The Death of Santa Claus   "Santa Claus is dead," James said. He said that on Christmas Eve 1942. I had just turned 8, and my sister Doris was almost 7. We lived in Frankston with our grandparents, Mammy and Pop, and our Aunt Una and Uncle Randy. We were gathered around the radio listening to Christmas music when our cousin James came in. "I just heard it on KRLD," he said. "Santa Claus was shot down over Germany." "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Mammy said. James was never ashamed of himself. He was in high school and he terrorized his sister Janice and Doris and me. He shot Janice’s doll in the head with a B-B gun, and did things to Doris and me like chasing us under the bed with a red hot poker and holding us up by our ankles over the fish pond, threatening to dunk us. Our aunt Una winked and said, "Maybe we should take the stockings down since Santa won’t be coming." Our uncle Randy said, "Maybe we should wait and see. It might have been a false report." Pop, who was deaf and lived in his own private world, didn’t look up from the paper. I don’t remember, and neither does Doris, whether we pretended to believe that Santa was dead. But we left our stockings up. We always used Mammy’s long, thick cotton oatmeal-colored stockings, and in the morning they were stuffed full of oranges and apples and hickory nuts and walnuts and Brazil nuts and candy canes. Underneath them on the hearth were two pairs of roller skates, with keys. There was a nurse doll for me just like the one in the Christmas catalog, and a baby doll for Doris, a "wetting doll," that drank from a bottle with a nipple, and peed. I got a magic set like the one in the Christmas catalog; and Doris got a doll’s cooking stove, with a tiny skillet and pots and pans. We probably pretended to be afraid that James was telling the truth. The reason I think we probably did is that about a week earlier, we found the nurse doll in a closet. "Do you think we should tell them we know?" I asked Doris. "No," she said. "Me neither," I said. "Do you remember when we stopped believing in Santa Claus?" I asked Doris last week. "I still believe in Santa Claus," she said. "He brought me a package from you yesterday." Written by Bellelettres Belle's Index or