SPOILER ALERT: Santa Claus Discussion Here

As the song goes, Christmas was meant for children.
Most people's happiest Christmas memories come from when they were children and still believed in Santa Claus--a magical white-bearded man, dressed in red, who rides through the sky on a sleigh pulled by reindeer on Christmas Eve, dropping into houses via their chimneys in order to leave gifts for the residents of the household.  It's the stuff dreams are made of for little kids.  Maybe adults, too.

I guess I was like most normal kids.  We put our tree up just a few days before Christmas in those days (because they were real trees that would dry out and become fire hazards).  There were no presents under the tree because only Santa could bring those.  Well...not so much.  There were presents there--gifts that the folks had purchased for other family members.  Just not the children.  Nothing seemed particularly screwy about that to me back then.  I do remember being concerned because none of the places where we lived had fireplaces with chimneys.  How could Santa come down a nonexistent chimney?  My mom told me he made special arrangements to come in through the door.  I mean, Santa can do anything, right?  Nothing so weird about that, either.  Also because we had no fireplaces, we pinned our stockings to the backs of chairs or sofas, hoping for goodies.  There were always goodies, so Santa could do it all.  As children, we suspend our disbelief.  I remember one year that we left milk and cookies out for Santa.  The next morning, only crumbs and an empty glass remained, with a thank you note from the bearded guy.  Wow!
Telling me to go to bed and actually fall asleep on Christmas Eve so Santa could come was asking the impossible!

I think I was in Kindergarten when some other 5-year-old kid told me that there was no Santa Claus.  Santa was actually our parents.  (Hah hah, for once, it wasn't my older sister spilling the beans to me about reality facts!)  I remember that I wasn't traumatized.  It seemed perfectly logical to me.  Not sure I had already suspected, but I knew I had to check in with my mom about it.  When I told her what I'd been told, I tried to convince her that I didn't believe the tattle-tale, but she knew the jig was up.  Our baby brother hadn't been born yet, so there was no purpose in carrying on the Santa myth.  We were then advised NOT to start snooping for presents ahead of time because, if they were discovered, we would not get them.  One of the two daughters always went searching, anyway.  (Hint: it wasn't I.)  We found stuff but got it anyway.   Seems that parent threats were as hollow as parent-carrying-on the Santa thing.

In the years that followed, my focus left Santa and focused on the real meaning of Christmas.  My brain hasn't retained the actual date, whether pre-or-post-Japan, but we were all at my grandparents' farm on Christmas Eve.  My sister and I were to sleep on the hide-a-bed couch in the living room, in the same room where the parents and grandparents were playing cards on the round card table that belonged to my grandparents.  They were either playing Pinochle or Bridge, but spirits were high (as was the cigar and cigarette smoke in the room).  There were two picture windows in that room.  My grandmother would keep the curtains closed in the daytime but open at night.

That particular Christmas Eve, a dense fog descended over the farm.  We couldn't even see anything just a few yards from the windows.  When the fog lifted around midnight, we were met by a magical fairyland.  Everything--every leaf and blade of grass--was covered in white.  This was my first introduction to hoar frost.  I just saw it as a Christmas miracle.  I sat on my knees looking out the south-facing window, seeing a dark and quiet world, all covered in white.  I will never, ever forget that.  Inside was laughter and gayety.  Outside was beauty beyond belief.  Welcome, Baby Jesus!

My mother had told me a story about the night that Santa Claus came to her house when she was a child.  He came through the door and visited with her and her siblings.  When Santa departed, Mom was sooo upset that her father hadn't been there to see him!  I thought that was funny, especially since her father (my grandfather) had a wandering eye.  Amblyopia, I guess.  As kids, we understood that our Popo had eyes that went in two different directions, never corrected by surgery or anything else.  When my sister's children arrived (his great-grandchildren) he had yet another gig as Santa.  Laurie, the youngest, declared, "That's not Santa.  That's Popo.  I saw his eye!"  God bless the babies!

My absolute favorite family Santa story involves my son-in-law, but I have to set the scene here before I can tell it:

Denis is Russian by birth.  Russia doesn't celebrate Christmas as much as it does the New Year.  He endeavors to be American, in spite of his own culture.  Denis is soft-spoken, patient, and adaptable, and I love him to pieces.  When he married my daughter in California, he inherited two children who were, at the time, living with their father in Illinois.  And then, they moved back to the Midwest to be closer to the children--a big career move for him.  They had rented a condo in Grayslake, IL.  As Christmas approached, I went up to visit.  I stayed in the entrance-level room, with a closet under the stairs leading to the next levels.  When I went there, I took with me the Christmas presents from the children's paternal grandparents--one of which was labeled for "Lily", an American Girl doll that Grandma Judy had given our granddaughter the previous year.  All of the presents were hidden in the closet under the stairs.

If the children no longer believed in Santa Claus, the rest of the family didn't know it.  They were certainly old enough to have been properly informed.  (My personal belief is that they knew the truth but weren't willing to confess because it would make the magic go away.  Just a guess.)

On Christmas Eve that year, we finally got everyone scooted off to bed.  I was asleep in the basement room when I was awakened by some noise in the stair closet.  It was 1:00 AM.  There was Denis, dressed in a Santa Claus suit, rummaging around, trying to find all of the presents to take upstairs to the tree.  He had borrowed a Santa suit from the neighbor because he didn't want to be discovered if the kids should catch him putting out presents.  He didn't want to be the one to mess up the illusion.  I asked what he was doing.  He told me he was sorting through the boxes to determine which ones to take up to the tree and which ones to wait until later.  He was grumbling to me about it, then said,  "And who the hell is Lily??"

I couldn't help it.  I started to chuckle and then started to laugh to myself...and I still laugh!

I had never heard Denis swear before or since.
I never left my bed that night, but there before me was Santa Claus, swearing in a Russian accent, distributing presents for people who were in bed,  just trying to be the good guy in a culture that was relatively new to him.

There will always be a huge soft spot in my heart for Denis Shchepetov and Santa Claus, both of whom are the same man.  Some things are just too special to forget!