| By Michael JordanIt’s my sister who did it. Not that she shot or stabbed him or pushed him off the roof when he was climbing down the chimney or anything like that, but what she did brought an instant end to Santa.I know I’m being overly dramatic but it did shake me up. But let me tell you the whole story.Most children live in a half-fantasy world, particularly those like me who have grown up in a home of story books. I devoured tales about giants and mermaids, witches that ate little children and cast spells on doomed princesses, and mischievous elves living in hollow trees.I read about St. George slaying a dragon and I made a wooden sword and pretended to be a knight wooing my first girlfriend, saying things like ‘fear not gentle maid’ (I was about seven or eight at the time). I made bows and arrows and played at being Robin Hood, and when I gravitated to comic books I became ‘Angel’, who was one of the first X-Men.So, it didn’t take a great leap of faith to believe that a jolly, fat man could fly around the world in 24 hours and deliver toys to every single child; and that he “knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.”We knew him as ‘Father Christmas’, which is the British name for Santa Claus.I didn’t wonder whether he must be uncomfortable and sweaty in that thick red suit,Authentic NFL Jerseys Wholesale China, and that his girth might cause him to get stuck in a chimney or two, or wonder at the fact that there were no reindeer droppings the following day, as evidence of his passing.I didn’t wonder at how he managed to come into the locked house. I just knew he somehow did. Magic needed no explanation.Back in my day, Santa brought good, durable British toys. When I was five, Santa brought a drum for me; at six, he brought the Cisco Kid holster and guns for me and my elder brother, and a beautiful rifle and revolver for my eldest brother. Those guns lasted us for years.It never crossed my mind to query why those toys often carried brands indicating they were made in England, rather than being made in Santa’s Workshop. We never hung up stockings like the children in other far-away countries. Santa left our toys under the Christmas trees (sweet-smelling pine or conifer trees) that my father would cut from some mysterious place…trees, which when lit and decorated with a star at the top, seemed to have their own magic.Bad weather never deterred Santa. I remember one Christmas Eve when it rained heavily. I went to bed that night fretting that Santa might not be able to make it. But next day, to my relief, there were the toys under the tree. Santa had come through.I also suspected that my parents knew Santa. I remember waking one Christmas Eve night and hearing my dad talking outside to someone. I suspected that he was speaking to Santa Claus, and the toys under the tree the following day proved that he had visited.But I believe that it was Nat King Cole who raised my first niggling questions about Santa.One Christmas, for the first time, I heard his song ‘The Little Boy that Santa Claus forgot’, and these were the lines that stuck in my head.‘In the street he envies all those lucky boys,Then wanders home to last his broken toysI’m so sorry for that laddie,He hasn’t got a daddyThat little boy that Santa Claus forgot…’I didn’t understand. Why would jolly, kind Santa forget a child who had no father?The song made me think about my four cousins from Bartica who had recently lost their own father in a mining accident at Mahdia. I had never been exposed to poverty. All of the children in my neighbourhood sported new toys. I had no idea that there were many, many children like the one in that song.I was about ten when I learned the truth about those toys under the Christmas tree.Another Christmas was coming around when my second sister said to me: “You know Santa Claus is not real?”Then she explained that she had gone into our parents’ wardrobe, or climbed to the top of it the previous Christmas or something like that, and had seen the unwrapped toys that they had brought in some Regent Street store.And just like that, Santa Claus was dead. I was stunned for days. Now I understood that the conversation I had imagined with dad and Santa was actually one between my dad and mother, arranging the toys under the Christmas tree.The revelation that Santa didn’t exist had taken some of the magic out of Christmas, though the toys were still there.And it seemed that my parents knew, because they dropped all pretence about Father Christmas soon after.I became a bit cynical about the Santa con, and, with that same sister who had exposed Santa, made up a song called ‘Rudolph the red-nosed donkey.’When I became a parent, I revived Santa for a few years, but then dropped all pretence and allowed my son to accompany me into crowded streets on Christmas Eve to buy his racing cars or whatever toy he chose.For a while, too, I also got a childish thrill from marking off the days to Christmas with my youngest daughter. Unlike me, though, she saw through the Santa Claus game quite early, and would give me a disbelieving look when I spoke of Santa coming down the non-existent chimneyAs an adult, I’m divided about this whole thing, not just about Santa Claus, but about this whole Christmas thing as well. Divided about the lavish celebrations and gorging when there are so many without. Divided about perpetuating a myth about a jolly old man who forgets poor children, no matter how well-behaved they were.I believe that Christmas may be the time that the poor feel their poverty most acutely.When I think of single mothers—a security guard maybe—coming home from work on Christmas Day; somehow scraping up the money to pay the rent and decorate her home, and cook something special and give her children a few cheap toys, that Santa Claus myth seems a cruel joke.But yet…But yet I wish that my smallest daughter had not grown up so quickly and we could still do our countdown to Christmas thing on the calendar.And good memories, of previous Christmases still surge through me at the sound of Nat Cole singing:Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow,Will find it hard to sleep tonight.They know that Santa’s on his way;He’s loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh.And every mother’s child is going to spy,To see if reindeer really know how to fly.And I look at the little daughters of two of my colleagues, and I see the wonder in their eyes at the thought of toys under the Christmas tree, and part of me yearns to be a child again so I can bring old Father Christmas back to life… |
