Ivan Macbeth’s Good Deed Goes Awry: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Good Deeds”

Playing Santa at the One-Room School in the 1930s: Unintended Consequences

Ivan Macbeth: 1904-1972

 

My mother, Ione Macbeth Peterson, told a marvelous story about how her father’s good deed in the mid-1930s went sadly awry, crushing her childhood Christmas dreams.

My mother was born in 1928 to Nora Hoffman Macbeth and Ivan Macbeth. Ione attended a one-room school, the Tivoli School in Blue Earth County, Minnesota. One December during her early elementary years, her teacher asked to talk to her after school. She wanted my mother to ask her father to do a favor for the school.

My mother obediently remained behind as the other children left and started their walks home in the chill Minnesota afternoon. Her teacher gave her a message for her father, both written and verbal, asking him to dress up to play Santa Claus for the school Christmas party, which was coming up in a week or so.

My mother couldn’t remember what she said to the teacher. She couldn’t remember the long, cold walk home. She was stunned. How could her father be Santa Claus? My mother, despite being nearly nine years old, still believed in Santa Claus. Now her world was crushed. She realized adults had lied to her. LIED. They had told her Santa brought her presents on Christmas. They had told her he rode through the sky on Christmas night in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, and that he stopped at the house of every child to bring the good ones gifts and the bad ones lumps of coal. They had told her Santa was real. And she had believed them, because they were her parents. Because they were adults, and adults were the source of facts and knowledge.

Ione Macbeth 8th Birthday

When she arrived home and relayed the message to her parents, and also expressed her confusion and feelings of betrayal, her parents laughed. They had assumed she had already figured out that Santa was a lovely Christmas fiction, and that she’d just been playing along as most children do, pretending to believe the last couple years. Their laughter just hurt my mother even more.

She recalled that her father did a good job as Santa. He had been pleased to be asked and was happy to do the job for the school—he saw it as his Christmas good deed. 

Ivan and Ione as a toddler on the Macbeth Farm--1930

Ivan Macbeth was a slender man, so she was amazed that he looked quite fat in the costume, and that his face was nearly unrecognizable under the full white beard. She remembers staring and staring at him, wondering how she had ever believed the school Santa was real—now that she knew who was beneath the padding and red clothes and black boots, it was so obvious that Santa was just a father in a costume, and that different fathers had played the role in years past.

As an adult, my mother recalled that for years after she remained mistrustful of adults. “If they could lie about Santa Claus, they could lie about anything,” she said. And when she had her own children, she refused to pretend that gifts came from Santa. She always made sure we saw her putting the gifts under the tree—there were no Christmas lies for my brother and me.