Santa is as real as Uncle Juju

Six is a terrible age. Just ask my daughter, little Egg. At the moment she grapples with the prospect of going to Grade 1 next year.

Her Grade R class is in the school where she will receive her primary education for the next seven years, but it’s not really school. Next year she will be wearing a school uniform and get homework. The thing that upsets me most, however, is the fact that she is getting big enough to doubt some of the simple truths that she has always accepted a fact.

“Some of the kids at school say Santa doesn’t really exist,” she told me this week. “Does he?” On Wednesday I side-stepped her shocking question, but today I will answer it in this column: Yes, Egg, Santa exists. Your little friends are spreading fake news. Santa is as real as you and I are. I know we can’t see him. But that means nothing.

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A lot of things that we see daily, are not real. We can see those fake Santas in pretentious shopping malls, but they’re not real. Only that one we never see is. I know – I was a Santa in a shopping mall as a young man once.

A beautiful girl who worked in a coffee shop came to sit on my lap every day. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t the real Santa. I didn’t want to be a dream crusher. My dreams, not hers.

We believe some total hogwash without questioning it. All the carrots in the world won’t prevent your eyesight from worsening. Toads can’t give you warts. There is no such a thing as a sugar rush. And the Great Wall of China is not visible from space. But we believe it.

Yet we doubt the existence of Santa. If you don’t believe in Santa, you can just as well not believe in love and elves and compassion and line dancing. They’re as real as load shedding and a 15% VAT rate, even if we can’t see it.

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And I don’t ever want to live in a world without Santa and love and line dancing. Believe me, my dear, Santa is real. He wears a red hat and a red suit and he’s overweight – like Uncle Juju. And he’s coming to town in just more than a month. We’ll have to get your list ready.