[SPOILER ALERT: Anyone who believes in Santa Claus, still writes letters to and receives letters from Santa Claus, or would prefer not to hear stories about how other people came to believe that there was no Santa Claus, should be warned that, um, stuff is about to be said that might change the way they feel about, you know, Santa Claus].

[ADDITIONAL ALERT: Anyone who doesn’t “get” the humor of comedian Greg Proops should be warned that the actual Greg Proops appears to say some pretty humorous things about Santa Claus, beginning roughly halfway through this article].

“How old were you when you stopped believing in Santa Claus?”

That’s the question I’ve been asking over the last few weeks, as my now concluded one-man-show Polar Bears played its inaugural run at Main Stage West theater in tiny Sebastopol. The show, about my attempts to allow my kids to believe in Santa Claus longer than I did (I was 4 years old, statistically a bit young for the magical Santa wool to be lifted from my eyes), an effort I took on despite a number of major setbacks, including the death of my kids’ mom just before Christmas, when they were 7 and 8. In my personal case, my loss of faith was the result of my parents using the same wrapping paper for Santa’s gifts to me and my brothers—the paper had little polar bears on it—that they used to wrap their own gifts to my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and even the priest at our church.

As I say early on in Polar Bears, I might not have been the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but Jesus Christ! Really, Mom and Dad? How hard would it have been to get a different wrapping paper for all of the stuff from Santa Claus?

Click ‘Here‘ to read the full story in the Pacific Sun