It's Christmas Time Again!

Christmas always brings memories of my early childhood. The memories are filled with the expectations that if I am a “good little girl,” I will get that red bicycle on training wheels as well as the doll that I always wanted. I use to believe that when I awaken and dashed out of my bed they would be sitting under our cedar tree that was decorated with homemade ornaments. However, Christmas after Christmas left me disappointed again.

As a young and impressionable child, I accepted and believed in Santa Claus, thinking he was a jolly old fat white man with long white hair and a grey beard. He would be dressed in a red suit and wearing black boots. Just like the picture I saw of him in the store windows and Christmas catalogs.

I imagined that every year on Christmas Eve, Santa Claus would travel all the way from the North Pole in a sled pulled by eight reindeer and guided by Rudolph with his red nose shining so bright to deliver toys to “good little girls and boys” as they slept in their beds.

I truly believed that Santa Clause would park his sled, filled with toys and nine reindeer, on top of my grandmother’s shabby, leaking roof, and shimmy down a tiny chimney, in order to carry my bike and doll, without getting stuck or his suit and beard covered with soot nor burned by the fire in the hearth.

On Christmas morning, I could always depend on receiving three gifts that were never on my wish list: a pair of brown and white Buster Brown shoes that had to last me until the next Christmas; a new dress; and a little white doll that looked nothing like me.

As usual, wearing my new dress and shoes, my grandmother would safely walk me across the road to visit the home of a little girl who looked nothing like me, either. She would wait and watch me until I ran up the hill and into the girl’s house. In her home, there were bowls filled with apples, oranges, nuts, and candies. The aroma of baked pies and beautifully iced cakes of different flavors emanated from the kitchen. Under and around the meticulously decorated Christmas tree set all of the girl’s toys and gifts. Some of the colorfully wrapped boxes were still waiting to be opened. I was sure Santa Claus did not like me because I was “Colored,” as much as he liked her because she was “white.”

One Christmas morning, while the little girl and I were sitting on her living room floor, combing our dolls' hair, I dared to ask her why Santa Clause brings her more toys than me. She said: “Stupid, there isn’t a real Santa Clause. I get more toys than you because my mama and daddy are rich. They buy me what I want for Christmas. Your Grandmother can’t because she is very poor.”

If I had known that Santa Claus was a myth, I would not have felt that I wasn’t important or “good enough” for a mythical character. If my grandmother had told me the truth, that she could not afford to buy me that red bicycle, or that large walking doll, or if I had known that my dress, shoes, and doll were typical of what most “colored” children, and even many white children, received, I would not have hated a man who did not exist.

Finally, around the age of nine, I got the courage to confess to my stern grandmother that I no longer believed in Santa Claus. She was surprisingly ecstatic. Now, she only had to buy me a pair of shoes and a dress, absent a new doll. After my confession, Grandmother told me the story of her saddest Christmas.

When Grandmother was a little girl, her mother promised her a store-bought doll for Christmas. On Christmas morning, Grandmother jumped out of bed and searched the small chilly cabin for her doll. All she could find was an orange, apple, and a peppermint candy cane in her handmade Christmas stocking that hung above the hearth.

Feeling very disappointed, she asked her mother why Santa Claus didn’t bring the doll that she was promised. Instead of telling her young daughter the truth, which was that Santa Claus was a myth or that she had planned to buy her the doll but had to use the money to buy some thread and needles to patch much-needed quilts. Instead, she lied. She told my grandmother that her doll must have fallen off Santa’s sled and was lost while he was on his way to their house.

Trusting her mother and disregarding the fact that she could have been attacked or eaten by wolves or a black bear, my grandmother got dressed in her raggedy coat and shoes and went out into the snowy freezing weather to search for her doll.

Believing that she had seen sled tracks and reindeer hoofs in the snow, Grandmother followed the phantom vision down the snow-covered path and onto the bank of the frozen pond, before finally losing all hope of ever finding a white doll lost by a man that never existed.