“Look! I can’t believe it!” “It’s Santa Claus!”
The girls stopped in their tracks, amazed by the sight of the annual fiction on display at the Montgomery Mall.
Lights winked and glimmered and a throng of impassive shoppers parted and streamed past the children as they gazed with delight at a picket-fenced enclosure.
Inside it sat a bearded man in an ill-fitting red suit. He held a young girl on his knee. Beside him sat her siblings, one of whom held a fat, beaming baby. On their mother’s command, the children produced Yuletide smiles. The camera flashed, and the mother stepped in to reconfigure the children. It was a boy’s turn to sit, with reluctance, on the strange man’s lap.
“Is it really Santa Claus?” one of the watchers asked breathlessly.
“No, sweetheart. It’s a man dressed up to look like Santa Claus,” said the child’s mother.
“Why is he dressed up like Santa Claus?” the child wondered, with the innocence of one who does not perceive the degree of commercial theater surrounding her.
“So people can get pictures of their kids with a phony Santa Claus and send them to their relatives, and it looks like they’re meeting the real Santa Claus,” explained a more worldly young person.
“Oh.”
“Blythe doesn’t believe in Santa Claus,” said a third child, referring to a bold young family friend. “She says he’s not real. She says he’s really your parents.”
“Santa Claus is my parents?” the woman laughed, to divert them, and the oldest girl laughed.
The smallest child looked worried. With her eyes on the not-Santa, wary now, she said: “Santa Claus is not real?”
“Well, I’ve never seen him, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist,” said her mother firmly. “I mean, I’ve never seen the Amazon River either, yet I feel sure it exists.”
“What if he really is parents?”
“Honey,” the woman said, with slitheringly deceptive reassurance, “If Santa Claus were parents then we’d all be walking around with long white beards and reindeer.”
She gestured to the passers-by: “Do you see any reindeer?”
All three children laughed with relief — obviously there were not, which could only mean that Santa was manifestly not parents — and the little party resumed strolling.
In truth, if you were to search the deepest recesses of the children’s hearts, in all but the youngest you would probably find suppressed the disagreeable reality of the situation. But you would have to dig under so many layers of fruitcake and gingerbread, and under so much self-protective tinsel and fir, that it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
“Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world,” wrote Santa’s most eloquent defender, Frank P. Church, to a girl named Virginia in the pages of the New York Sun.
“Well, even a fake Santa is nice to see,” remarked one of the girls, as the scene receded.
The most dangerous Yuletide conversation was over, and crisis was, for another precious year, averted.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
