Here Comes Santa Claus

A brief account of a very convincing argument for the existence of Old St. Nick.

    Christmas Eve 1986. I was four years old. This is the first Christmas I can really remember, but not for the presents and new toys, or the outrageous snowy weather (I can only guess that it snowed). What I remember so clearly, so vividly, is what occurred in the dead of night that hovered between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.

    It wasn't a particularly dark night as so many people had left on their Christmas lights, but it was dark enough for a small child used to sleeping with a nightlight. I awoke in the middle of the night. Perhaps something had woken me, or I was just that excited about Christmas presents, and couldn't sleep the night through. My brother was still asleep in the bunk above me, I could hear him breathing. There was no way of knowing the time, but I thought it must be past midnight, the magical hour that Santa Claus would slip in through our front door (we had no fireplace or chimney) and leave all our presents in the blink of an eye. Naturally, I had to investigate this. Slowly, quietly, I slipped out of bed and crept to the bedroom door that led out into the living room, my stuffed clown doll Jingles hugged tightly to my chest. I tugged open the door and peered out.

    I saw it immediately, a shadow so dense that no light penetrated, but was rather swallowed, like a void, hovering around our Christams tree. I heard paper rattle as the shadow moved, unnaturally tall, unusually round, amidst our presents. My first thought was that the shape matched what I had always been told of Santa Claus - a big, round man with a long beard - but if this was indeed Santa Claus, why was I so frozen at the sight of him, the hair on the back of my neck and arms standing at attention, and why was he more a two-dimensional shadow than a real live man in a red suit with white trim? And was it my eyes playing a trick on me that what might have been its feet didn't touch the floor?

    But no reason to panic just yet. Maybe it was one of my parents. Before the shadow around the tree saw me, I closed the bedroom door and hurried to the bathroom that joined my bedroom with the master bedroom. There I saw plainly both my mother and father asleep in their bed.

    That's when the terror sunk in. If my family were all asleep, who was in our living room? I jumped back into bed and pulled the covers tight over my head, heart pounding painfully in my chest, praying that the shadow would stay in the living room and not come into the bedroom. Somehow I managed to fall asleep like this, and was woken in the morning by my brother to open our stockings. Nothing seemed amiss in the living room; nothing out of place or scattered on the floor that shouldn't be. The presents were clustered around the base of the tree just as would be expected. There was no mention of an intruder, and nothing of my father's stereo equipment or the television had been taken, so I quietly concluded to myself that the thing of the night before hadn't been a burglar, and for years after I remained fairly convinced that yes, there really was a Santa Claus.