“Oh Boy!  Oh Boy!  Oh Boy!  Santa is coming!  Santa is coming!”  It’s a mantra I’ve been saying for eight decades and it holds as much promise and excitement now as ever.  But… though the sentiment is the same, the face of Santa has changed over the years.

I’m sure my first visualization of Santa Claus was based on the kindly-looking old gentleman in Clement Moore’s “A Visit from Saint Nicholas”– perhaps even the original illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith.  After all, in those early years of shopping trips and visits to the city to see the wonderfully decorated store windows, there was his picture-come-to-life over and over again.  A Santa Claus on every corner!

When I became wise enough to ask the why of that phenomena, I was told that those were merely “Santa’s helpers.”  It wasn’t until I was seven or eight that I began to pay attention to phrases like “the spirit of Christmas” and “a feeling in your heart” and realized that Santa Claus wasn’t exactly real.

I struggled with that concept for a good many years, I think, but gradually I was ready to perpetuate the myth and the magic to my own children and to the first/second/third graders in my classroom – at least to the ones who still ‘believed.’  And I never ceased being amazed that those little ones who ‘knew’ readily became complicit in the secret.  It was one of the rites of passage, whether they knew it or not.

Those were the years when Santa wore our own faces, though I never thought about it at the time.  ‘His’ face might belong to the neighbor who arrived unexpectedly with a plate of Christmas cookies.  Or perhaps to the stranger in the crowd who caught your eye and said, “Merry Christmas.”  Finally, I truly ‘got’ the ‘spirit of Christmas’ part.

And now… I think of Santa with the face of a loved one, or two or three!  I have my fingers crossed that Santa Nyel will be home and not in the hospital this Christmas.  I’m looking forward to a week from now when Santa Charlie and Santa Marta will be here helping to decorate our tree.  And I feel thrice blessed that the spirit of Christmas is right here among us.  I wish it were so for everyone, everywhere!