Why did you lie to me?

         My parents lied to me. They lied to me for over eight years. Year after year, they stretched this one haunting lie to all of my siblings and I.  And do you know why? Because they were lied to as children too, with the same horrific lie. That lie, was that a fat man dressed in red from the polar ice cap would crawl down my chimney every year on the same day, December 25^th, and leave boxes wrapped in color under a tree that, for some reason, we brought into our house.

My parents never told me that Santa wasn’t real. I had for find out the sad truth about Christmas all on my own. I always found it a bit suspicious, a fat man going down a tiny little chimney. Which are usually made of bricks, and bricks usually aren’t very stretchy. And the other fact that we didn’t have a chimney for Santa to go down. But once the movie Santa Clause came out, I found that he was magic, and could stretch and build a chimney out of thin air. So, obviously, I figured he was magical and could make a chimney and fireplace out of my plain o’ boring wall with our stockings hung up with care.

Now, let’s talk about the cookies. I always found it odd that there, in the cookie jar, were almost all the cookies we had set out for Santa the night before. I didn’t think much of it, but something about it always irked me. And there was another thing: the carrots. We were no ordinary family. We didn’t just set out cookies for Santa, but we set out carrots for his reindeer. But here’s the catch: they were only nibbled on, not eaten. If Santa has twelve reindeer, how could there be any carrot left over? Maybe they just didn’t like carrots. But maybe, just maybe, there were no reindeer at all, and it was all a hoax.

Santa’s handwriting was a bit odd, funny actually. It looked exactly like my mom’s! One year, my parents got really creative and had the neighbor write our names on the tags, to throw me off their scent. But alas, I was too good, and knew by then that Santa was a fake. Realizing that every year, Santa had the handwriting of my mother was a dead give away.

I had known that the Easter Bunny was a fake, I knew the Tooth Fairy was full of it, and I always knew that there was no “Sandman” or anything. But Santa, Santa was a different story. I so desperately wanted to believe that he was real, so I let myself believe for a couple more years. I would go to sleep Christmas Eve after making my cookie tree, excited and nervous (I mean, a huge old guy was coming into my house, what do you expect?). Until the one day, when my parents came up to me. That dreaded, cold winter day.

They told me that they were Santa. That my mom was the one who made the pajamas that Mrs. Clause suposably made, that they were the ones who gave us the presents, and that they never really sent our letter. I acted heart broken. Asked them how they did it. But about a year later, I told them I had already known. They weren’t that surprised. But you could imagine how surprised I was to find out I wasn’t the great actor I thought I was.

Now, I help wrap the presents. On Christmas Eve, I sit in my parent’s room with a big box between the presents and I. My mom will hand me a box with a present inside, and I wrap the box in the right paper and hand it back to my mom. I do this every year without fail, and I do it for hours. It’s scaring, really.