The Infinite Degrees of Santa Claus

December 21, 2009

WHEN I WAS ABOUT SEVEN YEARS OLD, things were easier to figure out. It was getting close to Christmas, and we were as excited as ever with the prospects of presents and the impending visit of that magical fat man. Of course there were smarter children in our neighborhood who didn’t believe, who told us that their parents had told them the truth—that it was all fantasy, that Santa was a story. Obviously, we knew that they were wrong. We knew and believed that St Nick would arrive late Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, and that given the chance; our parents would probably fill our stockings with coal. Anyway, no one really knew. No one had seen anything, one way or the other, as we were all asleep when it happened.

“There he is! Look! There! Don’t you see his sleigh? Up there! You can just barely make out the reindeer in front….”

“Yes, I see it—at least I think I do. But it’s hard.” I answered.

So, that Christmas, being seven years old and in the second grade, I realized that if Santa was really just my parents, he, or rather they, would have to have hidden the gifts somewhere—and I went exploring. The top shelves in the pantry? The shed in the back yard? The back of their closet? And, the last most scary place to look was the cellar. The damp smell, the cool closeness, and all those sooty cobwebs hanging—we, the kids, never went into the cellar. So I decided then, by logical deduction, that it was the most likely place to find hidden presents, the place I didn’t dare look.

One afternoon while my mother was out doing errands, I decided I’d venture into the darkness beneath our old house. Slowly, I opened the door and descended the bare squeaky boards that were the cellar stairs, petrified of what I might find down there, other than presents. The furnace made those awful thumps and grunts as I quietly took each step, carefully checking above and below for imagined spider attacks. Finally, at the bottom of the stairs I turned and reached out into the emptiness, caught and pulled the chain attached to the fixture and bare light-bulb hanging in the middle of the room. “Nothing. Nothing! Nope, no presents here!” And I spun around and left as quickly as I could, tearing up the stairs, and then—as I turned to close the door behind me, I noticed what I hadn’t seen on the way down in the dark, that above me—high up over the stairs—on the shelf— were presents, the presents.

But, that is the enlightened story that I tell now. What’s odd is that I didn’t see them then. That day when I first went down into the dark, I came back sure that there were no gifts hidden anywhere in the cellar, reinforcing my steadfast desire to believe. I didn’t see the presents at that time. As I turned to close the door behind me, and glanced up at the shelf, I saw nothing. I didn’t see the presents stacked on the shelf until a few years later, after understanding more fully the true nature of Santa’s life. It was then that I saw what I was looking for, what I couldn’t see while staring straight at them. Suddenly I remembered, and there they were. Then, in my twenties, I looked and saw more than just the packages; I saw my parents’ love. Later, as a young parent, I looked and saw struggles and sacrifice on top of that. And, while that shelf is still a mystery in some ways, I’ve learned to have faith in its magic—though it doesn’t happen how the smart neighbor kids or I once thought. The presents had remained invisible until my experience and understanding grew to include their possibility. The real miracle and potential is that the shelf in the cellar continues to fill with gifts today, so many things that I can hardly imagine—before I learn to see them.

(excerpt from Chapter 13, The Infinite Degrees of Santa Claus, Talking to Tesla, The Mirror That Is The Door)

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