was six years old the Christmas I woke up to hear Santa’s reindeer on our roof. It was just after sunrise, probably six o’clock or so. I could hear footsteps through the ceiling as I lay in bed brimming with excitement. I figured Santa must be out in the living room right now and the reindeer are shuffling their feet waiting for him. Oh, how I wanted to just peek down the hall and see if Santa really looked the way he did in pictures. But I stayed in my bed, everything covered but my impish smile. I didn’t get up until I heard the door open in my parents’ room. Leaping out of bed I ran into the living room. Santa had left. The presents were under the tree and the cookies were gone. My parents were good enough to humor me when I told them that I’d heard Santa on the roof. "We must have been one of his last stops," they said.

For some reason, I was always very selective about what I chose to believe regarding the mythology surrounding Santa Claus. I never believed that the Santas in the malls and at the school Christmas parties or even the Santa at Santa’s Village in New Hampshire were the real Santa. Who were they kidding? Even a 3-year-old can spot a lousy fake beard. Plus, how could Santa be in so many places with so many faces of so many races at the same time? Obviously, these were Santa’s elves. (I didn’t realize that elves were supposedly tiny people.) I told the elves what I wanted and they passed the word along to Santa who was busy at the North Pole.

I never believed that Santa slid down the chimney. I mean really, how could a fat man – or any man for that matter – slide down a chimney without getting stuck. And even if he didn’t get stuck, that’s like a 20-foot drop into the fire. He’d break his leg and burn himself. I was able to accept flying reindeer and sleighs as basic magic, but this was sheer physics working against my better logic. I didn’t have a Big Birdesque bout of worry over the matter. We simply made sure to leave our back door unlocked every Christmas Eve.

Age eight was the year of reckoning for me on the whole Santa Claus issue. I had figured out in first grade that a giant bunny delivering candy was an utterly ridiculous idea. The truth about the Tooth Fairy came in second grade when I woke up to my mom putting a dollar bill under my pillow. But I held onto my belief in Santa Claus right into the Christmas season of third grade. I don’t remember what made me start doubting his existence. I had probably heard older kids making jokes about Santa’s fakeness, or maybe I had started realizing that that kind of magic simply didn’t exist. Whatever the reason, I was confused enough to ask my mom point blank, "Is there really a Santa Claus?" Part of me wonders if she wasn’t quite ready to end the fantasy because she stalled, asking me, "What do you think?" I said I didn’t know. I was vulnerable and perhaps a little embarrassed to be asking the question, but she didn’t lie to me. She simply said, "No." I nodded my head and said, "Okay."

I wasn’t crushed. In fact, I felt like I had been let in on my first grown-up secret. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted the game to end. We had recently gotten a free Christmas coloring book with our large pizza from Pizza Hut and I had wanted to color it and leave it for Santa on Christmas Eve. It was already half colored by the time I had asked my mom to level with me. Part of me wanted to pretend I didn’t know better – the part of me that wasn’t constantly lording my "I-know-something-you-don’t-know-about-Santa-Claus" secret over my younger sister. And truth be told, I couldn’t help but wonder – and actually ask my parents – "Now that I know there’s no Santa Claus, does that mean I don’t get Santa presents anymore?" The worry resurfaced two years later when my sister was finally let in on the secret. Up until that point, I figured I was only getting presents "From Santa" for my sister’s benefit. But now that we both knew, would Mom and Dad stop with the Santa presents? They didn’t. They simply relabeled them, "Love Mom and Dad."

Myths are fun for the time that you believe in them, but eventually you need to find something more tangible to fill the space they leave behind. Christmases came and went. Luckily the absence of Santa Claus for me was filled with good old-fashioned family love and togetherness. I never had a reason to mourn the loss of one of my last beliefs in childhood magic. In fact, it never occurred to me until recently to question just what I had heard on the roof that one Christmas morning so many years ago. If not Santa or his reindeer, then who? My mom revealed the final mystery. When plowing our driveway, my dad would push the snow against the house until it was roof-high. Our dog Sarah had apparently taken to climbing the snowbank and running back and forth across the roof. She had been let out of house to go to the bathroom about 10 minutes before I woke up that Christmas.