I Failed My 10 Year Old's Diabolical Santa Test

On Christmas morning 2021, my 10-year-old looked around, having opened most of her gifts, and began to cry. I, meanwhile, felt my blood pressure spike.

As an interfaith family, we modestly celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas (along with my husband’s December birthday) each year, so usually, this moment is my personal finish line. A time when I pat myself on the back for making ALL the freakin’ magic happen, even during a pandemic.

Plus, that particular year, we’d just hosted a big reception for my oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah, and I was mourning the sudden death of my father two months earlier.

So as my child wept in front of our decorated Christmas tree, topped with a Star of David, I seethed and asked, “What’s wrong, sweetie? Why are you upset?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know what I want, but then I open my presents, and somehow they are the things I wanted. But it doesn’t feel that way this time.”

I’ll confess that my first reaction was more “Are you kidding me?!” than “Oh, honey.”

And my mood didn’t improve upon finding, a short while later, a small, ripped-out catalog image of an electric scooter taped onto a branch of the artificial tree.

Crap. There had been a test.

My 10 year old, who up to this point held fast to her unwavering belief in Santa, had run a secret trick play in hopes of being proven right. Evidence she could breathlessly report to friends. How she’d quietly secured a wish to the tree and found her heart’s desire propped there the next morning.

But that’s not what happened, of course. So now she was suddenly reckoning with the idea that the magic wasn’t real.

And I felt terrible.

Not necessarily about missing her “hint,” or failing to get her this big-ticket item at the last minute, but rather about my normally spunky, cheerful 10-year-old suddenly feeling like the ground beneath her feet wasn’t as solid as she’d woken up believing it to be.

I had been a very different kid: a born skeptic who, even in first grade, had thought, “This Santa story doesn’t add up.” And a few years later, when I stopped making Christmas wish lists, I’d wanted my parents to know and understand and “see” me so clearly that they’d know, even if I didn’t, what I might want. (Sound familiar?)

As I now know, this is an impossible task for parents of a pre-teen, particularly when the pre-adolescent in question is a quiet, painfully insecure middle child, as I was. But I didn’t understand that then, of course; so on Christmas morning, when I unwrapped a pair of boxy, camel-colored shoes with thick soles, or a fussy manicure kit, I’d bite my lip and feel like crying, too.

My (understandably) frustrated parents’ solution to my holiday ennui was to start giving a set amount of money to my older sister and I each year to buy some things for ourselves that we actually wanted. The plan was, we’d wrap the items and put them under the tree late on Christmas Eve, to preserve the holiday illusion for my much younger, Santa-believing sister.

Selecting and purchasing my family’s gifts, and then maximizing the money that remained, became my tunnel-vision, fervent focus. I bought books, CDs, posters, and relatively inexpensive clothes for myself. I opened them on Christmas morning, feigning low-wattage contentment and surprise.

But for some reason I couldn’t name, I still felt disappointed and sad.

So perhaps my youngest daughter’s tears would have come with or without that Santa Test we'd failed.

Maybe she’d simply reached that difficult, moment-of-truth transitional age, as I once had, when the dull realities of adulthood beckon, and happiness and magic are harder to come by. Toys and games and stuffies suddenly don’t have the potent joy-power they once did, and you can’t, for the life of you, figure out why.

“Am I even the same person?” we all wonder in this dissonant, panicked moment, when our identity seems to be in free-fall.

But this recent, fraught Christmas morning reminded me that while I can’t protect my daughter from the painful challenges of growing up, I could show her that moments of comfort and happiness are possible in the adult sphere, too. And this is where the traditions of our quirky interfaith family saved the day.

Having adopted, in recent years, “Jewish Christmas” rituals, we ordered Chinese food for lunch, after opening presents, and we welcomed the girls’ much-loved grandma into our home to share it. My 10-year-old’s spirits brightened as she grazed on sweet and sour chicken, then paraded some of her favorite gifts in front of my mother-in-law.

A short while later, my kids and husband and I piled into my car to go see “Sing 2,” which had us all singing earworm pop songs — including U2’s all-too-fitting “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” — for the rest of the day, as we packed for our usual post-Christmas excursion to Northern Michigan.

All of which is to say: watching your child start the journey out of childhood is harrowing and hard, no matter what. But I’m glad my family could be with my daughter when she felt that first unmooring sense of confusion.

That we could circle the wagons and let her know, without saying the words, “We got you. Things are changing, but we are a constant.”

And we have been. Last Christmas, there were no tears. Just wrapping paper, more Chinese food, movie theater popcorn, and laughs.

I wouldn’t want our holidays any other way.