by Mark Morelli

It was Christmas afternoon. I was behind the wheel for the one hour drive to my mother’s house.

Soft holiday music played from the radio and just as softly I ruminated upon the day which had thus far been calm and bright, filled with relaxed cheer, a hearty breakfast, and as if the blessed baby Jesus Himself had taken them by the collars, there was no fighting between my 4- and 8-year-old daughters.

The little one, Julia, was asleep in her car seat. Eight-year-old Olivia leaned forward with a dark, driven look in her eyes. In the mirror her dark, penetrating eyes met mine. I looked away and looked back. She still had a gruff sort of Anthony Quinn squint aimed right at me. Finally she broke the silence.

"Is he or isn't he real?"

I’m not one of those parents who thinks that kids who discover the truth about Santa Claus will be scarred, or think of their parents as liars. I’d seen this moment coming for more than a year, but just like you keep filling a tire with a slow leak, I’d just given her sufficient and evasive answers that kept her from going flat. This year, I knew I’d have to come out, like a press secretary, and make a definitive comment on the issue. For weeks I’d been parsing together a foolproof answer.

"Well, Saint Nicholas is real," I began. "He was born at Parara, a city of Lycia in Asia Minor. Now, in order for you to better understand this, let me explain where Asia Minor is...”

"Just watch the road," said my wife.

"When Nicholas was a boy," I continued, "he traveled to Egypt and Palestine and later became a priest, then the Bishop of Myra." I said that in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, they have the custom of giving gifts to children on December 6, St. Nicholas’ feast day, and that they let on to the children that the saint himself might’ve given them the gifts. I told Olivia that the real-life benevolence of Saint Nicholas inspired the legend, lore, song and myth that are now our Christmas traditions.

I paused and met Olivia’s eyes in the rear view mirror. Her lids drooped like Jerry Orbach listening to a bad alibi.

“Is he real or not?” she asked again.

I took a deep breath. “It begins with Saint Nicholas, many hundreds of years ago….”

"Yes or no! Did you buy all that stuff under the tree this morning?”

“If it weren’t for Saint Nicholas,” I said tentatively, “I wouldn’t have bought anything.”

“Is he real . . . or not?”

"Awright, awright," I said. The heat lamp had been too much. “You wanna know, is there a sled whisking around the air led by flying reindeer? Huh? Is there? Do you think so?”

She nodded her steely jaw no.

“Of course not!” I said. “It’s ridiculous! Flying reindeer? It doesn’t make sense. Right? Right?”

“No it doesn’t,” she said, relieved to have broken my confession.

I tried going back to the Saint Nicholas as the inspiration generations of countless hand-me-down myths, but her mind was elsewhere. Her eyes brightened. Her jaw went unclenched. Her gaze melted away from me. My guess is that she was at long last relieved to be unburdened of the dilemma, one year after she’d asked her first round of wary is-he-real questions.

We drove on. The countryside was Currier-and-Ives meet rural Ohio, farm country replete with skeletal cornstalks in fields and vibrant red barns, plus rusted old tractors with parts missing. These didn’t mar the landscape. They made the landscape closer to perfect. Olivia gazed steadily out the car window. I can't tell you exactly what she was thinking, but she seemed wiser, not sadder. The history lesson of Saint Nicholas wasn’t lost on her. It would come back later. But for now there was just the closest thing to wistful a little girl's countenance can get and a snowy countryside, both rusty and idyllic, that was just as beautiful as believing in Santa Claus.