THOMAS M. DISCH

THE FIRST REVELATIONS hit the headlines the day after Thanksgiving, less than a year from the Supreme Court’s epochal decision to extend full civil liberties to five-year-olds. After centuries of servitude and repression, the last minority was finally free. Free to get married. Free to vote and hold office. Free to go to bed at any hour they wanted. Free to spend their allowances on whatever they liked.

For those services geared to the newly liberated young it was a period of heady expansion. A typical example was Lord & Taylor’s department stores, which had gone deeply into the red in the two previous years, due to the popularity of thermal body-paints. Changing its name to Dumb Dresses and Silly Shoes, Lord & Taylor’s profits soared to record heights in the second quarter of ’89. In the field of entertainment the Broadway musical, I See London, I See France, scored a similar success with audiences and critics alike. “I think it shows,” wrote Our Own Times Drama Critic Sandy Myers, “how kids are really on the ball today. I think everyone who likes singing and dancing and things like that should go and see it. But prudes should be warned that some of the humor is pretty spicy.”

It was the same newspaper’s team of investigative reporters, Bobby Boyd and Michelle Ginsberg, who broke the Santa Claus story one memorable November morning. Under a banner headline that proclaimed:

THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS!

Bobby told how months before, rummaging through various trunks and boxes in his parents’ home in Westchester, he had discovered a costume identical in every respect with that worn by the “Santa Claus” who had visited the Boyd household on the previous Christmas Eve. “My soul was torn,” wrote the young Pulitzer Prize winner, “between feelings of outrage and fear. The thought of all the years of imposture and deceit that had been practiced on me and my brothers and sisters around the world made me furious. Then, foreseeing all that I’d be up against, a shiver of dread went through me. If I’d known that the trail of guilt would lead me to the door of my father’s bedroom, I can’t be sure that I’d have followed it. I had my suspicions, of course.”

But suspicions, however strong, weren’t enough for Bobby and Michelle. They wanted evidence. Months of back-breaking and heart-breaking labor produced nothing but hearsay, innuendo, and conflicting allegations. Then, in mid-November, as the stores were already beginning to fill with Christmas displays, Michelle met the mysterious Clayton E. Forster. Forster claimed that he had repeatedly assumed the character and name of Santa Claus, and that this imposture had been financed from funds set aside for this purpose by a number of prominent New York businesses. When asked if he had ever met or spoken to the real Santa Claus, Forster declared outright that there wasn’t any! Though prevented from confirming Forster’s allegations from his own lips by the municipal authorities (Forster had been sent to prison on a vagrancy charge), reporters were able to listen to Michelle’s tape recording of the interview, on which the self-styled soldier-of-fortune could be heard to say: “Santa Claus? Santa’s just a pile of (expletive deleted), kid! Get wise—there ain’t no (expletive deleted), and there never was one. It’s nothing but your (expletive deleted) mother and father!”

The clincher, however, was Bobby’s publication of a number of BankAmericard receipts, charging Mr. Oscar T. Boyd for, among much else, “2 rooty-toot-toots and 3 rummy-tum-tums.” These purchases had been made in early December of the previous year and coincided in all respects with the Christmas presents that the Boyd children subsequently received, presumably from Santa Claus. “You could call it circumstantial evidence, sure,” admitted Our Own Times’ Senior Editor Barry “Beaver” Collins, “but we felt we’d reached the point when we had to let the public know.”

The public reacted at first with sheer blank incomprehension. Only slowly did the significance and extent of the alleged fraud sink in. A Gallup poll, taken on December 1, asked voters aged 5 through 8: “Do you believe in Santa Claus?” The results: Yes, 26%; No, 38%; Not Sure, 36%. Older children were even more skeptical.

On December 12, an estimated 300,000 children converged on the Boyd residence in Westchester from every part of the city and the state. Chanting “Poop on the big fat hypocrites,” they solemnly burned no less than 128 effigies of Santa Claus in the Boyds’ front yard. Equivalent protests took place in every major city.

The real long-range consequences of the scandal did not become apparent for much longer, since they lay rather in what wasn’t done than in what was. People were acting as though not only Santa but Christmas itself had been called in question. Log-jams of unsold merchandise piled up in stockrooms and warehouses, and the streets filled up with forests of brittle evergreens.

Any number of public figures tried, unavailingly, to reverse this portentous state of affairs. The Congress appropriated $3 million to decorate the Capitol and the White House with giant figures of Santa and his reindeer, and the Lincoln Memorial temporarily became the Santa Claus Memorial. Reverend Billy Graham announced that he was a personal friend of both Santa Claus and his wife, and had often led prayer meetings at Santa’s workshop at the North Pole. But nothing served to restore the public’s confidence. By December 18, one week before Christmas, the Dow-Jones industrial average had fallen to an all-time low.

In response to appeals from businessmen all over the country, a national emergency was declared, and Christmas was advanced one month, to the 25th of January, on which date it continues to be celebrated. An effort was made by the National Association of Manufacturers to substitute their own Grandma America for the disgraced Santa Claus. Grandma America had the distinct advantage over her predecessor that she was invisible and could walk through walls, thereby eliminating the age-old problem of how children living in chimneyless houses get their presents. There appeared to be hope that this campaign would succeed until a rival group of businesses, which had been excluded from the Grandma America franchise, introduced Aloysius the Magic Snowman, and the Disney Corporation premiered their new nightly TV series, Uncle Scrooge and the Spirit of Christmas Presents. The predictable result of the mutual recriminations of the various franchise-holders was an ever greater dubiety on the part of both children and grown-ups. “I used to be a really convinced believer in Santa,” declared Bobby’s mother in an exclusive interview with her son, “but now with all this foofaraw over Grandma America and the rest of them, I just don’t know. It seems sordid, somehow. As for Christmas itself, I think we may just sit this one out.”

“Bobby and I, we just felt terrible,” pretty little (3' 11") Michelle Ginsberg said, recalling these dark mid-January days at the Pulitzer Prize ceremony. “We’d reported what we honestly believed were the facts. We never considered it could lead to a recession or anything so awful. I remember one Christmas morning, what used to be Christmas, that is, sitting there with my empty pantyhose hanging from the fireplace and just crying my heart out. It was probably the single most painful moment of my life.”

Then, on January 21, Our Own Times received a telephone call from the President of the United States, who invited its two reporters, Billy and Michelle, to come with him on the Presidential jet, Spirit of ’76, on a special surprise visit to the North Pole!

What they saw there, and whom they met, the whole nation learned on the night of January 24, the new Christmas Eve, during the President’s momentous press conference. After Billy showed his Polaroid snapshots of the elves at work in their workshop, of himself shaking Santa’s hand and sitting beside him in his sleigh, and of everyone—Billy, Michelle, Santa Claus and Mrs. Santa, the President and the First Lady—sitting down to a big turkey dinner, Michelle read a list of all the presents that she and Billy had received. Their estimated retail value: $18,599.95. As Michelle bluntly put it, “My father just doesn’t make that kind of money.”

“So would you say, Michelle,” the President asked with a twinkle in his eye, “that you do believe in Santa Claus?”

“Oh, absolutely, there’s no question.”

“And you, Billy?”

Billy looked at the tips of his new cowboy boots and smiled. “Oh, sure. And not just ’cause he gave us such swell presents. His beard, for instance. I gave it quite a yank. I’d take my oath that that beard was real.”

The President put his arms around the two children and gave them a big, warm squeeze. Then, becoming suddenly more serious, he looked right at the TV camera and said, “Billy, Michelle—your friends who told you that there is no Santa Claus were wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. But all minds, Virginia—uh, that is to say, Billy and Michelle—whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

“Not believe in Santa Claus? You might as well not believe in fairies. No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now—nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

Then, with a friendly wink, and laying his finger aside of his nose, he added, “In conclusion, I would like to say—to Billy and Michelle and to my fellow Americans of every age—Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

1974