Not some disembodied shade of a fellow, or a bloodless saint, but the guy in the ads on the back of my copies of National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid—a hearty old elf, with a great white beard, suited in red with white trim, capable of stopping to enjoy a bottle of Coca Cola on his rounds and taking a moment in front of the fire to consider the pleasures of life. That was Santa Claus. All others were impostors, perhaps well-intentioned, but missing the point.
The artist, Haddon Sundblom, took his inspiration, I am told, from Clement Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which I had certainly read by then, and heard read, and knew from television depictions, all of which would have been black and white. But my Santa was not black and white. He was a full-blooded character.
I did not just believe in him. Or, at least, I don’t remember trying to believe in him. He was a natural part of my imagined world, which was as real to me as what else I knew. Arguments about the reality of Santa Claus bemused me. They were disputing the existence of someone else. Something else. And when asked if I believed in that, I knew I could safely say, no. I could not imagine such a thing as that: a spirit who circled the globe behind ‘eight tiny reindeer.’ No…But Santa. Santa was quite real to me and did not require belief.
The importance of this is in what I chose to write about, then and later.
But I never wrote about Santa Claus. This is the thought I have now on Christmas Eve, and I wonder why … And I think because, though he fit well within my known universe, he was real, and what I wrote about was not. And I knew that, too. I did not write about my parents, for instance. I think I tried, more than once, and found it uncomfortable. I had to lie in order to make them more than stick figures. The reason I wrote, from early on, was to find the truth in things.
The contradiction here is a figment of a larger misunderstanding. Somewhere in that faded past, I had already determined that I did not understand my parents, or, for that matter, most of the adult world. They were given to lies and pretense, and I did not understand why. I did not yet have any idea why they lied, and I could not imagine a purpose other than deception.
But Santa was real. He had good will toward all mankind, and his gift, which did not require a sleigh or reindeer, or even a bottle of Coke, was to spread that good will. Why was that so difficult to understand? Especially on the birthday of Christ.
‘Do you believe in God?’ was the refrain. The context. How could there be a Santa if there was no God? And I had no answer for that. Nothing glib. Mostly, I think, because God had been delivered to me on a silver platter. I was raised a Catholic. I could not imagine a God who required worship, and suffering, and agony, and death. My limited intelligence made no sense of that. But a jolly old elf dressed in red pajamas whose beard would have been out of fashion even in the wilderness, that made sense. He was a man of good will. It seemed like an appropriate thing. We needed more of that and less of the suffering and agony. Death may be necessary, along with taxes, if only to make way for new comers, and to give the foolish something to worry about. But Haddon Sundblom had captured another idea for me at an early age. And Santa did not require worship. Not even the milk and cookies.
I heard a joke retold by a friend one day and realized that this whole conundrum was somehow captured within it.
A fellow dies after a long life and finds himself before St. Peter at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter smiles at his arrival.
“Is this where I belong?” the fellow asks, in disbelief. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I have done so much that was wrong.”
“Yes. But you tried your best. You knew when you had failed, and you tried to do better. You did well with what you had…Now, follow me.”
And St. Peter leads him through the gates and up a leafy forest path.
“This is so beautiful! I have always loved the woods.”
“Yes. Hiking was your passion.” says St. Peter.
And along a splendid ridge of pine above a lake.
“Is this for me, too?”
“Oh, yes,” says St. Peter.
But further along, among the rocks below them, they see the writhing of naked bodies, screaming and crying in a dark pit of despair .
“But what is that?”
“Oh, that. Don’t worry. That’s just the Catholics. They wouldn’t have it any other way.”