I saw joy in a young girl’s eyes last week as I was dressed like Santa for the children at work. Amy, one of co-worker’s granddaughters, ran up with arms outstretched and planted her face into my pillow stuffed belly like she had know me forever. In her eyes, she had known me forever.
As I put on the red velvet suit, I thought to myself, “No child is going to believe that I am the real Santa Claus.” However, as I walked down the hall towards the Christmas tree I saw the excitement. I could hear the whispers and nervous laughter from children that were subconsciously weighing the outcome on how bold their gift request should be versus their perception of how good they were that year.
I could feel all of the tiny little eyes watching my every move; even the smallest ones that were too afraid to approach me still felt compelled to stare as I waved to them all, gave a big, “HO, HO, HO!!”, grabbed my candy canes and walked towards my thrown.
Before each child climbed into my lap, my elf, Betty, another co-worker that wanted to help out, would whisper each child’s name into my ear. After I had this information, I would pick up a child and say things like, “Oh, Melissa!! You have gotten so much bigger than last year” or “Robert, I’ve been watching you and I think you deserve a nice Christmas for being such a good boy for your Mother and Father.”
The children were amazed; they heard their names and their faces lit up. Most couldn’t even speak after that. They sat in my lap, looking up with a fixed gaze of true wonderment, hypnotized like the children of Hamelin; they did not question me for one second.
Like Amy, as far as they knew, they had known me forever and as I took another look at all of the little girls and boys, I had to put up a fake smile as I asked myself, “When did it happen?”
When did I stop believing?
My thoughts raced as I thought about all of the Christmas Eve nights I just couldn’t fall asleep thinking about a fat man in a suit flying magically around the world lead by reindeers and carrying a bag that contained something made especially for me.
When did I stop believing?
What happened to that giant Rabbit that would put candy into my Easter basket or the tiny fairy that collected my teeth and left a dollar in its place?
When did I stop believing?
When did I lose that innocence?
I was jealous of those children that they got to experience something that all of us adults miss, but as the old adage goes, “youth is wasted on the young”. They had a few more years left before the reality that we call “life” creeps in and robs you of that naiveté.
It saddened me that everything that I believed in as a child turned out to be a sham. Santa isn’t real, Mothers aren’t perfect, Dads aren’t superheroes, and we will never be anything that we dream of becoming.
As a child, I thought my world was so big, and only until years later visiting my old Kindergarten classroom did I really realize how small it really was. The desks and chairs were tiny, the monkey bars that seemed so tall and long were only about 4 feet long and didn’t even come up to my chin, hell, the toilet in the little boys room made me laugh as I thought better about using it, deciding to hold it until I could find some “larger facilities”.
I thought to myself that everything seemed so perfect because everything was like a kiddie pool. The kiddie pool seemed like the perfect size for me, but I didn’t realize that it really didn’t hold that much. It really didn’t take a whole lot to satisfy me.
As I got older and bigger, I moved to the regular pool. The idea of a pool with only the water from the kiddie pool seems absurd, so it has to be filled with more water. So, we fill up our pools with more and more water, so much so that if we are not careful it could swallow us whole. The older we get the more we forget about how much fun that kiddie pool actually was; it’s no one’s fault…we just need more water to satisfy us.
I came out of my daydream just as we were finishing up and as I waved goodbye and told all of the children that Christmas is two weeks away and that they needed to be EXTRA good for the remainder of the time and that it was time for me to feed the reindeer, I could see Amy running in that stiff legged hobble that children do and her hair swaying as she bounced side to side. She stopped just short of me, reached up, grabbed my index finger with her tiny five year old hand, and motioned to bend down to her as if to tell me a secret. She cupped both hands around her mouth and pressed the other side to my ear so no one could hear what she had to say. My mind went a million different directions as I tried to guess what she was going to say until I heard those four little words. It tickled as her soft breath carried her message from her lips and I heard, “I love you, Santa”.
I knelt there for a second; not knowing what to say, but it didn’t matter. By the time I looked up she was hoping up into her mother’s arms while they walked away.
I stood up smiling, because I realized that life hadn’t taken everything I had believed in from me; I still had love.
