Santa Claus and Other Innocent Lies My Parents Told Me

            It’s interesting how humans create myths in order to justify the status quo.

            When I was a child, I believed in Santa Claus until an embarrassingly old age. My parents would do the whole bit. Buy the tree; make the gingerbread house and cookies. Get up in the middle of the night, put presents under the tree, take a bite out of the cookies and then go back to sleep.

            My sister and I would always be astonished the next day. Santa got us exactly what we wanted!

            It wasn’t until I was about 9 or 10 that my faith in Santa waivered. We went to go visit my mother’s family, which is the Black side of my family. As I was playing with my cousins they revealed that they did not believe in Santa Claus. ”We hate Santa,” they shouted, “because he doesn’t care about us with his ashy bones.”

            Needless to say I was shocked by their irreverence, so I went to ask my parents. Santa was surely real. He left us notes; he took a bite out of the cookies we left him. My mother stuttered when I asked. “They move around a lot, so Santa can’t always find them.” The truth is my cousins were poor. And there is no Santa. Santa was simply an attendant fantasy afforded to me by my parents’ socioeconomic status. A status that was furnished upon my family because of my father’s racial heritage as a high caste Hindu immigrant from a long line of professors. My parents didn’t see fit to explain such things to children. But even then, I could feel both the race and class differences between how my sister and I were raised and the reality my cousins had to live in. These were the same cousins who often teased me for “talking like a white girl,” and the Black side of my family always lived way more modestly than my father’s family.

            James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time that racial inequality in America was a crime of innocence. He wrote of his white compatriots that, “they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” (Baldwin, 5). I have come to realize that innocence is a luxury there for those who can afford it symbolically and materially.

            I think about that a lot this yuletide as I try to demystify my life’s narrative and move from innocence to guilt to something greater. A part of me mourns the sense of magic that my parents were able to create for me as a child. I now realize that that magic was based on a lie. My journey now is to seek truth. Part of that truth is that the world is actually very cruel. But I still believe in the magic behind the myth. And even though this winter is a bitingly cold one, I am still optimistic that the universe will eventually make that magic apparent to me.