Killing Santa Claus

When I was a little kid, like most kids who celebrate Christmas in America, I believed in Santa Claus. Every year on Christmas Eve I'd lay in bed unable to sleep as I imagined him coming down the chimney with the things I wanted most. It wasn't the presents, however, that enticed me to keep believing. I got presents from my family, and it was enough. What piqued my interest was the magical aspect of it. I enjoyed the idea that in this humdrum, boring, magicless world, there were amazing things beyond our capability to understand, like a man who lives in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth dedicated to spreading happiness and joy, or a magical anthropomorphic rabbit who gave out candy to those who knew the truth. As a kid, I believed in it all. I believed that houses could be haunted, that magicians like Penn and Teller or David Copperfield were truly harnessing the power of the supernatural, and yes, even that the joy of every holiday was spread further by magical beings.

Most people, mostly adults, believed that the world was without magic, that everything was boring and full of things like tax forms, laws, and the 9 to 5. It was only the special, the open-minded, that were able to carry the sense of wonder into adulthood. I idolized the illusionists, the paranormal investigators, and the literary characters who, in their older ages, still clung to those beliefs. I put down the kids who refused to believe, saying there was proof everywhere, and they had forced those things out of their mind so much that they now believed them to be false when they were obviously real.

That's why it was such a bludgeon to my psyche when I was told by my parents that Santa Claus wasn't real. I remember the night clearly. At first I was angry, then I simply thought they were lying to me. Over a short amount of time, however, the reality started to sink in. I no longer believed in Santa Claus, or any of the things I held dear. It was like they all started to fade away from my mind. This is when I got scared. I couldn't accept a world without magic. I didn't care about extra presents by this time. That isn't what I wanted for Christmas. I wanted a world where magic was everywhere. I started to force myself to believe. In my heart, I knew it wasn't true, but I had to believe. I attempted this experiment even into my early teen years, trying my best to rationalize the supernatural using explanations such as "we just don't understand the science of it," and the like. In the end it was futile. Nothing I used to try to convince myself worked at all. Sadly, I accepted the notion that magic simply didn't exist, and that our world was bound by laws that made such things impossible.

Now, I have accepted new things as wondrous, like quantum mechanics, engineering, and biology, but still, deep down in my mind, I continue to long for the days when pots of gold lied at the end of every rainbow, when eery, old castles were full of the lost souls of the long dead, and even when a bearded man in a red suit streaked across the sky in a magical sled once every year.