Magic

As a child, my parents never treated me to the full experience of Santa Claus. Perhaps they tried with my elder siblings, but by the time I was old enough to appreciate the magic, the spell had already been broken. We still made cookies (peanut butter, with red and green candy sprinkles) and left them with a glass of milk on the fireplace mantle. Christmas morning there were always full stockings (mine had a teddy bear on the front, which in later years I had smudged with chocolate-stained fingers), and a bundle of presents that weren’t there the previous night labeled “From Santa”. But the fun for me became in trying and catch my parents in the act of laying out presents and having the milk and cookies we left out. I remember one year my brother and I camping out in the adjacent room with a Polaroid, desperately trying to stay up late enough to snap a shot of evidence. My parents were in on the joke, innocently raising their eyebrows in defense with cheeky replies of “We don’t know what you’re talking about,” when confronted.

Instead of Santa, one of the best parts of growing up in my house was getting presents of fudge from my grandma. She lived out of state, so from time to time we’d get a package in the mail addressed to all of us. Contained within was a tin full of the softest, most delicious treat of my childhood, cut into neat squares and separated layer by layer with wax paper. There were even two kinds she sent, one with nuts and one without, to accommodate the fact that my older sister was in braces at the time. Nobody made fudge like my grandma, and I was so proud of the fact that we had what could be considered a Family Recipe.

As much as Grandma’s Fudge was a special treat, I wanted to be able to make it within our own house, whenever we wanted. More importantly, we would be the bearers of the Sacred Recipe, something to be handed down through the generations of our family. One day I grew bold enough to tell my father to ask his mother for it.

We just so happened to be in the local grocery store at the time. My fear was that he’d say no, and I would be abashed and ashamed for having asked him. Instead he made a rather favorable expression, and started marching through the store. I grew intensely excited – did he already have the recipe? Did he already know it? I was nearly offended then; if he knew it, why had we never made it before? But that indignation was quickly squashed as my father seemed to be looking for something specific. He was going to gather the materials, and we were going to be able to make the fudge tonight!!!

He went to a shelf and pulled off a jar of Marshmallow Creme, handed it to me, and pointed to the Fudge Recipe on the back. “That’s it right there,” he said.

I thought my chest was going to collapse. All this time, it wasn’t a Secret Sacred Recipe at all, it was on the back of a damned jar of something made by Kraft?! Attempting self-consolation, I tried to convince myself that maybe there wasn’t much opportunity for this to get out… then I looked up at the shelf. There must have been 200 jars of the stuff. Anyone could grab one.

God dammit.

When I tell people I never had a Santa Claus experience as a child, sometimes people feel sorry for me. They pity me for not having the magic, and they’re jealous of my not suffering through the disappointment of finding out the dream was false. But I still got the lift of magic and the letdown of reality as a child – and I got it in a way no one else did, making my experience both completely unique and utterly homogenous.

And now, as an adult, I get to make the fudge whenever I damn well please. And I don’t have to wait to have kids to experience it, either.