It was late August when I noticed one of the major big box stores in town had started to get the Christmas stuff out. Repeat after me: late August.
A day or two later a news item appeared about the gift wrap and ribbons and toys, books, games, doodads, gadgets now filling the shelves, and of course artificial trees, lots of them, right up there in plain view, towering above the display area where everybody could see them, which would of course draw shoppers right to those shelves with all the Christmas inducements loaded on and in.
Whereupon the chant from the business community started right up. There’s a recession on, y’know, and sales haven’t been all that good and Christmas, y’know, is our biggest time of the year and so we’re just tryin’ to get ahead of lost ground here, and besides we haven’t got our store Santa sitting in his little North Pole-Elf-Reindeer kingdom just yet so we’re not really overdoin’ this bit, no sir.
Now it’s November and Santas by the dozen have most assuredly appeared, perched on their chairs, all dressed up with pillows tucked in their tummies and beards that look like untilled cotton fields. Lineups of little kids with lists in hand, getting set to go begging for lots of boodle under the tree, which of course mum and dad will buy from that big display up there atop the shelves.
I say they are overdoing it, have been for decades, and it gets worse very year. I find the whole miserable, grasping commercial rack-up-the-credit card don’t let ’em walk without buying scene disheartening and annoying, especially since I have a story about how my Santa Claus really and truly did come to our house one Christmas Eve a very long time ago.
I was just a little gaffer, four years old probably, or maybe five, which would take us back to the first year or two following the Second World War. My father was on the faculty at the University of Saskatchewan and while he provided well for us, you have to remember that 60 odd years ago salaries at Universities and at most other places for that matter weren’t so hot. In fact, there was still rationing of some products and merchandising was basically confined to goods needed, not wanted. So my parents budgeted carefully every month, but they were especially cautious in December because they would be buying small gifts for one another, and perhaps a few friends, and for little Mike one good present, one only, from Santa Claus.
Now keep in mind this would be the guy coming down the chimney, and I knew it because that’s how they told it in “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” That marvellous classic by Clement Clarke Moore was the core of my Christmas fantasy, and back then nothing got in the way of it. There was hardly any advertising, and there was no television, period, to deliver a subconscious imprint that maybe Santa lived in a cash register, and so I should lobby for lots and lots of presents instead of just one.
Nor was Santa a retail mannequin, with a travel schedule which allowed him to come down from the North Pole for most of November and December and sit around in a whole bunch of department stores on the same day at the same time, instead of making that one toy I knew would be mine.
It was the magic, the breathless excitement of a fantasy world that did it for me, and I believed so hard. But one day when I was out cavorting around in the snow an older neighbourhood kid named Bobby Fisher upped and told me there was no Santa Claus, and I shouldn’t be so dumb as to fall for that silly old poem about “T’was the night,” and get over it.
I advised my parents of this news, and inquired if it might be true. They said no it would not be true and Santa Claus would for sure arrive at the very moment I fell asleep on Christmas Eve, but not a second before so I mustn’t try to stay awake. And he would be pleased, they said, to find the cookies and milk which I would provide.
But I brooded. Bobby Fisher was a really big kid, probably seven or eight years old, and could it be he might just know something, might be right about how there’s no Santa Claus? So I went back to my parents, and with the desperation borne of a four or five-year-old’s longing that Santa remain real and alive and about to come to see me, reasoned with them. If, I said, Santa and his reindeer land on the roof of our house, the sleigh will leave tracks in the snow up there, and the hooves little holes, won’t they? Yes, my parents agreed, they will.
My mother told me the story years later. About 2:00 AM, after several notches of rye, my father got his coat and boots and gloves on and went out into perishing cold (mother remembered it was around 30 below), pulled the ladder out of the shed, propped it up against the eaves, then got a broom and wobbled up the rungs and stroked a couple of sleigh tracks right into the snow on the roof. For good measure he sort of troweled out a few holes for the hooves, and then clambered down and more than likely had another dram of rye to warm up.
I don’t remember the one present, but I do remember this: I waited quite a while before venturing outside much later on Christmas morning, because I couldn’t help being hesitant and uncertain about whether the proof of Santa’s existence really would be there. And I remember looking up, and then bounding through the snow back to the house because anybody could see, even stupid old Bobby Fisher could see exactly where Santa had come with the sleigh and reindeer, right there on the roof.
My father had made sure the enchantment would endure, just for another year or two, because now I knew for certain my single present had indeed come from that wonderful he-only-comes-but-once- a- year-man who quick as a flash flew down the chimney. It said so right on the little card: “To Michael, from Santa.” The glass of milk, by the way, was empty, and just a few crumbs lay scattered on the cookie plate.
As my parents saw it, a little boy should not under any circumstances be denied the excitement and trembling anticipation of knowing, with utter certainty and conviction, that “St. Nicholas soon would be there,” and so I was left with the unrestrained joy of a Child’s Christmas in Saskatoon for just a little while longer.
As I mentioned, I’ve frequently told this story of how a father, in a powerful affirmation of love for a son, restored a little boy’s faith in magic and perhaps a little bit of sorcery After all these years that Christmas is indelible in my memory.
For small children these days, I’m pretty certain the retailers and the advertisers, starting in August, have removed all the mystery, the freedom of a child’s imagination, the spell, the pure unadulerated joy of Christmas. I’ll bet you this: I’ll bet any small boy or girl who’s seen one department store Santa after another after another and then another doesn’t remember a single one of them.
I remember my Santa, as if he came to our house just yesterday.