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 bonus and free turkey she made sure that we would have a nice holiday.
About a week before Christmas, after she had received her bonus, she wanted to do some shopping and pick up some things she had ordered from Alden'swhich was a smaller version of Sears or Montgomery Wards. We didn't have a car back then, but our Grandmother Miller offered to take her to the Alden's catalog center that was located in LaSalle, about three miles away from Oglesby, two town on the other either side of the Illinois River, about 90 miles southwest of Chicago.
Mom must have felt so embarrassed that December afternoon when it came time to pay and she was about fifteen dollars short. There was no way she could come back another time to get them so she swallowed her pride and told me to go outside and ask my grandmother if she could borrow the fifteen dollars. The look of desperation on my mom's face when she came up fifteen dollars short told me everything, told me how hard it had been for mom to raise two boys.
I don't know if that was a cruel thing to do, to send me outside and ask my grandmother for the money, with the promise to pay it back the next time she got paid and knowing very well our grandmother would not say no to me, but I was also too young to know what it must have been like for my mom, who was only 31 years old to have to swallow her pride and ask for help. Of course my grandmother was willing to help out and wouldn't have expected the money back because she knew what hardship was, having to raise three boys by herself during The Great Depression.
When I walked back into Alden's with the money, one of the clerks had already brought out the merchandise my mom had ordered. My mom had not intended me to be there to see what she had ordered, but it was too late. I immediately saw the Stanley Cup Hockey Game I had asked from Santa during a visit to his "house" on First Street in LaSalle in early December.
I didn't say anything but mom could tell that I was having a Christmas epiphany of sorts looking at the hockey game and wondering what it was all supposed to mean. I had my suspicions that mom was Santa the previous Christmas when it came time for us to leave some milk and cookies for Santa, she said that Santa preferred Coca Cola. Later that night, when I woke up to go to the bathroom I caught Mom rearranging presents under the tree. Her explanation: Santa was in a hurry. I was nine and bought it.
Now, it looked like the cat, or should I say, if you can excuse the pun, Santa was out of the bag.
My mom could have lied and said she was helping Santa, but it was beyond that now. It was time for me to grow up.
"I'm sorry," my mom said. She looked so tired and sad. "Please don't tell your brother."
My brother was only seven and it would have been cruel and unfair for him to have to stop believing the same year.
"Sure mom," I said. "I won't tell Randy."
And I didn't. (My brother would find out on his own the following Christmas.)
My mom smiled and the two of us walked out together carrying the presents she had ordered. It would turn out to be a very nice Christmas for us; mom made sure of that. That year I found out who Santa Claus really was and how special my mom was for what she had to go through and endure to take care of her family.
And on Christmas Eve, now knowing that there wasn't a Santa Claus per se, but that there was a little Santa in all of us, I got to stay up and watch those black and white images of the moon being transmitted back to earth from Apollo 8 and hear Commander James Lovell say, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."