I was reading an online discussion about whether it is a good thing to tell children that there's a Santa Claus. One side thought it was wrong to lie to children, while the other side thought that believing in the magic was a wonderful part of childhood. I never really believed in Santa Claus. It came across as a fun thing to pretend about, rather than a belief that a given person really existed. The pretense never went away, either. As long as we celebrated Christmas, my mom would give me one gift with a tag that said "from Santa."
I didn't really know why I didn't believe in Santa Claus, though. I was thinking that it was more of an attitude by my parents than anything else. Yesterday for some reason I remembered an incident, though, which was probably the source of how I viewed the jolly old elf for the rest of my life.
When I was little, cousins in one family were in a very difficult situation. My uncle was in the Navy and was at sea for months at a time. My cousins were 5, 7 and 9 years old and their mother just decided she couldn’t or didn’t want to care for them alone any more, so she abandoned them. The kids were placed in foster care. (Eventually they ended up living with our grandmother and my uncle retired from the Navy so he could be with them.)
I was five years old and my brother was seven. We didn’t have a real strong belief in Santa anyway, but there may have been something there at that point. Hard to tell. Our family wasn’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we had enough to get by on and our Christmases were pretty good. That year my parents came to my brother and me and explained about the cousins. They told us that our cousins wouldn’t have any Christmas presents where they were. If my parents bought presents for the cousins, there wouldn’t be as much for presents for my brother and me. We would still get presents, but there wouldn’t be as many as there had been in the past. They gave us a voice in how Christmas for everyone would be.
I want to stress that my parents didn’t put the whole decision on us. But we were part of it. And in order to make us part of it, they needed to tell us that there was no Santa Claus.
We agreed that it would be better for all of us, including our cousins, to have something, rather than for them to have nothing. My mom took us shopping with her to pick out the gifts for the cousins so we were part of the whole thing. The only thing I remember from that Christmas was when we went to the foster home to give the presents to my cousins. That was the most important part of the whole holiday.
