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Often your favorite stories are told more than once. Such is the case during this holiday season when I remember a Christmas Eve long ago when I was taught an important lesson.
I was a curious child, skeptical then about what I was told about the Great Elf, a title my father gave to Santa Claus. I found it difficult to see how one big elf could travel in a sleigh and visit all the children of the world.
I was determined to prove Santa a fake, even as I secretly hoped he was not.
My quest to out the jolly elf started when my mother took me to see Santa at a downtown department store. As I sat on his lap, I pulled on his white beard hoping to reveal it was fake. The problem was that it was a real beard. All Santa could do was say “ouch” and a low “ho, ho, ho” and wish me a merry Christmas.
But I was not defeated. I planned ahead.
One Christmas I asked for a fingerprint kit so I could dust the fireplace and get fingerprints. I was a devious kid and waited an entire year to use the kit on the next Christmas Eve.
On Christmas morning, I rushed downstairs to examine any prints left on the fireplace, but there were none. My father lurked nearby and smiled. “That elf is a smart old man,” he said laughing. “You can’t trip him up that easily.”
Our family custom on Christmas Eve was for Santa to come to our door and leave presents behind. After a few years, I became convinced that Santa was really my father, his laughter slightly British like my dad’s.
I had to wait another year. This time I grew more devious. I waited for Santa to come to our door on Christmas Eve. I wanted to out my father as the jolly elf. When Santa arrived at the front door I called upstairs to my father, who each year claimed to be working in his office. I knew I had him.
Let me just say from the testimony of eyewitnesses that when my father came downstairs, my eyes grew larger, and I turned my head back and forth to see him and the Santa at my front door, who by now was really bellowing out his “ho, ho, ho,” and handing me a bag of candy. I was stunned into silence and soon questioning my own skepticism.
I had a few more good years when I didn’t pull at Santa’s beard. I suspended my doubts and just enjoyed the warmth of the season, the gift giving and singing and the sounds and smells of Christmas. There would be time enough later to doubt.
I sometimes wonder if even now on Christmas Eve I heard the doorbell ring and a loud “ho,ho,ho” sounding outside, I might go to the door hoping to find Santa there holding a bag of candy.
I am reminded of a poem by another skeptic, English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, about another Christmas Eve:
“If someone said on Christmas Eve,Come; see the oxen kneel,In the lonely barton by yonder coombOur childhood used to know,I should go with him in the gloom,Hoping it might be so.”
The philosopher Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. What I learned as a child still helps me realize today that not every truth is scientific, that sometimes it is also about the lure of stories and fables and myths to take us into realms where reason cannot go.
(Oh, reader, the “Santa” at the door was a neighbor my father had arranged to take his place.)
John C. Morgan is a writer and teacher whose weekly columns appear in this newspaper and others.
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