The Year I Stopped Believing in Santa Claus

1968.

It was a historic year on all fronts that started with the seizure of the USS Pueblo off North Korean coastal waters in January and culminated with the fly by of the moon by Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve.

In between there was Tet, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, riots in Chicago, and the election of Richard M.

Nixon in November. It was a tumultuous year in America to say the least.

Although I was only 10 years old, I knew something was going on that year when I heard and watched the news of these events. I might not have understood completely what each one of these events meant but I did know, by observing and listening to the adults around me talk about them, that these events rattled and shook our nation to the core.

It was also the year I stopped believing in Santa Claus.

Now there were a few ways that a kid stopped believing in Santa Claus. Maybe it was an older sibling seeking some revenge for the way their mom and dad stopped paying attention to them as much as they had in the past by spilling the beans to their younger siblings. Maybe it was hearing it from a classmate, who upon finding out that there was no Santa (perhaps because his or her older brother or sister had already spilled the beans), wanted other people to share in his or her grief. Then of course there was always the possibility of mom or dad coming clean on their roles as Santa Claus upon being discovered or caught in the act as it were, placing gifts around the Christmas tree.

In my case it was an Alden's mail order catalog center.

Back in 1968, my mom was working at Spiller & Spiller this furniture manufacturing company that made kitchen tables and chairs. My mom's job was to bend tubes of metal into the legs for the tables and chairs. The machine she worked on was aptly named "the bender," this nasty looking piece of machinery that bent the metal tubes my mom fed into its noisy, greasy jaws. She had to work fast, feeding more and more steel tubes for the machine to metal crunch and then spit back out, bent into the shape of a chair or table leg.

It was a hard life and the meager salary she received from Spiller & Spiller and child support checks from our father barely got us from one week to the next. However, when it came time for Christmas and buying presents, Mom did what she could for my brother and I. Money might have been tight the rest of the year, but with her Christmas

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