I didn’t believed in Santa Claus until 2007 when, on a sunny December day in Florida, I met him. I had gone to pick up some food from a Peruvian restaurant, and as I was leaving the parking lot, I saw him. Of all places, he was in a random plaza on the corner of Gun Club and Military Trail in West Palm Beach.

As a child I didn’t grow up believing in Santa and always thought it was a Peruvian thing. But later, I found out many of my Peruvian friends, and even some relatives, believed in him, so it must have been a household thing. It makes sense; I grew up, because of my father’s job, listening and reading clinical cases and enjoying my mother’s unusual bedtime stories. I would ask her to invent her own because the traditional ones bored me. Therefore I believed, with no, hesitation in Gregor Samsa turning into a vermin after a night of estranged dreams, or I believed in Coronel Aureliano Buendia starting 32 civil wars and loosing all of them, even the flying carpets of Aladdin in ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ seemed more believable than the big man with the red suit bringing presents around the world in one night.

But, when I saw him that bright day in December he was just another man. He looked tired, and I figured it was because all of the traveling. His red suit, too thick for the Florida sun, danced around him as he seemed to have lost some weight from the pictures I had seem of him. The second to last button on his jacket was not black like all of the others, but brown, and I imagined Mama Claus sewing that button last minute before he left the North Pole. As he walked to his old burgundy Ford Taurus [I guess he uses it for local transportation while the reindeers rest waiting for their next big trip], I noticed he seemed happy, tired but happy.

His beard was not the white one like in photos, but more of a three-day beard that resembled someone who is exhausted - rather than someone ready to jump down into a chimney. His shoes were old, so was his belt, so was his hat.

I thought of going up to him, maybe trying to interview him, but understood he didn’t have time, since it was a few days before Christmas and who knows what he was doing in West Palm Beach. The poor guy had had to deal with millions of letters during the whole month, and probably the last thing he wanted was a non-believer asking him questions. He looked like a busy parent, and in a way, he may be.

That is what I understood that December afternoon, that he was the Santa I wanted to believe in. A hard-working man trying to get presents for all of the kids across the globe. A real man, as real as the kids who believe in him and their dreams.