By Victor Greto
Christmas is all about epiphanies of one sort or another.
So here’s a sweet holiday gem from my formative youth.
When I was about 8 years old, I finally asked my mom the question.
I had heard tell from the kids at school; hints had been dropped from an older brother or two; and, just days before this epiphanic moment, my younger brother Jimmy and I had actually found unwrapped toys in the upstairs bathroom closet.
That was the tipping point.
So one cold December evening, I confronted my mother at the kitchen table.
I don’t remember the immediate circumstances of what led up to that moment, but I can sense now the determination I felt then in my little body, the power of my tiny fist as it slammed against the mottled blue and white formica table.
“I wanna know,” I told my mother. “Is there or isn’t there a Santa Claus?”
I then saw something I’d never experienced before: my mom visibly thinking, right before my eyes. She hesitated. Her mouth curled weakly. Small sigh.
“Your dad is Santa,” she said. And she smiled. No kidding. She smiled.
I don’t remember what happened next. I must have been rendered speechless, because when I think about it now, I don’t think I could have said anything; something had me by the throat.
Moments passed. But the next question was obvious.
“Well,” I said, my mouth remaining open. “The Easter Bunny?”
See, this is the thing. You have to realize that the previous spring, I thought I saw the Easter Bunny at the foot of the stairs from my vantage at the top. I had peered around the wall by the banister. I was unshakably convinced that I saw his ears – purple, fuzzy ones – and I remember the next morning, after my brothers and I had rooted around dad’s ashtrays for hidden eggs, telling mom and dad that I had seen him.
Yes, that’s right: the Easter Bunny. I had seen the dude. Or at least his ears. Mom and dad both nodded at my revelatory vision, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“I’m the Easter Bunny,” my mom said now, at the kitchen table, months after that reassuring nod. This time she wasn’t visibly thinking. She just kept smiling.
Next, of course, was an obvious question. But I didn’t articulate it. I couldn’t. I mean, I knew already: I could lay odds at 8 years of age that, after this information, the tooth fairy didn’t exist either. She couldn’t have. Somehow – and even then, at the table, it seemed inconceivable – while I slept the sleep of the innocent, my old man or mom gently lifted the pillow, took the gross tooth I had left there just an hour or two before, and slid a dime in its place.
But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, ask that.
So, I didn’t. I just shook my head, and felt my voice return to my throat.
“You lied?”
I have to admit I really don’t know what happened next. I mean, I can see myself get up from the table. But I think, like now, I felt a weird sense of relief.
Don’t get me wrong. I was hurt and disappointed. More than anything, I was angry, at mom and dad and the entire world for so expertly perpetuating a lie at my expense.
But that’s also where the relief came in.
A world that had been constructed for me for so long, with such detail, enforced and reinforced by mom and dad and Christmas carols and aunts and uncles and TV specials and decorations and department stores – all of it had fallen apart so quickly and noiselessly around me.
Call it the beginning realization of a self set against the world, including mom and dad.
Watch that 8-year-old as he walks away from the fluorescent light of the kitchen and into the dark living room, walking past the faint glow of the TV broadcasting its insipid Christmas specials, to the stairs and making that long climb up to his room.
O, brave new world.