Finding Santa Claus
It was late Christmas Eve 1964 in Long Beach, California; coastal moisture bordering on fog hung gently on the night. In one room of a small apartment, located off an alley, over a garage and sitting neatly behind a Flying-A gas station, a single light burned. A commercial artist named Lom and his girlfriend Pat sat wrapping gifts in colored tissue paper, preparing for the following morning to be shared with Pat's 2 young sons. One of those sons, Paul, 6, was fast asleep on a bed in a makeshift bedroom, actually a closed-in porch. The other son, Bruce (yes, that would be me), 9, had been allowed to remain awake and assist in the wrapping; his gifts of course hidden from view.
Bruce was very happy to be staying up like this. Curiosity burned ferociously inside him and he was keenly paying attention on this night: is there really a Santa Claus, and is he going to show up?
It was a rare, precious moment for Bruce, getting to hang with these odd artists in this wonderful, weird place that he desperately wanted to call home. He and his brother officially lived with their dad and (extremely evil) stepmother in a nightmarishly boring tract home in Palm Desert, California, and was being allowed this visit with his mom for part of the Christmas holiday.
Bruce would later find out that his mom had been scheming to have he and his brother live in this place with her and her not-husband (kind of a scandalous deal in those days) and share this tiny apartment. But the night after next when his dad and stepmother would come to pick them up, they would veto the idea of Bruce and Paul living there on 2 counts: Lom and Pat were not married, and this weird apartment over the garage behind the gas station hardly constituted a "home."
But that disappointment was yet to come. Tonight Bruce was full-on focused on the beautiful mystery of Christmas Eve, being in charge of scissors and tape and different colors of tissue paper and tags (cut from Lom's own stash of colored construction paper from his work). And as the minutes and hours ticked by, Bruce was watching, and waiting, to discover the truth about that mysterious red-clad bearded provider of all things Yule.
It happened at roughly 1:30 in the morning: without being tipped off by either Lom or Pat, Bruce very quietly realized that, indeed, there was no Santa Claus. At least, there was no big jolly fat guy that came down the chimney (or otherwise gained entry) on Christmas Eve while everyone was sleeping. In that respect, Bruce had made one of his first steps into the real world, into adulthood. There would be many more to come.
But very interestingly it was not a disappointment. It would not be something he would, the next day, disclose to his younger brother to explode his childhood illusions.
In fact, this realization had quite the opposite effect.
Bruce realized that Santa did indeed exist. Saint Nick was very definitely real—in the brilliant love that all parents demonstrated on nights like this, patiently wrapping the gifts that (in our case anyway) they could scarcely have afforded. And on Christmas morning, the hard evidence of Santa's existence would be there for all to see, brightly wrapped under a Christmas tree, that, no matter its stature, was a thing of magic itself to the children surrounding it.
I never forgot it. Yes, folks, there is a Santa Claus. And through the love we show children, he visits each and every Christmas Eve—and will return year after year.