< 13 Santa Exposed Red Suit, she gave pause to doing the whole Santa thing when she became a mom. After doing some hard thinking and soul searching, she decided to go ahead and let her daughter into the Santa game. “I guess I decided that it wasn’t about Santa—it was about the magic,” she says. “Santa is about using your imagination, it’s about the whole idea of magic and fairies and princesses, and all the things that children like to believe in, and that adults, to be truthful, like to believe in too. I realized that the magic my daughter would feel around the holiday season, for however long it might last—until that time she decided she wanted to know the truth—was worth it. It’s worth it to have that experience of magic and wonder in her life. “I now feel pretty clean about the idea of having Santa,” Santa she says, laughing. “And I’m the one who wrote wro the book about big, fat lies.” She says it comes down to how you define what is a lie and a what is the truth. “If the truth trut is that I want to nurture my child’s imagination,” imagin she muses, “to encourage her sense of play and magic, then where do you draw the line? If I’m all about never pretending, tthen I’m never going to makebelieve I’m the th hairdresser and my daughter is coming in to get her hair done. We played that game this thi morning. I used an accent and everything. B But wasn’t that a lie? I’m not a hairdresser. “When we pull from the imagination,” she adds, “when we w pull from that creative space, when we pull pul from that belief in magic, when we pull from faith—that’s when the miracles occur in our life.” O
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“I HAD A younger brother,” says Mill Valley author Micha Michael Murphy (Golf in the Kingdom, The Future of the Body), “and in our family, when I was a boy, the big thing was fairies. It was a great th thing, to all pretend we could see fairies out in the garden. ‘I saw one!’ ‘I saw one, too!’ My brother was so imaginative. There was one day when my brother was, I think, 4 years old, and by this time, it had dawned on me that the fairies weren’t real, that it was just a game of make-believe we all played together—I was 6 or 7—and on this day, my little brother was just beside himself with happiness about these new fairies he’d seen. So I was there, and I just loved my brother so much that when he said, ‘Don’t you see the fairies?’ I went along with him. “But that was my moment of awakening. I didn’t see the fairies, after all. As far as Santa Claus goes—that realization really blew me away.” Murphy’s great Santa disillusionment came when he heard a noise in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, and went to investigate. “I heard my father in the kitchen,” Murphy recalls. “And the kitchen door had this glass window, so I peeked up to look into the kitchen, having a pretty good idea that it was my father, drinking. And as I looked in, there was my father, having a whiskey... with Santa Claus! It was some guy dressed as Santa who’d been going around the neighborhood, and 14 PACIFIC SUN DECEMBER 16 - DECEMBER 22, 2011
I guess my father invited him in for a drink, since we were all supposed to be asleep. When I saw them drinking whiskey, it was such a shock to my system. It was so obviously not Santa Claus. It all crumpled. So, my belief in Santa just evaporated right there as I peeked up and through that window.” That’s a powerful and moving image: a young boy’s loss of innocence, in a sense, as he stands on tiptoe, looking through a window into the adult world; a kind of Santa Claus peep show in which the shocking truth was unceremoniously revealed. Of course, as the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, Murphy is on the record ass accepting that many unseen aps real, despite a lack of visual things are perhaps proof. So, there may be folks who’d make the case that Santa does exist, only on a different hysical, seeable chimneys-andlevel than the physical, presents reality that kids accept so easily. In fact, theree is someone who believes just that. O
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“WHEN IT COMES to Santa Claus, I’m upside down,” wn,” says writer Robert Moss, author off several best-selling books about ut dreams and dreaming, including uding Conscious Dreaming—A Spiritual Path fee (Three Rivfor Everyday Life ers Press, 1996) and Active urneying Dreaming—Journeying mitation to Beyond Self-Limitation reedom a Life of Wild Freedom brary, (New World Library, d out 2011). “I started in Australia,” Moss explains, “so I grew up in a countryy mas where Christmas mfalls in midsummary mer. In my primary recollections off m Christmas, from my early life, I fwas always sufh fering through searingly hot days, forced byy my Anglo-Australian ian ith a family to sit with stiff collar and tie, and eat plum pudess ding in an airless room.” Growing up in the Southern Hemiound sphere, Moss found anta the notion of Santa ill made Claus—who still the customary appearancnt stores and es in department nts—to be a in advertisements—to tic and unbelievthoroughly exotic able character. “He wears a thick indeer through the coat, he flies reindeer sky,” observes Moss, “and there’s at in our nothing like that hemisphere.” all testHe does recall ing the whole Santa
Claus story one Christmas when he was still a young boy. Says Moss, “I remember asking one of the department store Santas for the largest teddy bear in the store, this magnificent, giant teddy bear—which is also exotic for Australia, as Australia has no native bears. But I never received the teddy bear. So the message was clearly not transmitted to the North Pole, or to my parents, and I remember being somewhat miffed—though I did not necessarily blame it on Santa, because, frankly, I cannot remember a time in childhood when I did not know that m my parents were th the source of the presp ents. So, a be belief in Santa was wa never really real a part of my childhoo childhood. “My story,” Moss aadds, happily, happily “is not one on of disencha disenchantment an and disillu disillusionm sionment in chi childhood hood, but o of disco discovert ing the won wonder t and truth about Santa Claus Claus... in adulthoo adulthood. believ I do now believe in Santa, firmly aand completely. I have an intense conviction about Santa. And I he’ for do believe he’s real.” For Moss, his conversion a began at the age of 22, when he left Australia, trackin eager to begin tracking experiences of visions and shaman dreaming and shamanism tradition of through the traditions his ancestors in Euro Europe. His research eventually led him to the indigenous cultu cultures of Scandinavia and Finland, and th the Sami shamans ancien whose ancient
culture includes stories of flying reindeer and shamans on sleighs soaring through the sky. “Early on,” he says, “I had some rather chancy encounters involving the ancient cult of the reindeer goddess, and the practice of reindeer shamanism by the circumpolar people. The Sami and the Laplanders are the most pertinent, because I believe there is strong evidence—at least, strong circumstantial evidence—that the Santa figure which has been constructed over time, contains elements brought forth by the traditional noaidi.” “Noaidi,” Moss goes on to tell me, is the Lapp word for shaman. “The Lapps are people who live with the reindeer, dream with the reindeer, survive alongside the reindeer, and have for a very, very long time,” he explains. “In their tradition, one of the preferred methods of shamanic flight, of astral travel or dream travel, is for the shaman to fly around on a sled or a sleigh, pulled by reindeer. There are ancient Sami drums you can find, with pictures of a fellow flying through the sky, pulled by reindeer.” Soon, Moss began to have his own dreams of reindeer. “I would sometimes see a reindeer, saddled, ready for riding,” he says, “which would pull me to a northern location where, typically, I would meet an immense feminine being, an antlered woman, who I came to understand, through research, was an ancient form of the goddess of the far north. “My feeling about Santa, today,” he continues, “is that Santa, on some level, comes from a very primal, very early Northern form of consciousness, making him a very significant figure for our time. I think he brings us, in a sense, into touch with something ancestral, something vital that we have lost in our surface life.” In other words, in discovering that pieces of the Santa mythology predate Christmas and Christianity, Moss was able to see Santa as more than a man in a red suit taking orders in a department store. “I believe in a bright spirit of giving and sharing,” he says. “I believe in Santa as a seasonal spirit of giving and sharing—however much that may have been distorted by the commercialization of Christmas. This jolly, avuncular figure who encourages us to come together, to leave our bickering behind, and to feast and revel and make merry, I believe in that. But I believe in Santa, also, as a benign shaman from way back in history, who can do things that maybe all of us could do if we would allow ourselves to do them.” Santa, to be specific, knows that humans can fly. “I believe in Santa,” he concludes, “as someone who reminds us that we have the ability, in our imaginations at least, to soar. Santa reminds us that we need to maintain Father Christmas a cherished connection to the animals and has the last laugh the animal spirits. I mean, Santa Claus is a after all—turns reindeer shaman! Santa restores to us the idea out he was a Lapthat we are not fully human unless we sustain plander reindeer shaman who dated relations with other species. plus-sized, antlered “In his case, reindeer.” < women.
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