Free A Christmas Sonata by Gary Paulsen

I t comes on everybody at a certain time in their life to not believe in Santa Claus.
    For me it came during the war, the Second World War, and my father was fighting in Europe. We lived in a large, poor apartment in Minneapolis for a time then, and my mother worked in a laundry during the day and could not always be with me.
    Different people on our floor took care of me at different times, or were supposedto, but often I just had the run of the floor. I was probably a nuisance and yet most people were more than nice to me. I would sometimes spend whole days in different apartments, eating cookies and listening to the radio or playing war with a small wooden gun that I had and everybody seemed to tolerate me.
    But there was one old man named Henderson, who lived with his wife at the end of our floor, who did not like children. He did not like me in particular, but I thought he must not like any children and a week before Christmas in 1943 I was playing in the hall, running back and forth, when I passed Henderson’s apartment and saw something that stopped me cold.
    Mr. Henderson was standing by the kitchen table with his wife. On the table was a glass jar of red wine. I knew about red wine because one of my baby-sitters was an old woman who drank red wine from a jar.Mr. Henderson had some wine in a jelly glass and just as I ran past he was taking a drink.

    He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit.
    There were too many things to take in, too many stunning things. I had complete, utter belief in Santa Claus. I had seen him in a store sitting on a raised platform, had been terrified by his power over me. I tried to be good; and when it didn’t work and I was bad I hoped that he would not hear of it, and when I sat in his lap to tell him what I wanted I nearly peed in fear. He meant Christmas and toys and more to me and I had seen his work. The year before I had asked for an army rifle with a wooden bullet that moved back and forth with the bolt and Santa did not find out that I had played with matches and I found the rifle beneath the tree on Christmas morning.
    And now I found that Santa Claus was Mr. Henderson. An old man who drank redwine and scratched and spit and swore at me, and who I had heard my mother say to a neighbor woman couldn’t hold a job—that was Santa Claus.
    I could not believe it and so I stood in his open door and looked up at him and asked him:
    “Are you Santa Claus?”
    He looked down at me and took a drink of wine and nodded. “Sure, kid. I’m Santa Claus.”
    I believed him. He had no reason to lie to me and he was standing there in the suit with the hat on and his wife was holding his beard. How could he not be Santa Claus?
    I ran back to our apartment and cried some. When mother came home from work she had a can of Spam, which we ate at dinner with fried potatoes, but even that was not good enough to cheer me and I told her.
    “Mr. Henderson is Santa Claus.”
    Mother stopped chewing. “What do you mean?”
    “I saw him today. He was dressed in his suit and I asked him if he was Santa Claus and he said he was.”
    She didn’t say anything.
    “I thought Santa Claus lived at the North Pole and had reindeer, and now Mr. Henderson says he’s him. Is that right?”
    “Not really, punkin. Sometimes stores will hire somebody at Christmas to pretend he is Santa Claus so that children can talk to him—”
    “But there is only supposed to be one Santa Claus, isn’t there?”
    “Yes, but …”
    And of course it didn’t matter after that, didn’t matter what she said. It was done. Santa Claus was ruined, was gone, and I knew he didn’t exist and that I had been lied to and there had never been a Santa Claus.
    I cried some and Mother sat with me for a time on the couch that felt like a carpet and had flowers on it, and she said some things about Mr. Henderson that weren’t very nice. But it didn’t change what I had seen or knew and I would probably have spent the rest of my childhood and