← Columns

Elementary, My Dear Santa

The Source

Back when I was teaching in the public school and the Christmas season rolled around I was happy that I taught seventh-graders. High school students secretly pretend they’re too cool for the Santa season while all the time regretting that they’re no longer children in this holiday made for the young ones. Kids in the beginning grades of school are simply too spastic to carry on an intelligent conversation about their Christmas hopes and memories. Stand before a first grade class and ask them about the best Christmas present they ever got and you’ll get answers like, “My Uncle died last year so I couldn’t get the new dog but Grandma made cookies anyway,” and “How come you got that red thing in your pocket?” Linear thinking doesn’t develop until about age 27. But seventh-graders are a special breed. . . part child, part adolescent, playing at adulthood, testing the waters of responsibility then drawing back when the onus becomes too great, their mouths running about two miles ahead of their brains, both fearful and excited about this idea of growing up. To quote Plato, “A young person tries on one mask after another until he finds one that fits.” The rare middle school student will get enough courage to completely take off the mask, but these kids are one in a thousand. Seventh-graders always reminded me of those signs you used to see before crossing the California deserts, “Last chance for gas for the next 300 miles.” Sometimes I felt that teaching adolescents was the last chance to make a lasting difference in a child’s life. So as Christmas neared we’d begin each class period with a question about the season, hoping to dovetail the discussion into the topic of the day. It was always my plan to be fifteen minutes into the classwork before they knew they were in school. One question that never failed to get a high percentage of responses was, “What does your family do at Christmas that’s special. . . something that maybe most families don’t do?” I’d always lead off the discussion by telling how at my family’s Christmas dinner we boy cousins would manage to rearrange Aunt Alberta’s four candles spelling out N-O-E-L to instead spell L-E-O-N. Their answers were usually entertaining and occasionally unprintable. It would always sadden me a bit to learn that alcohol played such a large part in many family gatherings so I always tried to steer the conversation to less libelous and booze-filled memories. One large family in our community had a tradition of hiding the baby Jesus from the crèche on Christmas morning. Whichever child found Jesus could be the first to open his or her presents. The students would always be surprised to find that nearly every family had a mother or grandmother who’d have to be reminded to open her own presents, the lady being to intent on watching the joy on the faces of the others assembled. By the time I retired from Triopia very few families made an annual trek to a tree farm to chop down their own evergreen, but one lad from Chapin said that his family had stopped the tradition just the year before. He told us, “When the snake crawled out of the tree and onto the living room carpet Mom said we were buying a fake tree from then on.” Geesh, Mom. . . where’s your Christmas spirit? Several students channeled the spirit of comedian Chevy Chase as they told crushing tales of falling Christmas trees. A girl from Arenzville told us, “Our tree falls over every year. Dad’s real bad at that.” A few of our local Lutherans admitted that when they were younger they’d spend many angst-filled minutes going to 11 p.m. Christmas Eve services, fearful that Santa would show up while they were gone, find no one at home and pass up their house. Living in Arenzville I know how to answer this fear: “Everybody knows that Santa Claus is a Lutheran and he’d never do such a thing.” But the really poignant thing about quizzing Jr. High kids about Christmas was a certain sadness that would inevitably work its way into their conversations. They were at the age when the totally flipped-out joy of Santa and Christmas was giving way to a more mature and reflective consideration of the season. They wished they were young again. They missed the magic. And so we grow up. May you and yours recapture that magic this season. Rearrange the candles, tip the tree over, go on a hunt for the baby.