How real Santa Claus is depends on your faith in mankind. I can remember the year that I had doubts. I found some items put under the tree by “Santa” was the same items that I saw a few days earlier peeking out of a bag that my folks had just brought home. That kind of spoiled things for me, I was disappointed that my parents tried to fool me, that is, until years later when I realized that they were just helping Santa get a head start on his rounds. I remember going to the department store and waiting in line to visit “Santa”, he was pleasant enough, just that I wondered why he gave me such a cheap gift, when he was due by my house in a few days. I’ve thought about this a lot and over the years and I concluded that Santa is not the guy in the red suit trying to sell everything from soft drinks to automobiles, expensive toys to cake mix nor is he the guy jumping out of an airplane with a parachute at a football game. He’s not the guy with his picture on the ad for the latest video game or that scraggly guy in the department store giving out gifts and listening to your wants, all for a price. Santa is indeed that jolly guy in the red suit decorated with white fur, or maybe he’s got a green suit and is skinny. It depends on what you believe and where you or your folks came from. However, make no mistake, he is real. He’s the one that inspired my parents to help him out, just to make my Christmas a happy one. He’s the one that inspires many folks to do without, just so their kids can have a gift of sorts for Christmas. He’s the one that motivates folks like firefighters and policemen to spend their time and money making sure that some needy family or some tot in the hospital has some semblance of a decent Christmas or is fed that day, then go spend their Christmas day working to protect us all. He’s the guy that inspired hordes of other folks to give up the holiday so that they make sure others have their needs filled, be it by conducting religious services or simply volunteering at the local shelter to distribute gifts and dinner or even just standing on the street corner with a kettle and a bell looking for donations.
To me, Santa Claus is that one being that is in the hearts and minds of us all, he is the one that causes Christmas to be a time of giving, a time of hope and charity by those that give and ask nothing in return but the pleasure to do these things for others. I’ve never seen Santa, in spite of what all those marketing experts want me to believe. He’s not the guy in the ads, or even the one up there on the sleigh at the Thanksgiving Day parades, he’s not visible nor does he reside at the North Pole, he is in my mind and lives in the hearts of all these people that do good things for others just to make at least one day of the year special for them all.
