I suppose I was about eight when I learned the truth about Santa Claus. My parents believed that childhood should be magical and they actively promoted a belief in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and other fanciful characters that populate those innocent years.

Most children today are, at least, doubters by the time they graduate kindergarten, clued in by an older sibling or a classmate with “modern” parents. I remember wondering why Santa seemed to be more generous toward those kids from more prosperous families than he was to those less fortunate but managed to reason that it had something to do with being “good or bad” and that I had to trust Santa’s judgment in such matters. I think it is important that you know I never saw the jolly old elf up close and personal. My sisters and I weren’t taken to stand in line at the local department store awaiting our chance to sit on his knee and recite our list of impossible dreams. I suspect it was partly to save us from Christmas morning disappointments and to make sure we had no opportunity to detect such things as false beards and the fact that Santa didn’t already know our names.

One snowy December evening, I did see him on his rounds, checking out the kids in our neighborhood. I was snuggled with my little sister Betty in Dad’s big chair by the kitchen window, watching for his pick-up to turn into our driveway at suppertime, when we heard the crystalline jingle of sleigh bells. Mother turned from the kitchen stove and asked, “Did you hear that? I thought I heard bells.” Betty and I leaned closer to the window and strained to see any movement that might be revealed in the pool of light around the kitchen door. The bells tinkled again, and a few moments later, a shadowy figure emerged from the alley beside our garage. Whoever it was, he was short and round and seemed to be wearing a red jacket and a stocking cap trimmed in white fur. In a flash he hastened out of the light, cut across our neighbor’s snow-covered lawn and disappeared into the darkness farther down the street.

“That was Santa Claus!” Betty whispered with wonder. “He’s checking to see if we’re being good!” I was as breathless as she was. Had it really been Santa? or just one of the neighborhood men coming home for supper? What we didn’t know was that our neighbor Dwight Slater, who worked at one of the local hardware stores played Santa at the store every year on the last Saturday before Christmas Eve, and that Dad had arranged for him to walk past our back door after work that day.

One of our family traditions was to wait until Christmas Eve to decorate our Christmas tree, partly for safety’s sake in reducing the chance of a fire, and partly because the tree seemed much more magical if we hadn’t become accustomed to it. A few evenings after our “Santa spotting,” the tree stood in all its tinseled and lighted glory in the living room, directly under the grating that allowed heat from the downstairs to drift upward and warm the attic bedroom where my sisters and I slept in winter.

After sighting the jolly old elf, we were determined to catch him in the act of stocking-stuffing and other magical activity during the night before Christmas. We removed the upstairs grate from the heat duct to give us a clearer view of the scene below and arranged our pillows and blankets on the floor around the hole so that we could be comfortable and warm while awaiting the big moment. We listened to the mysterious rustling and bumping of whatever our parents were doing below. We imagined them wrapping last-minute gifts and whispering about the big surprises we would discover in the morning. As time drifted by, we drifted into sleep and awakened to find ourselves mysteriously transported back into our beds with all the pillows, blankets and the floor grate back in their usual places. The smells of bacon and hot chocolate got us out of bed and scrambling downstairs to see what Santa had left for us. Mother and Dad didn’t seem to know we’d attempted to spy on Santa. Apparently it had all been magic.