When I was a kid on the farm, we always opened our presents on Christmas Eve and only with the immediate family.
Well, how could it be otherwise? We lived 8 miles from town, a couple of miles from our nearest neighbors. People didn't just up and visit the neighbors for Christmas Eve, and family from far away generally stayed far away. I'm not saying that was good or bad. That's just how it was.
Our dad sometimes took us kids for a Jeep ride to see if we could see Santa Claus, while our mother stayed home to digest the oyster stew or something. The Jeep had a removable canvas top with some sort of plastic for the wide and rear windows. It was a cold ride. I remember our dad scraping at the front windshield, and I remember peering through the scratched, frosted plastic side window, scanning the sky for a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.
None of us kids ever did catch a glimpse of Santa in flight. Our dad said he did. By the time we looked, the sky was empty, but Dad said the team was headed in the direction of the home place. By the time we reached home, we were too late. Our mother said we'd just missed the jolly old elf, and wasn't it a shame. We would have been sorely disappointed had it not been for the presents under the tree.
I don't know if the other kids understood the whole deal about Santa Claus and the "now you see him, now you don't'' business our folks pulled on us. I didn't, not as a child. I was a true believer until first grade, when a couple of town kids (always so much more sophisticated than us farm kids) told me the real story of Christmas Eve. Even after they did, I continued to want to believe for a couple more years. I guess I've always been a sucker for nice.
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Maybe that's why the story of Virginia O'Hanlon and her letter to the editor of the New York Sun touched me so deeply when I first heard it in ninth grade. Our journalism teacher, Merle Adams, read the piece, "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus,'' to the class. I was captivated with the notion that a simple newspaper editor could write something so meaningful and, as it turned out, timeless.
I know I'm a hopeless romantic. I know that still, after almost 50 years in the newspaper business and then state government, against all the evidence, I remain convinced that simple goodness is the most powerful force on earth. I forget that sometimes, and I lose my faith more often than I care to admit. But when it comes to yes or no, then yes, I still believe.
Last Sunday I searched the Internet for the New York Sun piece, as I do often in the run-up to Christmas, to read the response by Sun Editor Francis Church to Virginia's letter.
No Santa Claus? Perish the thought.
"He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.''
In my life as a newspaper guy, I always needed facts, things I could double-check before I put them into a news story. I was a fanatic for knowing the source of information and being able to go back to the report or table or textbook, something concrete, to verify what went into the story.
How is it, then, I find myself agreeing without reservation with Church when he says, "The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.''
Perhaps it is that Christmas Eve is when I most fully accept that there are indeed wonders I can't see. Santa does exist. The goodness and kindness of so many people support that belief.
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Here's hoping your life is filled with those kind of people this holiday and throughout the coming year.
