Santa Claus is invoked by Ellen as a creature of magical capabilities and the image of a generous, beneficent adult who doesn’t exist. While at her first home with her birth parents, Ellen imagines her father thinking of himself as a kind of king or Santa Claus, but instead of granting wishes, he imposes his wishes on his family to their discomfort. Her knowledge that Santa is a made-up personage demonstrates that Ellen’s childhood innocence has been shattered early.

Her cousin Dora’s belief in Santa Claus, later, draws the uncomfortable parallel that other girls Ellen’s age have been sheltered and protected, allowed to retain fanciful, childish beliefs. Ellen, who envies the stories that Dora is told, imagines one of them being that her father, who died of illness, went up to the North Pole to become Santa’s helper, a confusion of Santa with Ellen’s version of God. At her aunt’s house, Nadine’s invitation to see what “Santa” brought her is an illusion Nadine quickly dispenses with by explaining that she got Ellen nothing more than paper because Ellen is too difficult to buy for. Ellen realizes the illusion that she might at last have found a family is as fanciful as believing in Santa Claus, the symbol of her vanished hopes.