Wonder Lost, Wonder Found

It was the year I lost the wonder of Christmas.

I grew up in a rather typical American suburb in the 1950s. Our neighborhood was packed with kids like me: fathers who served in World War II, sizable families, middle class, and all the other hallmarks of the post-war Baby Boom generation. 

Schools were maxed out for space. It wasn’t unusual for teachers to have 40 kids in a class and double-wide trailers (“temporary classrooms”) to be occupying space on the playground. Public school started with first grade; I’d attended kindergarten at our Lutheran church.

My first-grade teacher was Miss Balcer. She was young, rather diminutive in stature, and very much committed to modern principles of education. She was strict, but the class loved her. You could always tell which teachers truly liked children and liked their jobs. And parents seemed impressed as well.

No one saw the crisis coming.

In early December, our class and school shifted into Christmas mode. Decorations went up, the school cafeteria added a few Christmas dishes, our families started preparing for the season, and Christmas was on everyone’s mind. Had we been naughty or nice this year? What would Santa leave under the tree on Christmas Day? In the classroom, we were likely a little noisier than usual, 35 or 40 kids all anticipating The Day.

It’s been too long to remember exactly what prompted the crisis. We were too young to write essays; it might have been show-and-tell (Miss Balcer was big on show-and-tell), or a coloring exercise of holiday pictures, or something equally small and trivial. Whatever it was, Miss Balcer responded by stating matter-of-factly that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.

Her statement was met first with the shock of disbelief. She didn’t just say that, did she?

She must have seen the looks on our faces, so the brave teacher repeated it, and then she punched the point home by saying it was our parents who bought all the presents and said it was Santa Claus. In less than a minute, we’d learned that Santa Claus didn’t exist and our parents lied.

She likely knew she had blundered when one little girl burst into tears and the rest of us had shocked looks on our faces. The teacher we loved had, in a few short seconds, destroyed our understanding of Christmas Day.

Decades later, I can see that perhaps what she was doing was trying to re-center our minds about what Christmas should be about. But she left it at “there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.” A room full of six-year-olds felt like all the air had been sucked out of it. 

The rest of the day was spent in silence.

Of course, the story wouldn’t end there. When a bunch of young children are told their most cherished hope for Christmas is basically a lie perpetrated by their parents, you might not be surprised that every child in Miss Balcer’s class went home and asked their parents if this was true.

Hell hath no fury like 35 or 40 mothers scorned.

The principal’s phone started ringing before 4 p.m. And it wasn’t only the mothers of the first-graders. The children told their older brothers and sisters and their friends in the other first-grade class, and the news traveled. Fast. We didn’t use the word “viral” to describe news in those days, but that’s what happened. By 4:40 p.m., the principal knew he had a full-blown school crisis. If he hoped to have tempers calm down overnight, his hope was dispelled when dozens of mothers, including my own, descended upon the school the next day. 

But what was done was done. No one could turn back the clock and have the teacher unsay her words. Our parents couldn’t say she was wrong; what they could and did say was that she had no right to tell children what parents would eventually tell them.

I was crestfallen. What I thought was magic turned out to be something else entirely. Christmas had become, at best, something like a second birthday. 

It was turning into something of a disaster year. In the spring, a stray dog my older brother had brought home had been diagnosed with heartworm and had to be put to sleep. The replacement, a little black dog named Tippy, slipped out of the back yard one Sunday morning while we were at church and was hit by a car. Two dogs lost, and now no Santa Claus.

I likely wasn’t the only six-year-old in my class who now considered Christmas in an entirely different light. The magic – the wonder – was gone.

Two or three days before Christmas, my parents made a sudden change in plans. Instead of spending Christmas at home, we would be driving from New Orleans to my grandmother’s house in Shreveport. If this six-year-old boy had a favorite relative, it was my father’s mother. I loved visiting her, even if she wouldn’t have a Christmas tree (both of my Shreveport aunts took care of Christmas decorating at their houses). My grandmother treated each of her grandchildren as her favorite, but each of us knew we were really the one. 

If there was one thing that would help restore as least some of the magic of Christmas, it was my grandmother.

We arrived on Christmas Eve, and, as expected, she’d been baking – pies, cakes, cookies, and the candy my parents loved – divinity fudge. It was too sweet for me, but she made wonderful pies. And if I got really hungry, I could run across the street to my aunt’s house for “Aunt Rubye’s biscuits.” I’d eat biscuits with butter while listening to Uncle Revis tell the most outlandish stories. Santa Claus might be a myth, but I knew my uncle’s stories were true. 

A little of the magic of Christmas was being restored, thanks to my grandmother, aunt, and uncle.

What I didn’t know until much later was that I was the magic for my grandmothers and my aunts, because I looked exactly like my father, the only boy in the family, looked when he was six. 

I hadn’t asked for anything for Christmas; nothing seemed the same after finding out the true identity of Santa Claus. If Miss Balcer was wrong, then Santa would somehow know. So, I didn’t tell anyone that what I really wanted was a puppy. Going to Shreveport had the downside of me realizing that a puppy simply wouldn’t happen there; we weren’t leaving for a few days and then there would be the 325-mile drive home. 

For Christmas dinner and the opening of presents, we drove to my Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Clinton’s house, about 10 minutes away. Everyone was there – aunts, uncles, our family, and my grandmother. We were all excited to open presents. 

I sat quietly, until my Uncle Clinton said, “What’s that noise I’m hearing?” We all looked around, shaking our heads. I’d heard nothing. My uncle told me to go check the back bedroom to see what the noise was. I went, followed by my father. 

I opened the door, and scooting out between my legs was a fluffy rust-and-white puppy.

Stunned, I raced after him into the living room, where he was introducing himself to everyone present. I went on my knees, and with the first lick of that rough tongue on my face, I knew that Miss Balcer had been dead wrong. No one knew what I wanted, because I hadn’t said anything. Only Santa Claus would have known. 

Only much later did I learn that my father and my uncle had gone to the dog pound on Christmas Eve and picked out a puppy left there. The mother had been a collie and the father a German shepherd. 

The wonder of Christmas had been lost. But after opening that bedroom door and meeting my new puppy, the wonder had been found once again.

The featured image, “ALL shall kneel to worship,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

Glynn Young

Glynn Young wrote his first story when he was 10 – a really bad mystery having something to do with a door behind a grandfather clock and a secret cave. At 14, he discovered Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, but he secretly wanted to write James Bond stories. At 21, he became a Christian, and the verse he was given, Philippians 1:6, became the theme of his life.

He received a B.A. in Journalism from LSU and a Masters in Liberal Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. He spent his professional career in corporate public relations, and mostly executive speechwriting. Since 2011, he’s published five novels in the Dancing Priest series and the nonfiction book Poetry at Work. Since 2009, he’s been an editor for Tweetspeak Poetry, writing a weekly column. He and his wife Janet live in suburban St. Louis.

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