It's been more than sixty-five years since I discovered the toy (at left) sitting beneath our Christmas tree in California, just where Santa had left it. A flick of the switch and its cars still clatter along the rusted tracks into the tunnel from New Jersey and back out on the other side on their way over the bridge to New York.
The Santa Claus I visited in 1946 (in banner photo, above, with my older sister, Ann) delivered a surprise on Christmas morning that I enjoy to this day.
Isn't Christmas, for children, all about imagining? Wasn't Santa Claus himself the captain of our dreams, organizing his company of elves to craft the trucks and dolls and books and toys we craved across winter nights?
When I discovered that Santa himself was just "a spirit" (as my dad described after he confirmed the bad news) my first question was, "Will we still get presents?"
Santa Claus may be a phantom (strange how our child-centric view convinces us that one fellow could refill his bag billions of times and then drop down every chimney in the world in one night) but those little metal cars (pulled along by a string underneath) were real to me and a lot more fun than that pair of brown socks I watched my father open.
What is real about Christmas, of course - more real than toys - is hope. Children hope for the
"reality" of Santa just as adults hope for the reality of God.
Both are true.
I always wondered why I could never catch Santa in the act - why it was that our father sternly warned us on Christmas Eve not to enter the living room should we awake in the middle of the night.
We can't ever see the real Santa. We can't ever see the real God.
But we can see the hope of Christmas in every believing child and we can see the face of God sealed on the heart of every loving caregiver.
-Erie Chapman
Photographs of toy copyright erie chapman 2012
