When I was six years old, Robert West told me there was no San­ta Claus. It was a cou­ple weeks before Christ­mas, a sun­ny warm day for that time of year. We had climbed an old oak tree on his grandfather’s farm and we were sit­ting side by side on a big branch, tak­ing turns spit­ting at a wheel­bar­row down below. The wheel­bar­row stood about ten feet from the tree, so it was a long spit. Robert could beat me at almost every­thing, but it turned out he wasn’t much of a pro­jec­tile spit­ter. All his attempts fell short. I hit the mark every time, and it was get­ting under his skin.

We hadn’t been talk­ing about Christ­mas when he dropped the bomb on San­ta Claus. It caught me off guard. “What?”

“There’s no San­ta Claus. Your par­ents buy the presents and put them under the tree while you’re asleep.”

I didn’t believe him. We had a big argu­ment, where­upon Robert pro­ceed­ed to dis­man­tle brick by brick the fortress I had built in my sub­con­scious mind to pro­tect Santa’s mag­ic from the real world’s cold logic.

Rein­deer can’t fly, he point­ed out. A fat old man can’t slide down a nar­row chim­ney, much less claw his way back up to the roof. No way he could vis­it every house in the world in a sin­gle night even if he flew on a jet plane. And so on.

By the end of it, I knew Robert was right, and I was on the verge of tears, which seemed to be what he want­ed. He couldn’t stand los­ing to me at any­thing, even a spit­ting com­pe­ti­tion, so he used the truth about San­ta to put me in my place. 

I climbed down from the tree and slouched home. On the way, my grief over San­ta turned into anger at my par­ents for play­ing me for a fool. By the time I found Mom in the back yard, hang­ing clothes on the line, I was out­raged. I con­front­ed her with what Robert had said. “You and Dad lied to me about San­ta!” I shout­ed. “What else did you lie about?”

Mom didn’t take much guff off any­one, least of all me. “Don’t you dare say we lied to you,” she said angri­ly. “We didn’t lie. We told you a sto­ry. A good sto­ry about a nice man who does right by chil­dren. We went to a lot of trou­ble to make Christ­mas fun for you and you should be grate­ful for it.” She picked up her clothes-bas­ket and marched away.

I didn’t have the temer­i­ty to argue with her. It was a good sto­ry, like she said, but it was also a lie, and it didn’t take me long to fig­ure out they’d lied about a lot of oth­er stuff. San­ta was the big one, but the East­er Bun­ny ran a close sec­ond. That sto­ry nev­er made sense to me. Rab­bits don’t grow to be six feet tall and walk on their hind legs, thank God, but I had bought into it any­way, naive­ly believ­ing every­thing my par­ents said.

The Tooth Fairy was anoth­er lie, but I didn’t care much about him/her/it. At only a quar­ter per tooth, there wasn’t a big enough pay­off to wor­ry about. 

A host of addi­tion­al minor char­ac­ters also fell like a row of domi­noes – the Sand Man, Jack Frost, the Lep­rechaun with the pot of gold at the end of the rain­bow. One guy I was glad to see bite the dust was the Boogey­man. My uncle claimed he lived under my bed. “You’d bet­ter behave your­self, or the Boogey­man will get you.” I nev­er real­ly believed in the Boogey­man, but I looked under my bed every night before I turned off the light just to be safe. It was com­fort­ing to know with cer­tain­ty he wouldn’t kill me in my sleep just for sass­ing my uncle, who usu­al­ly deserved it. 

I felt betrayed by all these lies. My bond of trust with my par­ents had been bro­ken, and I was angry and hurt for a while, but as best I can recall, I for­got about it with­in a few days.

Over the six decades since then, I hadn’t giv­en the death of my child­hood myths much thought. Then last month a news sto­ry broke that remind­ed me of those days long ago. A sub­sti­tute teacher at Cedar Hills School in New Jer­sey told twen­ty-three first graders that San­ta Claus didn’t exist, con­fronting them with the same cold log­ic Robert had heaped on me. After that, she mowed down the East­er Bun­ny and the Tooth Fairy. “Mag­ic does not exist,” she told the kids. “There is no such thing as mag­ic anything.”

This set off a firestorm among the children’s par­ents, result­ing in the school super­in­ten­dent ban­ning the sub­sti­tute from teach­ing in the dis­trict. Cable news pun­dits pounced on the sto­ry as anoth­er skir­mish in the War on Christ­mas. In the debates that fol­lowed, most every­one agreed the teacher’s actions were wrong, but spir­it­ed bat­tle lines formed around a dif­fer­ent ques­tion: Should par­ents trick their chil­dren into believ­ing the San­ta story?

I was sur­prised to learn that a lot of experts believe San­ta is tox­ic. Pro­fes­sor David John­son thinks the San­ta sto­ry impairs a child’s devel­op­ment of crit­i­cal think­ing skills and that learn­ing the truth, after so much parental decep­tion, trau­ma­tizes chil­dren. He tells the sto­ry of a child who defend­ed San­ta in front of his school class on the sole basis that his moth­er wouldn’t lie to him and then burst into tears lat­er when read­ing to the class an ency­clo­pe­dia entry about San­ta that proved she had indeed lied. “Lying to chil­dren about San­ta,” John­son con­cludes, “is immoral and unjustifiable.”

Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher Boyle and Dr. Kathy McK­ay believe lying to chil­dren about some­thing so spe­cial and mag­i­cal could under­mine their trust in their par­ents for­ev­er, throw the children’s moral com­pass per­ma­nent­ly off-kil­ter, and leave them vul­ner­a­ble to “abject dis­ap­point­ment” for the rest of their lives.

Pas­cal-Emmanuel Gob­ry may be the most mil­i­tant of the anti-San­ta advo­cates. In his arti­cle, I Tell My Kid San­ta is a Lie and You Should Too, he prais­es an event at a Catholic dio­cese in France where church offi­cials told chil­dren San­ta was not real, denounced him as a heretic, and hanged him in effi­gy. “Join the move­ment,” Gob­ry says. “Togeth­er, we can kill Santa.”

Seems a lit­tle extreme to me. My mom used to say, “Some peo­ple are too smart for their own good.” The San­ta Truthers may have fall­en into that trap. I agree lying to chil­dren is usu­al­ly wrong, but the San­ta sto­ry makes Christ­mas a lot more fun for a lit­tle kid, and chil­dren are more resilient than the experts seem to under­stand. Look­ing back on it now, I wouldn’t for­feit my child-hood belief in Christ­mas mag­ic just to avoid the short-lived dis­ap­point­ment that came from learn­ing the truth.

Of course, every child is dif­fer­ent, and each par­ent should make an informed, care­ful deci­sion about Santa.

My parental deci­sion was nev­er in doubt.

I was watch­ing the weath­er report on tele­vi­sion Christ­mas Eve forty years ago when my four-year-old son came bounc­ing down the stairs. I told him the weath­er­man was track­ing San­ta Claus on radar. “He’s over Pomona right now, head­ed our way!”

We ran out in the back yard and stood by the pool, star­ing up at the sky.

“There he goes!” I shouted.

“Where?!!!

“There!” I point­ed. “He just streaked over the house!”

“I didn’t see him!”

“Dang! Maybe we can see him from the front yard!”

My son ran around the house as fast as he could, des­per­ate for a glimpse of the fly­ing rein­deer and the jol­ly old man, who didn’t exist.

It’s not a lie, I told myself as I jogged along behind him. It’s a sto­ry. A good sto­ry about a nice man who does right by children.

Post Script: Hey, Robert, wher­ev­er you are, I still hate you.

Ian Long arrived at the Bor­der­line Bar and Grill in Thou­sand Oaks, Cal­i­for­nia, on Wednes­day night, Novem­ber 7, at 11:15 p.m. Armed with a .45 cal­iber Glock 21 hand­gun, he shot the secu­ri­ty guard post­ed at the entrance and went inside.

The Bor­der­line is a night spot pop­u­lar with col­lege stu­dents. On Wednes­day nights, it fea­tures west­ern-style line danc­ing. The dance floor was packed with stu­dents from Pep­per­dine Uni­ver­si­ty, Cal­i­for­nia Luther­an Uni­ver­si­ty, and Moor­park Com­mu­ni­ty College.

Long fired into the crowd.

Sergeant Ron Helus, a 29 year vet­er­an of the Ven­tu­ra Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office, was talk­ing to his wife on the phone when a report of an active shoot­er came across his radio. “Hey, I have to han­dle a call,” he said. “I love you. I’ll talk to you later.”

He was the first offi­cer to respond. He charged inside, exchanged gun­fire with Long, and was hit mul­ti­ple times. By the time oth­er offi­cers were able to get inside, Long had killed twelve, wound­ed thir­teen, and turned the gun on himself.

Sgt. Helus died at the Los Rob­les Region­al Med­ical Cen­ter at 2:00 a.m.

Thurs­day morn­ing, the Sheriff’s Office escort­ed a hearse car­ry­ing his corpse to the Ven­tu­ra coroner’s facil­i­ty. Hun­dreds of peo­ple lined the 134 free­way to pay trib­ute to his hero­ism. Dri­vers in oncom­ing traf­fic stopped, got out of their cars, and watched the pro­ces­sion from the guard rail. Fire­fight­ers and police offi­cers stood on over­pass­es and salut­ed as the hearse passed beneath them.

My wife had a doctor’s appoint­ment that after­noon in Thou­sand Oaks not far from the Bor­der­line. We arrived at 2:00 p.m. The Hill fire sprang up just west of Thou­sand Oaks at 2:03 p.m. Anoth­er fire ignit­ed near Woolsey Canyon Road, about twen­ty miles to the north­east, at 2:24 p.m.

When we left the doctor’s office, smoke cov­ered half the sky. As we pulled up in our dri­ve­way, a jet tanker car­ry­ing fire retar­dant flew low over our house head­ing north.

An hour lat­er, the Fire Depart­ment issued a vol­un­tary evac­u­a­tion notice to our neigh­bor­hood, Hid­den Hills. Our daugh­ter and our son live near­by. We texted back and forth. Every­one was safe. No flames in sight. We chose not to evacuate.

At 6:30 p.m. the Fire Depart­ment issued a manda­to­ry evac­u­a­tion order. We were sur­prised. The Hill fire was ten miles west of us, blow­ing away from Hid­den Hills, and the Woolsey fire had received very lit­tle press cov­er­age so we didn’t believe it was much of a threat. Think­ing the Fire Depart­ment was being over­ly cau­tious, we packed one night’s change of clothes, round­ed up our dogs, and drove east.

Our daugh­ter, who also lives in Hid­den Hills, checked with local hotels. They were already booked with evac­uees, so we drove out to our oth­er daughter’s home on the oth­er side of LA, out of harm’s way. Ten min­utes there con­vinced us that our six dogs weren’t meant to live under one roof. We found hotel rooms in Pasade­na and checked in, expect­ing to return home in the morning.

The Woolsey fire turned real bad that night, burn­ing homes in Bell Canyon, a few miles north of Hid­den Hills. Winds with gusts of 70 mph blew embers the size of base­balls into neigh­bor­hoods west of my home, set­ting ablaze Oak Park, Agoura Hills, West­lake Vil­lage, and Thou­sand Oaks. The fire jumped the 134 free­way and burned through the canyons toward the ocean. I watched tele­vised images of Mal­ibu homes burn­ing to the ground with a mix­ture of survivor’s guilt and relief that the fire had spared my neighborhood.

Fri­day morn­ing, my sense of relief proved to be pre­ma­ture. High winds rekin­dled hot spots in Bell Canyon, set­ting scores of hous­es on fire and blow­ing embers south, direct­ly toward Hid­den Hills. Cal­abasas, where my son lives, came under an emer­gency evac­u­a­tion order. As he drove away, flames licked at hous­es on the edge of his neighborhood.

The old Ahman­son Ranch, now a nature pre­serve, bor­ders Hid­den Hills on the west near our house. The Ranch caught fire about noon. One tele­vi­sion sta­tion briefly flashed images of a wall of flames march­ing across the ridge behind our home, and I caught a glimpse of heli­copters and air­planes drop­ping water on a field where I walk my dogs, but mad­den­ing­ly, the cov­er­age shift­ed to oth­er areas and nev­er returned to Hid­den Hills.

That night, reports about the fire gave way to reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled pro­grams. From then on, news cov­er­age of the fire was min­i­mal. I spent a sleep­less night, not know­ing if my home had survived.

Sat­ur­day, the winds calmed and the worst seemed to be over. The media was silent about Hid­den Hills. We assumed no news was good news, but the evac­u­a­tion order was still in effect and we weren’t sure if our homes were intact.

Sun­day morn­ing, I could stand the uncer­tain­ty no longer. I drove to Hid­den Hills and was allowed access to my home. To my great relief, it was safe and sound, but with­in min­utes after I unlocked my front door, the winds kicked up again and a hot spot erupt­ed in West Hills, just north of my house.

Fire engines sped up my street to defend the perime­ter of Hid­den Hills, and I was ordered to evac­u­ate again.

With­in min­utes, heli­copters and planes were in the air over West Hills and eight fire engines and crews rushed to the flames. They knocked the fire down in four hours. Res­i­dents of West Hills lined the street and cheered the fire crews as they drove away to the next call.

Winds blew hard Sun­day and Mon­day. The fire­fight­ers tire­less­ly beat down count­less flare-ups. Mon­day night, the Woolsey fire still raged in Mal­ibu, but its threat to inland homes declined.

Tues­day at 9:00 a.m., the evac­u­a­tion orders cov­er­ing Hid­den Hills and my son’s neigh­bor­hood were lift­ed, and we went home.

That after­noon, I walked out to the bor­der of the Ahman­son Ranch. Its fields were char­coal-black. The brush burned up to the edge of my neighbor’s yard, melt­ing the three-rail white vinyl fence that enclos­es it. We would have lost our home if the fire­fight­ers hadn’t stopped the fire right there. There are no words that do jus­tice to the courage, ded­i­ca­tion, and skill of these men and women. We will be for­ev­er grate­ful to them.

By Tues­day night, the week from hell had come and gone for my fam­i­ly, but for many oth­ers, the suf­fer­ing had just begun. As I write this, the tal­ly of homes destroyed in the Woolsey fire exceeds 1500. In the wake of the dead­ly Camp fire in north­ern Cal­i­for­nia, res­cue work­ers have found almost 100 corpses and hun­dreds more are miss­ing. The con­di­tions there are dire. They believe the search for bod­ies will extend well into 2019.

Most of the fam­i­lies of those killed in the Bor­der­line shoot­ing had to evac­u­ate their homes the day after the mur­ders. The Tues­day I came home, they began to bury their lost loved ones. Memo­ri­als for the slain went for­ward every day that week. Hun­dreds came to hon­or each vic­tim. Over 4,000 peo­ple attend­ed Sgt. Helus’s funer­al, includ­ing hun­dreds of fire­fight­ers and law enforce­ment per­son­nel, most of whom hadn’t slept for days.

The fol­low­ing week, our fam­i­ly came togeth­er at our Thanks­giv­ing table. In the past, we’ve giv­en thanks for what we have, but this year was dif­fer­ent. While so many fam­i­lies in our com­mu­ni­ty were sift­ing through the ash­es of mis­ery and loss, we could still hug our loved ones and hold them close. So this year, we donat­ed fam­i­ly funds to the vic­tims of the shoot­ing and the fires, and we gave thanks for the only thing that mat­tered to us when we thought we might lose every­thing: the safe­ty and health of those we love.

Dona­tions to the Ven­tu­ra Coun­ty Com­mu­ni­ty Foun­da­tion for the vic­tims of the Bor­der­line mur­ders and the Hill and Woolsey fires can be made here: https://vccf.org/. The North Val­ley Com­mu­ni­ty Foun­da­tion is col­lect­ing dona­tions for the Camp Fire vic­tims here: https://www.nvcf.org/fund/camp-fire-evacuation-relief-fund/.

About fif­teen years ago, I got inter­est­ed in ances­try research. At a fam­i­ly reunion, I told every­one I intend­ed to trace our fam­i­ly tree as far back as I could go. One of my nephews gave me the hairy eye­ball. “That’s not a good idea,” he said. “You may find out things we don’t want to know.”

I thought his con­cern was ridicu­lous and ignored his warn­ing. About a month lat­er, I found records on Ancestry.com about William Odor, who turned out to be our most famous fam­i­ly mem­ber by far. Born in Illi­nois in 1844, he gained nation­al noto­ri­ety dur­ing the sum­mer of 1870. The sto­ry of his rise to coun­try-wide promi­nence begins in the spring, nor­mal­ly a sea­son of hope and optimism.

On May 12, 1870, a Mis­souri Pacif­ic Rail­road pas­sen­ger train pulled into Eure­ka, Mis­souri, before dawn. It was due to arrive in St. Louis at 6:00 a.m. A freight train left St. Louis about the same time, head­ed for Eure­ka. In those days rail­road com­pa­nies put down a sin­gle track and trains trav­eled in both direc­tions on it. When two trains were sched­uled to trav­el toward each oth­er, one of the trains was required to pull off onto side rails, which were spaced at inter­vals along the sin­gle track. Under the Mis­souri Pacif­ic rule, pas­sen­ger trains had the right of way over freight trains, and freight trains were respon­si­ble for giv­ing it to them.

The dis­patch­er in St. Louis told the freight train’s con­duc­tor, William Odor, that the freight train could pro­ceed toward Eure­ka for thir­ty min­utes, but after that, it would have to give way to the pas­sen­ger train by pulling off on a side spur.

The pas­sen­ger train’s engi­neer, J.P. Jack­son, eased his train out of the Eure­ka sta­tion a lit­tle after 5:00 a.m. About a mile and a half into the trip, the pas­sen­ger train entered a sharp turn, and Jack­son saw the puff­ing smoke­stack of a freight train bar­rel­ing around the bluff at full speed toward him. He hit the brakes and reversed engines.

The freight train’s engi­neer, Joseph Tra­cy, tried to brake his train, too, but there was no hope of stop­ping an engine of that pow­er at that speed pulling that much weight.

The engi­neers and con­duc­tors on both trains jumped free just before they col­lid­ed. The two loco­mo­tives reared up on their back wheels like wild stal­lions fight­ing one anoth­er. The impact of the crash com­pressed the pas­sen­ger train’s six cars into its loco­mo­tive like the folds of an accor­dion, shred­ding them into strips of met­al and wood. The engines then slid down an embank­ment, drag­ging the cars and pas­sen­gers with them. Corpses, body parts, and injured sur­vivors lit­tered the tracks and embank­ment. Nine­teen peo­ple were killed. Thir­ty were injured, eigh­teen of them with ampu­tat­ed limbs or col­lapsed inter­nal organs.

Jack­son and the pas­sen­ger train’s con­duc­tor did their best to help the sur­vivors. The freight train’s engi­neer and con­duc­tor, Tra­cy and Odor, ran away. As best I can tell, Tra­cy was nev­er found. Odor was tracked down the fol­low­ing day and detained.

A coroner’s inquest deter­mined that he was at fault. As the con­duc­tor of the freight train, it was his job to keep the train on sched­ule. He ignored the dispatcher’s instruc­tions that he could run no more than thir­ty min­utes before pulling over to give the right of way to the pas­sen­ger train. The freight train had been on the track 45 min­utes when it hit the pas­sen­ger train. Odor’s defense was that there must have been some­thing wrong with his watch, the pas­sen­ger train conductor’s watch, or the clock at the St. Louis sta­tion. The coroner’s jury didn’t buy it. They found him cul­pa­ble; the pros­e­cu­tor indict­ed him for mul­ti­ple counts of manslaugh­ter; and the court jailed him pend­ing trial.

News­pa­pers all across the coun­try ran sto­ries about the train wreck and its after­math for months fol­low­ing the col­li­sion. Every arti­cle in every news­pa­per high­light­ed William Odor’s wan­ton reck­less­ness as the cause of the tragedy. Punchinel­lo, a New York week­ly satir­i­cal mag­a­zine, called for the death penal­ty (prob­a­bly tongue-in-cheek), mak­ing a pun with my family’s name. “(W)e fer­vent­ly desire to have this ODOR neu­tral­ized … with strychnine.”

Sigh.

Mer­ci­ful­ly for me and William Odor’s oth­er descen­dants, the press grew weary of the train wreck by the end of the sum­mer and his ignominy fad­ed into the mist of his­to­ry. I could find no records about the rest of his life. I don’t even know what hap­pened to him in the crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ings, but giv­en the noto­ri­ety of the case and the num­ber of deaths and injuries, it’s like­ly he served a long stretch in a Mis­souri prison.

For years I searched for some coun­ter­bal­anc­ing hero­ic ances­tor in the fam­i­ly tree. One guy was a fifth cousin of Daniel Boone, but if you do much ances­try research, you’ll find that almost every­one alive today in the Unit­ed States can claim some dis­tant con­nec­tion to the famous pio­neer, the rea­son being that almost every mem­ber of the Boone fam­i­ly spawned ten to twen­ty kids.

Oth­er than that, all I could dig up was a third cousin twice removed from Pres­i­dent John Tyler’s sec­ond wife. Tyler was William Hen­ry Harrison’s Vice Pres­i­dent. When Har­ri­son died of pneu­mo­nia, Tyler became the tenth Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. He was wild­ly unpop­u­lar. The first impeach­ment res­o­lu­tion ever intro­duced in Con­gress against a Pres­i­dent was aimed at him. His own par­ty, the Whigs, reject­ed him when he tried to run for reelec­tion, and most his­to­ri­ans rank him along­side James Buchanan and Mil­lard Fill­more as a bot­tom-feed­er among U.S. Presidents.

So my family’s only pathet­ic shot at genealog­i­cal redemp­tion for William Odor’s Mis­souri slaugh­ter is a ten­u­ous con­nec­tion to one of the crap­pi­est pres­i­dents who ever lived.

But that’s not the worst of it. I made the mis­take of research­ing my wife’s fam­i­ly his­to­ry, too. One of her branch­es goes back to William the Con­queror. Her ances­tor took care of William’s hors­es on the bat­tle­field. Her tree has roy­al Plan­ta­genet fam­i­ly Eng­lish lords and ladies hang­ing all over it. One of her fore­fa­thers, nine gen­er­a­tions back, was the brains behind the Vir­ginia Com­pa­ny which financed and found­ed the Jamestown Colony. Anoth­er one was an ear­ly Jamestown set­tler, a big hero who fought off scores of Powhatan war­riors dur­ing the Indi­an Mas­sacre of 1622 that wiped out more than half the colonists. There’s an island on the James Riv­er near Rich­mond named after that branch of her fam­i­ly. There’s more, but I don’t want to talk about it.

For the half-cen­tu­ry we’ve been mar­ried, most every­one who knows my wife and me has seen fit to remark soon­er or lat­er that I mar­ried up. To main­tain mar­i­tal bliss, I’ve kept my mouth shut over the many years, while secret­ly telling myself they were wrong.

Now this.

I should have lis­tened to my nephew.

Post Script: Maybe there’s still hope. I just found out there’s a Venezue­lan named Rougned Odor, who plays sec­ond base for the Texas Rangers. I can’t pro­nounce his first name and he’s only bat­ting .250, but hey, he’s in their start­ing line­up. There’s def­i­nite­ly a fam­i­ly resem­blance between us, don’t you think? The ears are a match for sure.