When I was a kid in my one-room schoolhouse in the 1950s, it was just taken for granted that Christmas was the biggest deal of the year. It never occurred to us, at least it didn’t to me, that there might be somewhere on the planet where people didn’t celebrate Christmas. In our world, Christmas was it.
A few weeks before the big day, the school “trustees” – three local farmers who looked after school repairs among other duties – showed up and erected a big wooden stage at the front of the school on which we would soon be performing some wonderful songs and skits for our families and neighbours. In our minds, in any case, they were terrific productions. That stage provided a few puberty-stricken boys with some early phys ed lessons, too, when they discovered they could crawl underneath it, during dress rehearsals, from the boys’ dressing room side to the girls’, to take in the modest sights on the other side. Not in the Christmas spirit, perhaps, but a definite addition to the excitement of the season.
The poems, plays and pageantry out of the way, it was onto the Big Day, of course, the day that made every other day of the year look pretty sad by comparison. First, however, we had to get through Christmas Eve, and in those days, as a good Catholic family, that was no easy chore. For the first 10 years of my life, or so, we went to “midnight Mass” because we needed to receive Communion on Christmas Day, not the day before. And most people simply were not likely to attend the Christmas Mass at a time when gifts were being ripped open. So we kids had to go to bed at 7 p.m. Christmas Eve, only to be awoken at 11 p.m., dressed and hauled out into the cold night for the four-mile country drive to church. It was strange being in the church just after midnight, but it was almost a mystical experience as well. The church never looked, smelled or sounded better. Every pew was filled and nowhere on Earth were the standard carols sung any better.
Outside after that hour, we greeted all our cousins and churchmates and headed home to bed to anticipate once again being the recipients of the benevolence of that truly great man, Santa Claus. How he managed to come up with all those gifts …
To this day, as I go into my 56th Christmas, I can honestly say I have never seen Santa Claus. And I’m glad that I haven’t. I wouldn’t want to risk not getting what I ask for by interrupting his visit to our house.
I have to admit, I have sometimes wondered about that. How long can I go on believing in someone I’ve never seen? When I was in my early 20s, I knew a lot more than I do today. If only I could be as smart as I was back then, when life was so simple. In those days, if I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t believe in it. Case closed.
But life has a way of throwing you around a bit as time chugs on and the certainties grow a little hazier. Things that seemed to be easily explained, somehow, don’t seem so plain anymore. The odd prayer gets answered.
A man once asked me whether or not I had ever seen the wind. Of course I had, I said. I see it all the time when the trees bend, the dust swirls, my cap blows off.
“That is not the wind,” he said. “Those are only the effects of the wind. No one has ever seen the wind. But everyone knows it exists. Even the scientists.” The same for love.
And as Santa Claus is nothing but love … of course, he is real.
Merry Christmas.
©2006 Jim Hagarty
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