Explaining Santa Claus

**Spoiler Alert: Anyone under 10....this is a fantasy story with no factual basis.

I worked at the Dar Chebab Saturday night and about fifteen kids showed up for Youth Cafe. The new Connect 4 from America was well-received. After the Youth Cafe I went out to Nadia's (my 21 year-old host mom) village. Everyone was really excited to see me and we had a good time looking at my pictures from home. They thought the snow looked beautiful and asked a lot of questions about why my dad drives a pick-up truck. (Apparently only farmers drive them here and that's why there are so many of them in town)

One of the pictures I brought back was of the three stockings hanging by the fireplace. This picture started a very interesting conversation about Santa Claus. Only Nadia knew about Santa Claus because last year when I was living at her house I gave her Christmas stockings and told her about Santa. At the time, she told me maybe Santa would make a stop in Morocco...the next morning there were chocolates in the stockings! Surprise!

This year, as I started talking about Santa, everyone else in the family actually thought that Santa was a REAL MAN who came into people's homes to deliver presents! Nadia's sister was relentless in asking me HOW this man got into everyone's houses? Did he have keys? Did he break-in? How did this work? Then, when I told them he climbed down through the chimney they were SHOCKED. My host grandma kept saying, "Jeenee, don't lie. Are you lying? How does he do that?" I told them all about the cookies and milk and was leading them on for a while, but finally I had to stop and admitted that Santa wasn't a real man, but rather the parents pretended he was and did his dirty work. My grandma was the most shocked and scolded me for lying. But they all laughed and admitted it was a good idea to keep children from misbehaving at Christmastime. Then, like ten minutes later Nadia's brother came into the room and the whole thing was repeated again. His sister tricked him into believing that Santa Claus was real. His mom tried to set him straight, but since he missed the entire explanation I think he still might be a little confused about the whole thing. They really liked the part about how if you're bad you get coal in your stocking. They asked if I'd ever gotten coal, to which I said, "No, I was always a good girl." And they thought that was really funny for some reason.