News, Views, & Interviews

I asked my niece, Courtney about Saint Nick. Children easily have the most charming perspective on the jolly fat man. What can you tell me about Santa Claus? He’s nice. I wanted to stay up all night Christmas Eve and go out into the living room whenever I heard something, but I fell asleep before then. Do you want to meet him? Yeah. What would you say if you met him? Hi. Anything else? No. Would you ever want to go on a ride on his sleigh? Yeah. I’d go to the North Pole with him. I want to see the elves’ ears and meet the reindeer. Do your parents ever tell you better behave around December because Santa is coming? Yeah. My mom always says that after Christmas too, for next year, and because me and my brother always fight a lot. But I never listen to her. I just ignore her and fight with my brother more. Until December and then you get your act together? Why do you do that? Because then Santa will come. You know all of this is going to be published, right? Yeah. Santa may read this and see that you’re only good for one month of the year. Really? …Really? …I’m good all year. I don’t really fight that much.

Bernice Chamberland was my grandmother. I asked her about Santa back in 2004.  Tell me about Santa Claus. That bum? I’m not a good person to ask because my brothers, especially Bill, were jokers. And Bill would tell me that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and that people used to just dress up as him and do all that dirty stuff. Of course my mother was dead then. So I don’t have any pleasant memories of Santa Claus. I tried to believe in Santa Claus, but then they would tell me don’t be stupid, how could anybody like that come down a chimney? I used to think that there might be one and I’d run downstairs for Christmas. That’s when the coal was in the stocking. Nobody was going to go out and buy me any presents and that was the joke. I was six when I got the coal. And it would be hanging up behind our gas stove. That went on for a couple of years anyway. I’d go to get my stocking and they’d say don’t be stupid, you know what’s going to be in it anyway.

The first time a child meets Santa Claus, it’s like meeting the world’s biggest celebrity. Most of us never forget the racing heartbeats, the giddy excitement, or maybe even the fear of meeting this omniscient, supernatural being who can either make your dreams come true by laying your most desired toy under the Christmas tree, or crush you with lumps of coal in your stocking. As we get older, our ideas of Santa morph and evolve until many of us actually become Father Christmas — either at the office holiday party or when we have children of our own. The Santa experience offers genuine miracles on both sides of the fluffy white beard in a world where most mysteries are dying off at an alarming rate. Childhood is full of myths and monsters. On the bad side are ghosts (sometimes) and boogeymen, on the good side are the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, but the kingpin of them all is Santa Claus. Old Saint Nick’s roots are based in the kind-hearted ways of a wealthy orphan who lived centuries ago and spent his life giving gifts to children and those in need. But since Santa went mainstream, he’s has been deified, lampooned, imitated, commercialized, scorned, and overexposed. But through all the murk and mess, Santa’s magic still shines through like Rudolph’s nose through the fiercest blizzard. We teach our own children about Santa because, even if only for the first few years, it’s right to believe in magic. Do you remember thinking you heard footsteps on your rooftop? Or did a red, glowing light in the night sky on Christmas Eve make you think that it was certainly Rudolph leading Kris Kringle’s sleigh team and surely not an airplane? Did your parents use Santa for extortion to get you to behave better — at least in December? Remember your Uncle Larry who dressed up as Santa, had way too many hot toddies, and crushed the Christmas tree? Anyone who has ever survived Christmas has a Santa story to tell. As a side project I started collecting interviews with people about their Santa experiences for a possible future book. As a holiday treat, I’ll be sharing some of these interviews in the coming days. Reader beware… they ain’t all warm and fuzzy.

Yesterday I made a trek to the western portion of Cape Cod to do some research for my forthcoming book, Weird Massachusetts. Joining me was Derek Bartlett from the Cape and Islands Paranormal Research Society — Derek wasn’t so much joining me as he was acting as my tour guide. We’ve had a strange weather pattern here in the Bay State recently and the sunny skies and mid-fifty-degree temperatures didn’t match the date on the calendar.

This Web site is for my close, personal friends. So welcome to it. We’re still working out some of the little technical bugs and finalizing a few of the Web pages, but the site will come together quickly. Enjoy what’s to come! -Jeff