe in. I told them that last Christmas, in the middle of the night, I heard Squeakers/Pih downstairs squeaking, and she only squeaked when someone came into the kitchen, which meant that Santa had come in through our back door.
Brad choked on his own laughter. Lindsay sucked her Bonnie Bell Lipsmacker lips and asked me if I was serious.
I continued dabbing watercolors onto my landscape, or braiding the hot pink yarn on my small tapestry, or working a gloppy brush of decoupage over the torn pieces of the tissue paper decorated masks we were making. I was in the sixth grade and I could feel my face burn hot as I continued. I was serious. Oprah came on at 4:00PM everyday. My address was 314 Mary Street. I could do ten pull ups and get the Presidential Fitness Award. Santa Claus used the back door when a house did not have a chimney. Santa was real.
I thought of this all last week when Emily and I went to a friend’s house for dinner, and the friend said that his seven year old niece had figured out that Santa was not real. She had sat her father down on the couch and said, “I need to ask you a question. Don’t lie about it.” I kept thinking about that phrase: figure it out. Did I figure it out or did I take my gullible enthusiasm to the farthest reaches of my own delusion? Does figuring it out immediately snuff out one’s ability to believe? My mother often shares that when asked if Santa is real, she will say that the person Santa is not real but that the spirit of Christmas (generosity, kindness, magic) is very much real. Which then creates a new truth. When I think of my childhood I think of how much I trusted adults as the truth keepers and how much I wanted to be my own truth keeper, how I made up my own stories and worlds and talked to myself and made necklaces from dandelions for the guinea pig and sang to myself when alone and talked with confidence, such confidence, when you asked me about anything at all. Where is that confidence now? What do I enthusiastically believe in?
A recent interview with Shonda Rhimes included this: If you tell me writing is the most important thing in your life but then you’re not doing it every day. If there’s more to that paraphrased quote, I don’t remember it, because my shame and anxiety has picked up that half-sentence like a broken mantra and kept it on loop in my head ever since as I pant Oh god Oh god Oh god. What do I do every day? Pray. Eat. Brush my teeth. Put on clothes. Breath. Talk to the cats (audio of our apartment would reveal that I frequently out of nowhere bellow “KITTIES” and “MEOW MEOWS”). Worry. Read email, Twitter, stories on the internet. Look at photos. Fish around in the junk drawer of my nighstand every morning in the dark, looking for my glasses. Then I sit with a cup of coffee on the side of the couch closest to the window and look at the bare tree branches (winter) and muster up enthusiasm for the day.
Have I told you that we already had bicycles? Before the pastel purple Huffy bicycle became mine? My father built us bicycles. He could build anything. He found or dumpstered or bought bicycle parts and then made, from his bare hands it seemed, two bicycles: one for my brother and one for me. He spray painted them, one blue and one red. They were wonderful bicycles and then they were replaced by shiny new ones. Why as I child hand’t I believe in those bicycles? The handmade, the miracle. Why as a grown up do I choose to worry more than work? What’s the opposite of figuring it out? I want the full throttle rocket of my enthusiastic child heart to return to me. I want to release the tortured mantras and write when I can, where I can, and believe in my own writing the way I once believed in Santa Clause. Unabashed. Confidently. Like it was a truth I had born into the world.
xo,
c
P.S.
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