The Death of Santa Claus

Nobody told us this. Pema. Al-Anon. Joey McIntyre from New Kids on the Block. New tunes for the revolution.

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Onward. — AJD

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Last Saturday, my oldest son, Ozzy, age 7, had a friend over for a few hours to play PlayStation, eat pizza, and be squawking 7-year-olds. When the father came to pick him up, his friend asked his dad if he could get a PS5 so Ozzy could come over to their house and play. “Santa got me this one,” Ozzy said. “But I don’t think Santa’s real anymore.” The father looked at me nervously as his confused son examined the adult faces for clarification.

“Ozzy, come on, what?” I said.

It turned out that while playing with my iPhone, he opened up my Amazon app and went through the recent purchases and found many of the baseball cards he got and other toys his brother and sister received in their stockings or under the tree — toys that were explicitly marked “Love, Santa” were all right there, purchased by me, shipped from various warehouses across America staffed by exhausted, underpaid workers and impersonally delivered by nameless young-looking men in brown work boots and blue vests. “I saw that you bought us most of the stuff!” He wanted answers. Or he already knew the answers, but he wanted the whole story.

“I also know there’s no tooth fairy because I saw you sticking money under Ivey’s pillow at 5 a.m. the last time!” I began to concoct some story about how the fairy had a bad wing injury and needed my help but that I had mailed the tooth to her the other day.

He cut me off. “Okay, Santa.” When he said “Santa” he made obnoxious little air quotes.

After his friend left, I couldn’t even look at him. I felt like I’d been caught in a lie because I had been caught in a lie.

I thought there would be some more time, maybe a year or two, to slowly reveal that the Santa Claus myth is open to interpretation, but you can still believe in him. The Magic, right? Magic is what we’re selling our children. Santa was just the exhilarant for The Magic. But now I’m reluctant to stand firm on “The Magic” because Ozzy’s snide little air quotes rattled me. How did I fuck this up?

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When we began introducing Santa into our house a couple of years after our children were born, I came across a poem called “The Death of Santa Claus” written by Charles Foster Webb. It’s a devastating read, or at least, for me, it was because I had such a deep attachment to Santa as a kid, and finding out what I believed for so long was not real was a hard day. Here is what I wrote about that:

It all fell apart in fourth grade. A kid with a weirdly shaped head named Ryan not-so-gently broke it to me that Santa was not real. He pitied me. He didn't understand how I could be so naive. I still wasn’t convinced, and I asked my dad about it while we were driving back from basketball practice. He shook his head and reluctantly revealed the truth: “I wanted to tell you a couple of years ago, but your mother wouldn’t let me.”

When we got home, he told her what we had talked about. I was sad, but she was devastated. This was a real loss. The brightest light had gone out.

As the next decade of Christmases rolled by, my presents were downgraded from toys to clothes to gift cards to personal checks I promised I would spend on something nice for myself. I never did, though. I used it for rent or overdue credit card bills …

Bleak!

I don’t think Ozzy’s as broken up about it as I was, so I have no fear that he will turn into Elliott Smith next week (or Charles Foster Webb, for that matter). How I felt about him calling me out about Santa Claus was very similar to how I felt when that obnoxious kid Ryan did it.

I am concerned that he could take a perverse joy in ruining Santa for everyone else, starting with his two younger siblings. Where do we go from here?