The Truth About Santa

Nonfiction by Abigail Allen

I had to have been three years old, because my brother, Thomas, hadn’t been born yet. It was a warm Christmas Eve night in North Carolina, and my mother had made lasagna. I’m sure it was a delicious lasagna – it’s one of my favorite meals now – but I was convinced I despised it. Honestly, I hadn’t even tasted it. Instead, I alternated between staring at the bare white walls of our apartment and watching my father feed my baby brother, Andrew.

I was an interesting child, to say the least. While other children played with Barbies and cars, I picked dried worms off of the sidewalks, taped them to paper and wrote science reports about them. When the older neighborhood children pulled pranks on me, I enjoyed annoying them by figuring it out before it happened and not falling for it. Instead of playing on the neighborhood’s playground, I was catching fireflies and – I’m not proud of this part – creating bioluminescent art by pulling off their bottoms and painting with their guts.

I don’t know how my obsession with truth started, but maybe it was with a song. My mother had a CD of children’s music that we often listened to, and two of the songs rooted themselves deeply in my psyche. The lyrics of the song “Never Tell a Lie” terrified me as I imagined the situation happening to me:

“You'll get caught and then you'll start to cry, You'll have a horrid painful pounding in your head, and you will feel your face get hot and turn bright red, then your heart will start to thump, in your throat you'll get a lump, and you'll feel so bad you'll wish that you could lie right down and die”

My overactive imagination had no problem showing me exactly how this would go down. Another song, “When You Tell One Lie” added even more:

“And each lie you tell will keep multiplying 'Till the whole wide world will know you're lying Then you'll be Suspected Detected Rejected Neglected Disliked And you should!”

Mom told me that if I did not eat at least one bite of my lasagna, Santa would not bring me presents the next morning. I, knowing that Santa was all-knowing, thought long and hard about this while pushing my food around my plate. To my surprise, when my mom returned to the table, she congratulated me for having taken ‘one bite of food’ and she assured me that Santa would bring me presents the next morning. I don’t know why this happened; at the time, I thought she must have just mistaken my messy plate for a plate missing a bite. Now, I wonder if she knew I hadn’t taken a bite but had given up and just wanted me in bed as soon as possible.

Regardless of what her reason was, I remained silent. My obsession with truth put me in an awkward position. I could not lie and tell my mom that I had eaten a bite of the lasagna, but I would not deny that I had either. I weighed in my tiny heart whether or not tomorrow’s presents would be worth not having to take a bite and decided that yes. I would forgo presents to avoid eating a tablespoon’s worth of lasagna.

Thus began, I believe, an unfortunate habit that I still occasionally struggle to break. While I do not actively lie, I omit the truth or simply remain silent. After all, if truth is the absence of falsehood, then not saying anything is still true. At least, that’s what I decided. I can tell the truth and imply something untruthful while not actually going so far as to lie.

Perhaps this in and of itself is a lie, but it’s also the truth. I guess it just goes to show that you have to be careful with the conclusions that you draw.

In order for something to be truth, doesn’t it have to be completely true? Now, I consider something different –something can be true and yet not be entirely true, that is to say, not every aspect of it is true and yet on the whole is true.

It was with a heavy heart the morning after not eating my lasagna that I followed my brother to the Christmas tree. Above all else, I was afraid my parents would soon know the truth – that I had not eaten even a bite of it. It was clear to me that they would be able to figure it out based on the lack of presents addressed to me.

To my great astonishment, there were indeed presents for me from Santa. I was filled with skeptical dread. Clearly, something about this was false. Either Santa didn’t care about disobedience like people said, or he was not really all knowing as I had been told. Looking back, I think it was the most somber Christmas I have ever experienced. I spent a great deal of the day thinking about it, and I eventually came to one conclusion. Santa could not be real. It just didn’t add up.

Sometimes I wish I could be a fly on the wall to see from an outside perspective just how that Christmas day went down. How much of my inner thoughts could be seen on my face? I think I didn’t say anything to my parents about it, although I can’t be sure. I was a pretty quiet, introspective child so it would have gone against my nature. I would like to know if my parents noticed how I was acting though. Going back to truth- knowing is subjective. What one person knows to be true, another might know to be false. What God knows we cannot know. We know our knowledge; knowledge is things that have been learned. We know what we have learned to be true, and if we have not learned it, we cannot know it.

Perhaps the issues that I have with truth stem from years of not understanding that there are different ways to learn something. For example, a child might hear their parents say the sky is blue, so they learned it from them, and they know it is true that the sky is blue. Someone else might read a book about the sky and learn from the book and know that it is true that the sky is blue. In both cases the knowledge of truth is the same, but the manner of learning the knowledge was the difference.

It almost seems to confuse me all the more. If there is more than one way to get to the truth, is there any one right way to get there? If there isn’t one right way, there are endless possibilities to learn, but each might yield slightly different results on what is truth. Yet, if all those ways to knowledge are valid, then shouldn’t all the answers be valid? At the same time, they can’t be, because two things that contradict each other can’t both be true. However, as I said before, something can be true but also not entirely true. Which means that two contradicting things could both be true.

In some instances, there is only one path to learning to gain a particular piece of knowledge. For example, someone might know that the Bible is the word of God because they have prayed and received a witness from the spirit. They learned and now know that the Bible is truly of God. However, someone who is unaccustomed to this form of learning cannot know that the Bible is from God, and because they cannot know, they assume that no one else can know either. This person could say that such a claim is not true, while someone else could say that it is true. Because one doesn’t have access to that form of learning, it would become an impossible conundrum.

If you learn something by reading, the book may be false. If you learn by seeing, your eyes may be faulty, or you may not understand what you see. If you learn by doing, you could make a mistake and not realize the result is not actually the truth.

When I was about ten, my best friend still believed in Santa Claus. One day, probably in late October or early November, we were playing with a group of kids when it came to light that she still believed in Santa. The other children were mocking, but also insistent that she accept Santa Claus was a myth. I saw in her eyes the hurt that she felt hearing this, and I was stuck in an awkward position. At the time, I considered discovering the truth about Santa to be one of my most formative memories, but I also loved my friend and did not want her to be sad. Through all of my inner turmoil, I came up with a new philosophy. I did my best to explain that Santa was indeed real, because he was real to her. I decided that truth and reality were relative. Years later, I learned about how this very philosophy is used by some to discount the truth of the gospel, and I began to doubt the epiphany I had had about Santa. If people use it to discredit the truth, it can’t be a thought worthy of pondering, can it?

Looking back now, I see an internal struggle to know what truth is and if it is true at all. What is reality, in the end, if not what we see and feel and know, each individually for ourselves?

Throughout the year following a fateful lasagna dinner, I developed a hypothesis – that my parents were the ones that put out the presents. The following Christmas, my cousins, my brother Andrew, and I were sleeping in the same bedroom. I had told them Santa wasn’t real, but they didn’t believe me because of the presents magically appearing overnight. I was determined to see if my hypothesis was correct. To discover the truth.

This past Christmas, Andrew told me about his own perspective on this event. He was doubtful of what I said, but when, later that night, I proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt, his tiny three-year-old heart shattered.

My plan was incredibly simple, stay up until midnight and then sneak out to see who was putting out the presents under our flimsy tree. I did just that. I’m sure you know who was busy under the tree that night. I’ll give you a hint.

It wasn’t Santa.

Countless times over the ages, people have thought they know something only for it to be found false later. If you know something to be true, but then it is proved false later on, it was never true. At the same time, it was true for you for a period. More than that, if we look in the opposite direction – to the future, not the past – we can’t be sure about anything we currently know because it might not be true, and we just don’t know that yet.

When I was six, Santa Claus appeared at our church Christmas party. Of course, I knew the truth- he wasn’t real. However, I was suddenly confronted by the possibility that I was wrong. I spent a long time that night staring at Santa, sneaking around after him to see what happened when he removed his Santa Claus coat. I ultimately figured out which church member he really was. Every Sunday for almost an entire year, I would approach him and accuse him of being Santa and lying about it. He probably secretly hated me by the end of the year. Although my memory on this isn’t the best, I remember him having an increasingly peeved face each week. Perhaps I’m the reason he wasn’t Santa the next year.

For a while, I considered discovering the truth about Santa to be one of the most formative aspects of myself. It represented a realization of a falsehood, and a fruitful search for truth. When I was around seven or eight, I thought it was important that my peers also be rid of the delusion of Santa Claus. Everyone should know what truth is and what is not. I was under the impression that they would want to know, but I was wrong. It was confusing for me. Why weren’t they happy to learn the truth? Why didn’t they want to know when they were being lied to? Since then, I’ve learned that not wanting to know the truth is not unique to children or Santa.

The questions remain. What is truth? I am always searching to know the truth on any one thing. But with it comes simply more questions. Now-a-days, I ponder less on what truth really is, unlike my younger self, and more on why not everyone wants to know the truth. Some actively seek to avoid it, it seems, while others simply deny it when faced with it. Is it any wonder that there are so many different opinions on the matter? Perhaps simply searching for truth is what really matters, not whether or not what we find is actually true.

In fact, in all aspects of our lives we can only hope that what we know is true. In the meantime, we simply have to continue believing what we currently know to be true. There is no other way to be in this world than assuming what we know to be true is true. Perhaps that’s all that really matters.

The real truth is seeking truth, and as long as we are searching for truth, we’ll be okay. After all, we can test the truth we know time and time again, going round in circles forever, since until we know the truth of everything, we can't be sure that we know the truth of anything at all.