Believe!
My four-year-old granddaughter thinks Santa and Jesus are next of kin.
I can so see how she got there.
Both Old St. Nick and the Prince of Peace watch over everything everywhere all at once. Each disapproves of bad behavior. We petition both with lists of wants and needs. Legions of helpers—elves and angels, respectively—rally to help them make miracles occur...
Austyn, who has grown into a pre-school-going girl, is a believer. Even if some of her wires are crossed. The fibers that cement Jesus of Nazareth and Santa of the North Pole together in her mind will, in time, loosen and begin to separate. But I am not inclined to push the process.
Her conviction—however it’s bundled—fortifies me.
In our house, which tends to display (and I quote my daughter) “so many words,” one that has a year-round presence but juts itself to center stage at Christmas is “BELIEVE.” That blessed word appears on ornaments, frames, pillows, shelves. Nine times, nine different places. I counted. It hits you in the face at every turn.
I can’t help it. I like the way the seven letters look together, the way they sound all grounded like a stake with delicate hopey wings. Some words are just as pretty as they mean. “Believe” is one of them. And it’s important. I shudder to think without it, where any of us would be.
When Colton, (our four-year-old believer’s father) was a little boy, he, too, was all bought in. He was the quintessential first child, the big brother keeping the promise of reindeer on the roof and a fat guy in a bright red suit alive for his younger sister. This is a boy who never peeked. A boy who never tried to poke holes in the myth. The boy who didn’t come down the hall on Christmas morning until his dad and I gave him the “all clear.”
I can still see his face as it was when the bubble burst.
We were hustling and bustling on a random December evening, just me and him in the living room sorting through sacks of this and boxes of that, when I said something about the gifts we’ll wrap for his sister to be from Santa.
My firstborn looked as if someone had reached a hand down his little throat, wriggled past his sternum, and pinched off a piece of his heart.
Surely, he’d heard the whispers. He was in school for heaven’s sake! He had to have had. He was a bright kid more than capable of putting two and two together, a better listener than anyone I knew. Clearly, he knew the improbability, the snags in the story, the parts that didn’t compute. (But oh, how he wanted to believe!) He knew but he didn’t want to KNOW, so he’d been hanging on. Until, that is, his matter-of-fact mother unintentionally cut the cord.
As quickly as it happened, I regretted my big mouth. My brain raced trying to find a way to stuff the genie back inside a bottle where it would no longer fit. Colt, to his credit, played it off like Cool Hand Luke. So, I kept going, too, to match his bravery and not belabor the dastardly betrayal. But I did so while slowly bleeding out.
A few days later, Colton carefully broached the wounded subject he’d been lugging around. “Mom,” he asked as casually as he could while helping me get the Christmas cookie cutters down from the pantry’s top shelf, “is Santa Clause real?”
One last courageous attempt to keep the hope alive.
“He is if you believe him to be,” I said, dismounting from the step stool to look my six-year-old dead in the eye. His baby blues twinkled and he half-grinned the way he’s still, at thirty, apt to do when words cannot serve his purpose.
We never spoke of it again.
There hangs in our entryway, on the backside of a weathered wooden ceiling beam, a sign I left up that Christmas after all the décor came down. It says in an unfancy font, “i believe in santa claus.” It’s there in the spring when flowers are blooming. It’s there in the summer when the temperature soars to triple digits. It’s there in the fall when kids and teachers start back to school. The placard never comes down. It’s been hanging, sort of crooked, for over 25 years.
Ours is a home that chooses to believe.