Dear Santa,

I never believed in you, you know.  I suppose you would know since you listen and look into everyone’s homes kind of like that guy from the Dr. Seuss Sleep Book.  If you did exist I wonder if you’d skimp on my presents over my unbelief.  It would hardly seem fair since my mom never even tried to have me believe in you.  The only person who ever did was the nice old lady who lived down the road from my grandmother and would send presents over on Christmas that said they were from Santa Claus.

I still left you cookies sometimes, and carrots for the reindeer.  I was into carrots as a child, which is why I left a carrot for the Easter Bunny.  I didn’t believe in him either, naturally, but he was more fun to semi-believe in than you because the thought of him didn’t creep me out.  The thing is, even as a child I felt like there was something a little funny about some guy sneaking in through people’s chimneys and leaving things for the children.  Plus we didn’t have a chimney so it would have been problematic if you had tried to come.

I think I might have written a letter to you once when I was little, because it was something to write.  I used to write letters to my mother, too, and address them to “Mom’s Room, The Hall, Our House”.  I have no idea what I said in that letter years ago, but it was when I was still into Christmas so I probably said something cheerful and festive.  Then I probably threw it away because I knew you didn’t exist and you weren’t going to read it anyway.  I wasted a lot of paper when I was little.

For a few years my family didn’t celebrate Christmas at all.  My sister and I had gone strictly pagan and anti-consumerist by then so the holiday didn’t hold a lot of appeal.  I missed it, though, because even if it held no religious meaning to me and it had been far too commercialized Christmas was still a part of my childhood.  I still got in the mood for it when the snow started falling, and I secretly looked forward to getting together with the extended family on Christmas at my grandmothers.  The nice old lady from down the road had died by then, and we no longer stayed over there late with the adults playing Canasta and the kids playing some board game or Uno or watching E.T., but it was still  a reminder of all those things.  I wished that we had still gotten up early in the morning to open presents at home.  I wished – although this, like the nice old lady and the later nights, was already gone – that my sisters and I had been taking turns each day opening up the doors on one of those paper Christmas calendar things (we used the same one every year, and always had fun trying to remember what each door was before we opened it).

Last year I decided that I wanted to celebrate Christmas again.  My sister still didn’t and my older sister was long moved away so it was just my mom and I.  It was nice, but it was too late to bring me quite to my childhood.  We didn’t get up early because I couldn’t summon quite the enthusiasm for that (at that time I was used to sleeping until noon or later) and there was no going over to my grandmother’s afterward because she had died the October before – my grandfather was still alive but he was never into the holidays and there was no big family get together.  All of those changes weren’t because I skipped a few years of true Christmas celebration, but it was nevertheless a bit of a letdown to do it again for sentimental reasons and then have it not be all that sentimental.

Right now I’m listening to music that reminds me of Christmas music, but it isn’t Christmas music.  I change the station when a Christmas song comes on the radio because it annoys me that they play them so early – it’s not even December yet.  My mom and I will be celebrating Christmas again this year but I guess I’ve gotten old enough that I’m doing it for my mom rather than the other way around.  There will be a family get-together but I don’t intend to go to it for a number of reasons that are not in keeping with the Christmas spirit.  Have I gone a little Grinchy?  Perhaps.  Christmas just doesn’t mean anything to me anymore; there’s no pleasant sentimental feeling, just a melancholy feeling because that pleasant sentimental feeling has been lost.

Do you want to hear about this, Santa?  Christmas is your holiday so maybe, if you existed to begin with, you could give it back to me.  You could fix my family troubles and fix me.  Who knows, maybe you could fix the whole world.  I know you’re Santa Claus, not God, but since I don’t believe in either of you it doesn’t make much of a difference.

If you existed you’d be a kindly older man who cares about the problems of children.  It stands to reason that if you cared about me as a child you’d still care about me now, so you probably would want to hear all of this.  You probably wouldn’t be able to do anything though, so it’s just as well that I don’t believe in you so I can’t be angry with you for not giving me what I want for Christmas.  But you know what I’ve come to realize?  The nice thing about the proximity of Christmas to New Years is that those of us who don’t believe in Santa, especially those who don’t even believe in Christmas anymore, can disguise what we want from Santa as a wish for the New Year.

In the New Year, I want love.  I want to write more, and to sell more stories to magazines.  I want to form a band.  I want to do great at college, and get a raise at work.  I want to laugh more and only cry when it feels good.  I want all of my awkward, broken, confusing interpersonal relationships to be resolved.  I want to be at peace with all the thoughts that torment me.  I want my life to pull together and I want to do something for sentimental reasons and not have it feel so flat.

That’s what I want in the New Year, Santa.

Sincerely,
A Rational Child