The year Galen started kindergarten, our third in Wisconsin, I learned about St. Nick’s Day. Children set their shoes by the fireplace before going to bed on December 5 and awoke the next morning to find their Keds and Converses filled with chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, along with a small toy or two. A mini-Christmas, weeks before the big day, commemorating the Feast of St. Nicholas, the fourth-century Bishop of Myra, famous across Christendom for his good deeds and secret gifts, as well as the patron of sailors, brewers, and pawnbrokers, all of whom had a serious foothold in Wisconsin.
Our own foothold in Wisconsin was less firm. Even after three years, we still found ourselves alone at times when we ought not to have been. The neighborhood pool, for example, was open only eight weeks in the summer, a ridiculously short season for a guy from Texas and California. I could count on one finger the number of indoor pools I’d swum in during the years I lived in California. Yet by mid-August the pool was practically empty, down to the bored and over-tanned lifeguards, a cluster of acned teenagers playing underwater grab ass, and us: Hayden blowing bubbles in the baby pool and Galen alternatingly working to tear out my hair and break my sternum every time he jumped from the side. Weeks before Labor Day, I noticed a certain autumnal chill in the air, the sky starting to thin and the upper leaves of the maples sliding along the color spectrum from green to red. Soon after, my neighbors coiled away their hoses and returned the storm panes to their windows and wrapped their rhododendrons in burlap. Once football season started, Appleton, thirty minutes south of hallowed Lambeau Field, where the Packers had played most home games since the year Joe McCarthy died, became ground zero of the apocalypse. Traffic lights on cloudless Sunday afternoons changed from green to yellow to red without a single car passing beneath. Any establishment that didn’t serve beer in front of a gigantic flat-screen closed down. Walking the boys to the park, the earth’s axis visibly tilting away from the sun and the temperatures tumbling with the leaves, I noticed television sets glowing inside every window. We learned that Packers games were a great time to shop for groceries. The checkers stood at the ends of their lanes, their eyes pleading for us to wheel our cart in their direction and afford them a few minutes of human contact.
Children grease the skids of community and even friendship, providing entrée to playgroups and music lessons and the like, but they can also keep you outside the fence of other circles. My colleagues at the college had adult children or none at all. They tolerated though didn’t exactly welcome an infant and a toddler crashing their parties, plunging their saliva-slicked fingers into the baskets of chips and nuts. Most of the other families with small children we encountered around town were native, not only to Wisconsin but to the immediate area, their kids bound for the same elementary, middle, and high schools they themselves had attended. They weren’t typically in the market for new friends. Still, we tried our best. We went to church suppers and joined book clubs and crisscrossed the state visiting pumpkin festivals and eating fried haddock at the VFW and picking apples at a local orchard where, for an extra fee, a woman in a gingham apron dipped our hand-plucked apples into a vat of steaming homemade caramel.
One morning, in the park with the boys not long after Hayden was born, Katherine struck up a conversation with another mother and ended up getting herself invited to join a church group for mothers of preschoolers. Not a Bible study, the woman explained, simply a chance to get together. The church that hosted it was Lutheran, and it was in our neighborhood. Galen was still a year from starting preschool, but the woman said he was close enough. After an isolated winter, Katherine was desperate to connect with people who understood the precarious comedy of wrangling a toddler into a car seat in subzero weather while eight months pregnant, so she said okay. She enjoyed herself enough to go back the next week.
That June, we were invited to a birthday party on the far side of town for one of their children, in what might be labeled Appleton’s suburbs: a mile beyond the highway that encircles the city limits, vinyl-sided houses flanked by sapling maple trees held upright against the Canadian winds by baling wire and wooden stakes. I parked on the street behind a fleet of Toyota Siennas and Dodge Caravans and helped Galen out of his car seat while Katherine unbuckled Hayden. The furniture looked as though it had been purchased as a set: a faux-leather sectional with a matching faux-leather recliner, a coffee table made of the same granite as the countertops, an oversized Roman-numeral clock hanging on the wall opposite the autographed Packers jersey enshrined in a mahogany frame. The kitchen table showcased an array of potato and corn chips, M&M’s with peanuts and without, celery and carrot sticks dammed against a reservoir of ranch dressing large enough to swamp the entire crop, and a most impressive three-dimensional Thomas the Tank Engine cake, complete with edible tracks and a railroad crossing fashioned from a lollipop. “Damn,” I whispered to Katherine. “That’s some cake.”
Galen’s eyes alighted on the enormous play set on the other side of the sliding glass door, and he pushed his way through the crowd of children. I followed him, leaving Katherine inside with Hayden riding on her hip. The patio, I discovered as I stepped through the door, was occupied by three men in khakis and polyester golf shirts, the kind that never wrinkle or wilt, each emblazoned with the logo of a different sports team. Badgers, Packers, Brewers. They eyed me suspiciously.
I shook hands and introduced myself. I asked which child scaling the side of the play set belonged to whom, nodded as the men pointed and said their children’s names, and then forgot them all. One of the men offered me a beer from the cooler. Why not? The guy in the Brewers shirt pulled a bottle from the ice and handed it to me. I studied the label. Fauerbach Lager. “I’ve never had this before,” I said.
“It’s from Portage,” he said. “Where I grew up.”
“Did you know John Muir is from Portage?” I asked.
“Who? John Moore?”
“Muir,” I said. “The naturalist. He founded the Sierra Club.”
The men glanced at one another.
I should have stopped there and changed the subject to a topic more befitting my audience. I hadn’t paid enough attention to the football season to say anything meaningful about the Packers, and though I knew the Brewers were Milwaukee’s baseball team, I couldn’t name a single player. I continued. “The famous historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, was from Portage, too. Aldo Leopold lived in Baraboo, the next town over. That’s really something, if you think about it. Muir, Turner, and Leopold were major players in the early environmental movement, and they’re all from the same part of Wisconsin.”
“Okay,” he said, and crossed the lawn to push his daughter’s swing. The other men stared into their bottles. A minute later, Galen tugged on my pant leg and said he needed to use the bathroom. I’d never been so happy to hunt for a toilet in my life.
In the car on the way home, Katherine patted my knee and said, “Thanks for being a good sport. I won’t make you do that again.”
I looked over at her and then into the rearview mirror. The slice of cake given to Hayden had mostly ended up in his hair, and Galen’s knees were stained green and black from the yard. The boys needed baths, and I needed a drink, something not from Portage, something clear and cold and Russian. “Everyone was nice,” I said.
“You don’t have to say it,” she said.
One way or another, we had to make a life. I had a good teaching job, spending my days among young men and women whose bright faces and eager voices I loved. Katherine, too, had landed a gratifying gig as a social worker at the local hospital. We camped on Rock Island, the last of the islands off the northern tip of the thumb-shaped Door County peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan, our tent fifty feet from the shore and the boys in our laps as the twilight gave way to a dazzling firmament of stars. We savored local customs like brandy old-fashioneds and Bloody Marys in liter steins garnished with bacon and pickles and side chasers of beer. When we heard about St. Nick’s Day, Katherine and I were charmed.
Most American kids grow up with some awareness that St. Nicholas is synonymous with Santa Claus, but few know the story of how one became the other. I didn’t until I looked it up. According to legend, the real St. Nicholas saved three poor maidens in southern Turkey from a life of prostitution by throwing purses filled with gold coins—dowries for their weddings—through the girls’ window in the middle of the night. In a slightly apocryphal version, St. Nicholas tossed the purses down the chimney where they landed in the maidens’ stockings, hung by the fire to dry. As tales of St. Nick spread throughout medieval Europe, his clothes, his body, and even his name began to change. The Dutch gave him a long beard, a red cape, and called him Sinterklaas. In 1809, Washington Irving, of “Rip Van Winkle” fame and founder of the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, cast him as a portly sailor in a velvet coat and renamed him Santa Claus.
In America, St. Nicholas’s Day was long ago absorbed by Christmas, but in Europe—and in Wisconsin, which continued to receive large waves of Dutch, German, and Scandinavian immigrants well into the twentieth century—it remained popular. The bakery at the end of our street made special nut cakes and pastries. The boutiques downtown erected displays of inexpensive, shoe-sized toys. I learned about the tradition from the mother of one of Galen’s classmates while standing outside the school. She told me that everyone, including the Hmong children whose parents had emigrated not from Europe but from Laos and Vietnam, celebrated the occasion. If Galen missed it, he’d feel left out. We didn’t want that, did we?
Of course not. I thanked her for steering me around what, in the cosmos of kindergarten, would have amounted to a major disaster. Katherine meanwhile had gotten the skinny on St. Nick’s from the nurses at work. She felt bad that we hadn’t celebrated the day before now. Two-year-old Hayden was at her feet, working the toe of my shoe into his mouth. He had his teeth almost to the laces, a lot farther than I thought he’d get it. “Thankfully,” I quipped, “we found out before it was too late.”
We didn’t have a fireplace, so the boys left their shoes beneath the thermostat.
They bounded down the stairs the next morning and dove for the loot. Katherine had gone all out, intent on making up for lost time. A plate of St. Nick’s apple miters sat on the coffee table. The boys’ miniature kicks were buried beneath a pile of flannel pajamas, yo-yos, Matchbox cars, packs of stickers, and generous parcels of chocolate coins. Hayden sat cross-legged on the carpet and devoured his entire stash, wrappers and all, until chocolate spittle oozed down his chin. Galen, though, was puzzled. He studied the Christmas tree, festooned with lights and ornaments but empty of presents, unsure of whether to be happy or devastated. “Is this Christmas?” he asked.
“It’s St. Nick’s Day,” Katherine said.
“Does St. Nick work for Santa?” Galen asked. “Or does he work for God?”
For as long as I’d been a dad, I’d had my misgivings about propagating the Santa Claus myth. It wasn’t Santa’s make-believe status that bothered me, but rather how children were so heartily encouraged to believe in him when they’re little only to have the fable, and all the magical thinking Santa made possible, later revealed as a fraud.
I was Galen’s age when my mother told me she’d once seen the fat man in the flesh. She’d had the flu, and Santa had crept into her bedroom after dropping off the gifts to wish her a merry Christmas. She told me he’d set his white glove on her fevered brow and said her name. I clung to the story as proof that Santa was real long after I’d begun to suspect he wasn’t. The pieces didn’t add up. How come, for example, the presents supposedly sledded in from the North Pole smelled like my mother’s perfume? Why were the cookies I’d set out the night before now in a Ziploc baggie in the pantry? I finally cornered my mom and demanded the truth, and to her credit she came clean, but the revelation nevertheless felt like a betrayal. When I grilled her about her confab with Santa—how could she have seen him if he wasn’t real?—she replied more sheepishly. “Well, David,” she said, “I had a fever. I was delirious.” The thing I couldn’t figure out was why I’d been duped in the first place. Christmas seemed neither more magical nor the gifts more lavish because they’d supposedly come from Santa’s workshop. If anything, I’d learned to take for granted how much things cost, as well as the copious amounts of human labor required to acquire and assemble all the gadgets and gizmos Santa left at my house. It was an attitude I’d noticed the boys starting to espouse: If I threatened to take away their toys, they shrugged and said Santa would bring them more. If they lost their gloves at school or day care, their solution was to simply add them to their Christmas lists. A five- and two-year-old shouldn’t have to ponder the sacrifices made in service of their happiness and well-being, but all the same it didn’t sit well with me that they saw Santa as a cash cow who catered to their every desire. What evidence did they have to the contrary? They were my mother’s and my in-laws’ only grandchildren. They could ask for the moon and expect to receive it.
I saw my chance to set a few things straight.
“St. Nick was Santa,” I said. “He was a real person who lived a long time ago. He gave presents to children and helped the poor. He was so famous that everyone in Europe and North Africa and parts of Asia knew about him and continued to tell stories about him long after he died.”
“He died?” Galen asked. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open. “Santa died?”
“A long time ago,” I said. “More than a thousand years ago. We remember him at Christmas because his story reminds us to love others and to be generous.”
Galen gazed at the Christmas tree, the lights shimmering in the ornaments. He looked suddenly wise, as though he’d grasped some fundamental human truth—about, perhaps, the ways fables can be understood as fictions and still tell us something about who we are and how we ought to live. The story of Santa, far more than the person, taught us to do for others before doing for ourselves, anonymously and without fanfare if possible, and to find a quiet and abiding joy in the solemnity and solicitude of a lighted tree during the coldest, darkest time of the year. In Wisconsin, that was no small thing.
I congratulated myself for my honesty and for making the truth plain. I hadn’t said Santa wasn’t real. On the contrary, I’d told him Santa was as real as he and I, subject to the same cycles of life and death. Galen seemed to take comfort in the knowledge that the laws of biology and physics governing the other eleven months of the year also held true in December. Smiling, newly enlightened, Galen handed me one of his chocolate coins. Bursting with yuletide spirit, I unwrapped it for him.
The next week, Galen’s teacher called. “We had a little trouble today,” she said. “We were making holiday ornaments when Galen announced to the class that Santa was dead.”
“He said that?” I asked.
“Several children started to cry,” she said. “I’ve already had a few parents call. Christmas is less than two weeks away.”
“It’s my fault,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “I was telling him how St. Nicholas was the real Santa Claus.”
“Well,” she said, her voice elongating into a schoolmarmish tone, “some beliefs are better kept to ourselves.”
“It’s the truth,” I said.
“Different families have different truths.” She was growing annoyed and wasn’t trying very hard to hide it. “We try to respect that.”
“What is truth?” I asked, rhetorically.
“That’s what I’m trying to say.”
I held off telling my son’s kindergarten teacher that she sounded like Pontius Pilate, and she in turn refrained from further cramming down my throat the message she’d already made exceedingly clear: that rumors of Santa’s demise, sprung upon a room full of five-year-olds in mid-December, needed to be dispelled, pronto. The consequences were potentially dire. Galen could be branded a pariah, the kid who killed Christmas.
Galen was in the living room, watching TV with his thumb in his mouth and clutching his woobie, a dishwater-gray blanket with a bear’s head and paws. We’d been trying to persuade him to give it up since he started school, but so far our efforts had only intensified his attachment. I sat down beside him and fell into his episode of Go, Diego, Go!, waiting for the right opportunity to broach the subject. The show, however, ran without commercial breaks, Galen never once moved his eyes from the screen, and the longer I sat beside him, the less I knew what to say. Hey, kid, remember that conversation we had last week? Turns out I was wrong: There really is a fat guy in a velveteen suit who can slow time and squeeze through air ducts. His reindeer can fly, his toys are made by elves, and your Christmas presents don’t cost us one red cent. It sounded not only stupid but cowardly, a bald-faced repeal of the first consequential truth I’d ever told him. Parents already tell so many lies in the course of simply holding things together: that we can protect our children from harm or that we’ll always have enough to eat, despite the fact that harm and hunger daily befall children around the world. There were plenty of times I brazenly deceived my sons not to guard their innocence but for my own convenience, because I wanted them to go to bed or stop hounding me at the store. The proliferation of the Santa Claus legend itself resulted from the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York’s wish to transform Christmas from a drunken, working-class bacchanal into a domesticated family holiday. I mean, think about it: How often is Santa invoked in order to get unruly children to behave?
Now that I’d let the genie out of the bottle, I didn’t know how to get it back in.
When the next episode of Diego started, I patted Galen’s knee and slumped back to the kitchen, foolishly telling myself I wouldn’t compromise my principles in order to placate a bunch of sniveling kids. Deep down, though, I knew I was simply at a loss for words.
Maybe, I thought, I could make Katherine talk to him. That way, in a few years when he finally wised up for good, I could claim I’d never been anything but honest. That seemed like a cop-out of a different sort, and Katherine, who in her years as a social worker had on more than one occasion engaged in hand-to-hand combat with belligerent schizophrenics and crazed drug addicts, had little patience for buck-passers.
Peer pressure, in the end, did the work for me. Without further intervention from his parents or his teacher, Galen decided to hedge his bets and declare Santa alive again. Apparently, one of the kids at his craft table had laid out the question of Santa’s existence in terms of Pascal’s wager. Even if Santa wasn’t real, it was better to believe just to make sure you got the presents. A few days before school let out for the holidays, Galen brought me his Christmas list, scrawled in marker on a sheet of yellow construction paper, and asked me to burn it. The same school friend had told Galen that Santa would read the smoke. Christmas lists sent by smoke signal were faster and more reliable than using the mail.
“You’re sure Santa will get it?” I asked.
“Of course,” Galen said. “He sees everything.”
I carried the paper to the kitchen sink and dug around the drawer for the lighter. Before I touched the flame to the page, I looked down at my son, hoping to gauge his level of seriousness. When I set fire to the list and watched Galen lean over the sink to study the paper as it blackened, I understood why he wanted to believe. For all the hype that attaches to Santa, for all the overspending that occurs in his name, believing in him is ultimately an act of community during a season when community is paramount. Hoping they’ve made the nice list helps reassure children they’re worthy, despite their failings and misbehaviors, of the love, goodwill, and yes, even the presents that come their way during the holidays, all of which can be overwhelming when you’re five. It’s not Santa’s magic that children cling to and need, but his grace. Sharing in Santa gave Galen the very thing I’d been chasing for the past three years: a foothold in his community. It didn’t matter that his community still needed help in the bathroom and consumed more Play-Doh than fried haddock. St. Nick’s Day and Santa had given him a way in. And in that way, his foothold was also mine.
On Christmas Eve, after church and after dinner, I ushered the boys upstairs while Katherine finished the dishes. The boys kicked their feet inside their sheets and squealed. Christmas was almost here. Once we were certain they were out, Katherine and I would begin assembling toys and stuffing stockings for the grand reveal the next morning. We’d be up into the wee hours, and the boys would rouse us from bed by six, if we were lucky. “Santa can’t come until you’re asleep,” I told Galen. If the Santa facade granted me even one extra hour of sleep, it was worth the deception. “Stay in bed.”
Galen drew an X across his chest. “I promise.”
I leaned down to kiss him. “Merry Christmas,” I said.
“Merry Christmas, Dad.” I backed out of his room and shut off the light. As I pulled the door closed, I heard him say, “Merry Christmas . . . Santa.” And then I heard him giggling in the dark.