The White Bearded Man Who Shall Not Be Named

It wasn’t how I expected it to go down. Sitting with my wife and daughter at a Sunday family lunch in Makati, several weeks before Christmas, having “The Discussion.” You know: the one that involves a certain hairy, overweight man navigating chimneys on Christmas Eve.

Our daughter is 12, so maybe the discussion was a bit overdue. But we hedged and hawed and hemmed. Nobody wants to be the one to ask first. It’s the proverbial fat, jolly elephant in the room.

She was reticent about what she wanted for Christmas. She usually was. Wouldn’t give us a clue. She’s generally non-materialistic that way. So we circled around the question: “How do we feel about, um, You Know Who this year…?”

It was like a hand of Texas Hold ‘Em. Our daughter’s poker face told us that she wasn’t going to be the one to fold first.

We tried again.

“So, um… do we still believe in all that?”

A slight, reluctant shake of the head from our daughter.

“And when did we… stop believing in that?”

A shrug. She wasn’t going to go down that road.

In truth, the tradition of the White Bearded Man Who Shall Not Be Named is as much a thrill for the parents as it is for the child. Every parent knows the prickly excitement of picking out a “special” gift from The Fat Man, covertly wrapping it in unique (and carefully stored away) wrapping paper, placing it just so among the pile of other presents, going undetected, Ninja-style. It’s like being caught up in the Cold War, playing spies. Our thrill certainly matched, or outmatched, our daughter’s upon finding the actual presents on Christmas morning.

We weren’t always master spies, of course. There was the time we — I mean “The Jolly One” — gave her a fancy bike, and it was clearly stamped as manufactured in China. Well, besides the worry we had if she accidentally licked the bike (lead paint fears?), there was the possibility of her connecting all the dots: Why would an international gift-giving expert be making a stopover in China for a bike, when he had a crack team of elves working round the calendar in the North Pole?

Or there was the time we gave her a requested watercolor pad and brushes — and we (I mean “I”) accidentally left the “National Bookstore” tag on the pad! We think that was the tipping point, really: the actual moment when our daughter put two and two together. After that, the rest was all charades and camouflage.

But what a good, good run you have! It’s like you get to navigate this course of mutual deception for a pleasant outcome: the look of happiness, extra joy on your kid’s face! Sure, it’s based on trickery, and perhaps Christmas should revolve more around the traditional joys of observing the belen and contemplating the birth of Christ (on whatever day or month it actually occurred, pre-Roman calendar) with your family. But pure, unvarnished joy can be in short supply in this day and age; we look for it wherever we can find it, and parents look for it in the extra layer of discovery and happiness that expresses itself on kids’ faces on Christmas morning.

I know my parents did it to me, growing up. (How old were my brothers and I before we ‘fessed up? Probably an embarrassingly lot older than our daughter.) How can I possibly “blame” my parents for a slight, though continual, deception that hurt nobody, in the end? It’s really a victimless crime.

The other tradition that takes a bit of extra flourish on Christmas Eve involves cookies, milk, a stuffed stocking, and a handwritten card from The Jolly Fellow From The North. I’m not sure why all these “requirements” ended up on the checklist to ensure the truthiness of the deception, but they did: I had to make sure to buy cookies, display them openly to our daughter, remember to place some on a plate near the Christmas tree with a glass of milk (The Fat One has never been lactose-intolerant), and remember to leave behind only a few crumbs, come Christmas morning. I had to remember to stock up on various candies, and stealthily hide the same weeks or days before Dec. 25, then spill them into a red felt stocking that had been previously empty. (Really, who came up with this checklist?)

And the final touch was a personalized note, saying “Merry Christmas, Dear Isobel, and Have a Wonderful New Year!” (or some such similar message). The trouble was, it couldn’t be in our handwriting. (Our daughter was already way too familiar with our handwriting samples, from notes to her school.) So, usually over Noche Buena feasting past midnight, our fingers greasy with sliced quezo and baked ham and pan de sal crumbs, we had to assign somebody to write “The Note.” (My brother-in-law Gary proved to be the most successful at forging masculine-but-jolly handwriting.) Occasionally, the designated writer would switch hands from year to year, using the left paw to produce handwriting as unlike ours as possible.

Eventually though, after a few Christmases had gone by, we began to wonder if our daughter was secretly collecting the old notes from The Jolly Trespasser From The North, and carefully comparing the chicken scratches on each one, like a handwriting expert from Quantico. We started practicing continuity, making sure the handwriting was all laid down at the same angle and tilt.

All that is history, now, sitting at a Makati restaurant over Sunday lunch. Abruptly, we find ourselves exiting a period of growing up where parents good-naturedly harbor secrets, to one where teens, as much as we hate to admit it, learn to harbor their own.

We ask our daughter if, someday, she’ll do the same ritual with her own kids. “Oh, yes,” she says without hesitation. “Probably.”

No crime, no foul.