The holidays are upon us. We celebrate Yule and Christmas in our family and enjoy many fun traditions such as burning the Holly King and hanging stockings by the hearth (well, we hang them across from the hearth to prevent fire danger). For me, this time of year means Santa Claus.

“But Zven, you can’t possibly still believe in Santa!” you say.

Well, now that you asked…

Merriam-Webster defines belief as “feeling sure that someone or something exists or is true or trustworthy.”

I have a clear memory of my ninth-grade remedial English teacher assigning a project on the loss of innocence. Specifically, we were to write about the moment we stopped believing in Santa Claus.

The assignment ruffled my feathers in a way I still carry with me, decades later. Write a story about when I learned Santa Claus does not exist. At the time, I recall making up some weird science fiction story for the assignment, as is on brand. Now, as an adult author, I intend to do the opposite of that ninth-grade assignment. I will tell you why I believe in Santa Claus.

Imagine yourself at six or seven years old. It is a clear, crystalline cold Christmas Eve under a full or near-full moon. You sit in a car with upholstery stinking faintly of cheese. As the car heads down the dirt road for home, you have a sweeping view over the forest of Big Basin Valley. Trees as black as construction paper cut-outs, the sky a misty deep blue. And then a long string of shadows passes over the moon.

“Mom look!”

Mom stops the car and leans down to get a better view. Unmistakable, iconic, a sleigh pulled by a team of eight reindeer crosses the moon and angles for Bonny Doon on the opposite ridge top. You both watch for ten, twenty seconds until the image disappears. Two lanterns hang on the back of the sleigh, one red, one gold. And then they vanish.

“Holy shit,” says Mom.

Today, I figure we must have seen a transparent banner pulled behind a small plane. But in that moment, my mom and I saw Santa. In that moment, he was real. And it is a moment I carry with me.

Fast forward to that ninth-grade class assignment. Write about finding out Santa isn’t real. I imagine the teacher wanted us to explore the potential disappointment when the magic vanished. When we thematically said goodbye to childhood and entered some darker, grimmer life stage. When we gave up something we could never get back. But I couldn’t do it, because I still believed.

Which brings me to that belief. I feel sure that Santa Claus exists, but what does that mean? Do I believe a jolly old man lives in a magical workshop in the North Pole surrounded by tiny toy-making creatures and flies in a sleigh pulled by reindeer to singlehandedly deliver toys all around the globe in a single blurred night of cookies and bells? No. I hold the door open for the fantastical, but I don’t believe that. And I don’t need to, to find my belief in Santa.

Because Santa Claus is more than the conglomerate fable cobbled together from scraps of saints, soda pop ads, and old gods. Santa Claus represents the spirits of generosity, kindness, and even redemption in a way, an invitation to be our best selves. 

Santa Claus lives in every letter my friend Lillian writes back to children as a volunteer Santa for the Post Office. Santa Claus is every delicate nature painting crafted by my friend Nina to bring awareness to deforestation and climate change. He is the gift baskets made by my small neighborhood community for the wilderness firefighters.

Santa Claus is my mom driving home that Christmas Eve. My mom was a Search and Rescue coordinator back then, often volunteering days at a time to crawl through rainy canyons looking for people lost in the woods. We saw something in the sky. Whatever that object was, the spirit of Santa was there.

Santa lives in each act of selflessness and kindness, compassion and generosity. Strip aside the trappings of consumerism we often paint on Santa. Find his roots of charity and love. Look around yourself, or look inward, and I bet you will find him. He is every act of defiance taken against a world pushing us to cruelty.

This holiday season, I encourage you to find Santa Claus, and I invite you to believe, whatever that means to you. It may be a selfless gesture; it may simply be a smile and patience in the face of frustration. Be it big or small, he’s there if you look.

If Santa Claus isn’t part of your culture or practice, the same values still live in you. Santa is just the face I imagine for the intention. Santa is the personification of virtues greater than me, greater than all of us. I didn’t exactly have this vocabulary as a Special Ed ninth grader, but deep down I still knew I chose belief. An abstract belief, sure, but belief all the same.

I heard someone say recently that there was no point in small actions, that they don’t add up, and therefore are meaningless to make a difference in our world. It’s nothing more than a drop in the ocean, they said. Why bother? But as David Mitchell wrote in Cloud Atlas: 

“What is the ocean, if not a multitude of drops?”

Happy Holidays everyone. Cheers to you.

***Zven