I believe!

• By Alison
• 22 December, 2009
• 2 Comments

I don’t remember what it was like to believe in Santa Claus.

That’s because I never got a chance to.

I was four years old when the older child who lived over the road told me in no uncertain terms that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. My mother was furious, but the damage could not be undone. What was heard cannot be unheard.

Four is such an innocent age. It’s pretty hard to shake the faith of a four year old. You can tell them not to be terrified of an enormous fuzzy moose that is walking towards them and seems to want to grab them and gobble them up. You can reassure them that the moose is just a man dressed up and therefore not terrifying at all. But they won’t believe a word of it. That moose just keeps coming, and the four year old will start screaming and won’t stop until you drag them into a nearby shop where the moose is not.

You’d think therefore that someone could tell the same four year old that Santa doesn’t really exist, and the four year old would ignore that statement, because they want to believe the alternative.

But not when the person bearing the news is another child. Adults don’t get a look in – children look up to other children like some sort of short mutant God. If a child says it, then it’s gospel. Kind of how some people view the gossip rags.

So I have no idea what it’s like to look forward to Santa, or to dream of Santa tiptoing in the night. I have no memory of a time when I did. And yet, the fantasy of christmas for me was still a wonderful time. And the reason for that was my little brother.

I didn’t believe in Santa because I knew better, but I was determined that my little brother wasn’t going have his reality mashed in like that.

My brother was six years my junior. People often say that siblings who are close in ages fight more. That couldn’t have been further from the truth with my brother and I. From the moment he turned about four, World War III raged in our house. We may have loved each other deep down, but you had to dig really REALLY deep to find that love on most days.

I was the verbal winner – with the advantage of six years on him, I could cut him down with my tongue in a way he’d never be able to compete with. His retaliation was always physical.

One time we fought, his payback to me was to come into my bedroom and tip over my bookcase. As a typical tweenager, my bookcase was not just full of books, but lined with porcelain ornaments. Ballerinas who spun on their toes when you flicked them, colour changing doves who told you the weather in a rainbow, little bells with silver clangers – and so on. All when crashing down underneath “What Katie did next” and “Pollyanna”, and the complete series of “Secret Seven” and morphed into sparking shards and disembodied limbs. I was devastated.

On the upside, boy – did he EVER get in trouble!

But no matter how much we fought, come christmas time I would become his Santa mentor.

If your big sister tells you that there IS such a thing as Santa, then you believe her. You believe her all the way up to your 10th year, when it finally dawns on you that if the tooth fairy wasn’t real and the easter bunny was a farce, then things aren’t looking so great for Santa!

As christmas approached, I would help him write a letter to Santa which I would mail for him. Then I would write a reply to him from Santa, with illustrations. He never wondered why Santa’s handwriting was so appalling, and similar to a teenaged girl’s, and his drawings often involved noses and high heels (I had a slight obsession with the profile view).

Christmas was exciting for me because of the wonderment and excitement that he had, and I shared in it and fostered it in a way that was almost parental. 

For myself, knowing the santa truth actually gave me some power. With my birthday in February it meant that I could bargain bigger presents by pulling the combo card.

Once christmas was over (or even on the day) we’d got back to screaming at each other and he’d throw the occasional battery at me (they embedded themselves into the bathroom door, which was hell to explain to mum!)

But she always wondered in amazement at the fact that no matter how much we fought, I never pulled out the santa rug. I never shouted in anger that it was all a lie. I kept that fantasy going for 10 years for him. She asked me about that when I was in my 20’s. My reply was that “you can’t take that back”. I knew that no matter what ammunition I wanted to use in an argument, I would never do something that I couldn’t undo. I wouldn’t destroy a fantasy that couldn’t be reclaimed.

That love must have been closer to the surface than we knew!

Now that I have my girls, I am glad that neither of them have had their belief taken away prematurely. At 8, Miss Trouble Pants both believes and is shy of Santa Claus. Miss Comic Relief is 5, and fervently excited about christmas day, but is also nervous of the man himself. She was so shy of him that she couldn’t think of what she wanted for christmas when they both saw him at the school christmas fair, so asked for the same thing as her sister. Which was a skateboard. Which is NOT coming. 

We just used the “Call Santa” app on my iphone to leave a message for him about what she’d actually like for christmas. Turns out it’s a new pair of roller skates, which she remembered that she wanted after I reminded her that she’d grown out of her old ones. How handy… because Santa’s already procured those bad boys!

Adulthood comes quick enough as it is, without robbing children of fairytales and Santa Claus. Nothing helps erode that belief faster than not getting what you asked for!

Fairytales, Santa and iphone apps go hand in hand really. They are all quite unbelievable to adults!

And I hope the child that took away my Santa Claus years ago now has children who believe in Santa Claus too, and that they all have a merry christmas together. 

See how full of love I am? Oh, and Santa, I’d really like that video camera I can’t afford you know…