On this particular Christmas Eve night, I was snug in my bed with visions of Goldenberg's Peanut Chews dancing in my head, when I was jolted from slumber by the roar of my father's voice, swearing a blue streak.
"@##!*&!," came his voice through the ductwork. I sat straight up. What, I wondered, could be going on? Didn't Dad know that Santa was on his way with all those toys and goodies on his sleigh? Surely Santa wouldn't stop by if he heard such profanity.
I crept down the staircase to discover my father kneeling beside the tree, surrounded by various spokes, screws and sprockets -- parts of the very bicycle I had asked Santa for, three weeks earlier. Dad, you see, had purchased the bike unassembled and sat there, blood dripping from his fingernails, frustrated by the intricacy of the gears. My mother, clad in red PJs, sat on the sofa, anxiously clutching a pillow. I quietly sat down next to her and we spent the remainder of the early hours watching my father stumble his way through the assembly process. Santa, of course, never came, and my parents were forced to tell me The Truth.
By the time most of us are 10 or 11, we learn the bitter truth from our older brothers and sisters, from the kids on the playground, and, as in my case, from parents who slip up. Rarely do the adults willingly tell us The Truth.
Here at CL, we thought we'd check in with some other local folks to see how they learned The Truth. Happy Holidays, and here we go.
City Councilman Patrick Cannon, an only child, didn't have the older-sibling early warning system, so he made it to the wise age of 11 before his friend Eric Potts clued him in. The boys were at Potts' house, and Cannon was sharing his confidence that Santa was going to bring him the brand-new TRX racetrack set he wanted.
"(Potts) looked at me like, "Look, don't you know your mom's gonna buy you that set? There's no Santa Claus,'" Cannon recalls. "I looked back at him and said, "What are you talking about?'"
He then went to his mother, and asked if Santa was real. "She looked at me like she didn't want to tell me. She chose not to respond, which led me to assume what the real deal was."
Happily, Cannon's newly acquired knowledge didn't stand between him and the brand-new TRX racetrack set. It arrived Christmas morning, under the tree, erasing all unease about the whole Santa thing.
"I was OK," Cannon says with a laugh. "My focus was on getting that TRX set. I didn't care who brought it. It could have been my mom, Santa, an elf -- Rudolph could have brought it -- it didn't matter."
Cannon's now the proud dad of a one-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter, who's just starting to buy into the Santa Claus deal. Cannon says they'll take part in the festivities of the season, including a trip to McAdenville to see the lights, but they might not visit Santa at the mall.
"We try not to get too involved in the commercialism of Christmas," he says.
Harriet Sanford, president of the Arts and Science Council, says her twin brother began planting the seeds of doubt right after they entered second grade.
"We spent the days after that Thanksgiving looking for the gifts he said my parents had purchased. We never found anything."
The following year, however, the two received as their main Christmas gift an encyclopedia set of the Books of the Bible.
"I decided that only my parents and not Santa would do this to a young child," Sanford remembers.
Every year from then on, until about the eighth grade, Sanford and her brother roamed the house prior to Christmas looking for gifts they knew their parents had bought. Armed with The Truth, they were able to find most of those gifts.
"Of course, having that experience," Sanford says now, "I have taken great pains to hide my daughter's gifts -- and can only hope she doesn't read this article. . . .So that is what I remember. I wish I'd never found out. . .I miss Santa!"
Bob Inman, novelist and former WBTV anchor, says he still believes in Santa, but his concept has changed. Back in the day, however, he firmly believed in the Fat Guy who filled his family's stockings with small candies, nuts, apples and tangerines. Larger gifts -- like his Daisy Red Ryder BB Gun -- were under the tree as gifts from his parents. He thinks he was 10 or 11 when he was rummaging around the kitchen cabinets a week after Christmas, and found some half-empty bags of walnuts and candy -- the same treats "Santa" had left in his stocking. Heavy-hearted, Inman approached his mother. It went something like this, he says:
Inman: "Santa Claus is not what I thought, is he?"
Mother: "No, Santa Claus is not what you thought, but he's very real."
Inman (after a pause): "Then the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are not what I thought either?"
Mother: "No, but they're very real, too."
Because Inman had three younger brothers and a younger sister, he kept his lip zipped. He says he still has a soft spot in his heart for fat guys in red suits at Christmas time.
Now that he's a grandfather, Inman plays Santa whenever he can, doing his best to make his toddler granddaughter smile.
"You know, you see those kids [at the mall, waiting for Santa] with all their wide-eyed innocence -- that's really special," he says. "Anyone who's nice to a kid is Santa Claus, any time of the year. Maybe I believe even more in Santa [now] than I did when I was 10 or 11."
WCNC-TV anchor Sterlin Benson Webber was the youngest of four kids; her siblings never spoiled the magic for her.
"I thought he was the coolest guy -- so wonderful," she says of Santa. She remembers her mother using the Santa Card as a disciplinary tool, starting each autumn: "If you're not good, I'm going to tell Santa."
But a classmate brought the rude awakening, and Benson Webber felt totally let down.
"My bubble was burst," she admits. For the next two years, she didn't want her parents to know that she knew The Truth, so she continued to leave cookies and milk for the big guy on Christmas Eve. They never did discuss The Truth, she adds, "but I never talked about it in the same wonderment again."
Now the mother of five-year-old Symphony, who gets "totally excited" by the idea of Santa Claus, Benson Webber says she's playing the Santa Card whenever Symphony misbehaves. She or her husband will dial the phone and pretend to call Santa. She worries, however, that it won't be long before Symphony starts asking some tough questions.
"Already she told me last year that Santa brought her Barbie Jeep, but a friend got hers at the SouthPark Mall. . .We're trying to milk it for as long as we can. We want her to believe long enough to have fun."
Mike Collins, host of "Charlotte Talks" on WFAE-FM, says he held fast to the Santa myth even in second grade when someone on the playground told him The Truth.
"I dismissed it as poppycock," Collins says. "But then when I heard the same thing again in third grade, I chose to believe it." He went and asked his parents, who confirmed the rumor.
"They didn't outright deny it," Collins says. "But they were more evasive than in previous years." For the sake of his little brothers -- one four years younger, the other 10 years younger -- Collins didn't let on.
These days, Santa is a very real guest on Collins' radio show. For the past few years, Santa has come to the studio and taken calls from kids, most of whom are five or six years old, with a handful of nine-year-olds who still believe.
Santa regularly impresses and confounds the kids who call by knowing their age and other details about them (methinks Santa has an in with the show's producer). "The kids will gasp and say, "Santa, how did you know?'" Collins explains.
He says the older kids truly sound like they still believe, but you can never be too sure. "It always scares me to death that they're going to blow the whistle on the air," he laughs. "I keep my hand on the "off' button just in case they start to say, "Aw, I don't b------.'"
County commissioner-elect Dan Ramirez grew up in a poor neighborhood in Bogota, Colombia, some 50 years ago -- when Santa Claus was an unknown. (He now is a staple in Latin American countries, Ramirez says.) Instead, it was the Baby Jesus who brought gifts to the children.
Ramirez was the youngest of five children of parents who didn't have much money for toys. One year, when he was seven or eight, Ramirez had done particularly well in school and therefore was hoping that Baby Jesus would bring him the cowboy hat-and-toy gun set he wanted.
"My mother couldn't buy it," Ramirez remembers. "She sat me down and had to tell me that there was no Baby Jesus who brought gifts."
At first, he cried. "I was very distressed. I said, "Baby Jesus doesn't like me.' I'm sure it broke my mother's heart."
When he thought about it longer, though, he says he understood his parents' situation and got over his disappointment. His mother made him promise he wouldn't tell his friends.
Ramirez moved to the US 32 years ago, right after the birth of the first of his three daughters, who soon were swept up in Santa fever. He thinks his first daughter learned the truth at age 10 or 11; the second, "a bit earlier," and the third, "a lot earlier."
Thinking back on the day when he learned The Truth, Ramirez says that his story might sound sad, but it really wasn't. "Children are very resilient. I didn't think about it anymore -- there are still so many other rewards in life."