Is Santa Real? A Doubting Brother And The Gift Of A Mother's Voice
As a kid, NPR editor Bruce Auster loved to record his family talking. A snippet of tape captured by chance on a long-ago December night marked a moment before cancer changed everything for his family.
When I was a kid in junior high, I owned a cassette deck, a big brick of a recorder. I'd hide it on a chair at the dinner table, then push the red record button. No one but me knew it was there. Later, I'd listen to what I captured.
One December night in the early 1970s, I happened to record the moment when my younger brother began to doubt whether Santa Claus exists. And for
