I wrote the following piece for Good Housekeeping (Philippines) for the 2011 Christmas season and edited in December 2024.

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I believed in Santa Claus.  At a certain point, I still do.  Of course, I know he’s not real, but the little boy inside me still feels connected to something magical the myth of Santa.

When I was a boy, my parents would start reminding me every December that Santa was making a list of naughty and nice boys and he would only give gifts to the nice ones.  It always hit me that if the scope of Santa’s evaluation was the entire year, why was I only worried about the month of December?  Was I good enough during the entire year to merit the gift this year?  What if I had piled up naughty points before December? Could I make it up this season by listening to my parents now?   Whatever questions I had, though, I knew it was better to play by the rules and be nice and receive a gift than be logically correct but not get a gift because of some technicality.

Come Christmas time, we’d go to my Lolo’s (grandfather’s) house in Nueva Ecija with all my cousins and sleep for one or two nights.  On Christmas Eve, we’d all get dressed in nice clothes, walk to the town church and attend a the two-hour long Midnight Mass at 10 pm.  After that, we’d excitedly run to Lolo’s house, eat the traditional meal, and look out for Santa Claus.

No matter how we plotted, Santa was always a step ahead of us. When I was  six years old, I fell asleep, and woke up with the gift already under the tree.  At seven, Santa’s gift was on my bed after we got back from mass. At eight, the lights went out at 11:00 pm. We all huddled together on the first floor, and when the lights came back on, the gifts were in the rooms on the second floor. And at nine, the power wnet out again, but this time we had flashlights! We rushed to the second floor, but didn’t catch him. We thought we heard sleigh bells across the Nueva Ecija sky that night.  We found the gifts the next day under the tree.

At eleven years old, I just somehow found out Santa was a myth perpetuated by my parents. No wonder they knew the gifts were from Santa even if there were no cards on the gifts! I wasn’t shocked or felt like I was lied to.  It was like a game of hide-and-seek with my parents and after nine years, we found them and said, “Ok game over!”

Now, as a parent, I continue the great myth of the guy in red because the myth of Santa taught me important truths that are hard to teach:

It taught me that there is a Kindness out there that knows all things and see all things and for some strange reason, is paying special personal interest in me — in not just what I do but also in what is in my heart.

I can tell you that there were some years I don’t think I passed the nice test, but come Christmas Day there was still a wonderful gift waiting for me.  That taught me that there is an Unconditional Love that it didn’t count if there was more right than wrong.

And it made real to me that there is Something more to this world than what’s on the surface. A kind of magic that makes miracles and the seemingly impossible possible.  Even the impossibility of a star lighting the way, angels delivering a message, and a God becoming man born in a manger one December evening.”