All’s Not Lost if Santa Falls Short : Memories: Disappointment can linger over wishes that go unanswered. But experts says it’s healthy for children to learn that you can’t always get what you want.

It’s a Christmas wish that Mickey Aubain wishes she could forget. Even nearly 80 years later.

“I’d asked for a doll,” she remembers. “My sister and I had both asked for one.”

But when the 3-year-old and her 5-year-old sister excitedly tumbled out of bed and raced to the Christmas tree in search of the dolls they had asked Santa Claus to bring, they weren’t there.

To this day, Aubain regrets that Santa stiffed her. And she’s not the only one.

It seems the season of good tidings and great cheer doesn’t always live up to the expectations of tiny imaginations. Santa may forget a child’s Christmas list. But kids don’t--even after they grow up.

“I was so very disappointed,” said Aubain, now an 82-year-old retired Lockheed worker who lives in Chatsworth. “I’ve never forgotten it--I was so very disappointed.”

There had been every reason to believe that Santa would deliver. She had been a good little girl that year on the Eastside, where the family lived, Aubain said.

And she and her sister, Ethel, had even met Santa in person--posing as sleeping tykes with him for a 1915 Christmas cover photograph for the Los Angeles Times magazine.

In La Canada Flintridge, nuclear engineering consultant James Owens vividly remembers the Christmas in the late 1920s when he asked for a pony.

“I was 7 and living in Middlesboro, Ky., and I wrote Santa and told him what I wanted,” Owens said. “We were poor folks, so it wasn’t surprising I didn’t get one.”

Peter Koch-Weser, an advertising executive from Cheviot Hills, was 11 when Santa brought him a bicycle. Unfortunately, it was about four years too late.

“There were a number of Christmases when I was 7, 8 and 9 that I was really wishing for a bike,” Koch-Weser said. “Problem was, my parents were intent on me saving some of my money for one and then they’d pitch in the remainder.”

By the time Santa finally came through, “the excitement about getting a bike was kind of over,” Koch-Weser said. “My parents had worked the earning-your-own-bike thing to the bone. Each year I’d think, ‘My gosh, when is this going to end?’ ”

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Ann Bradley, a mother of four who lives in Valencia, was 8 when she asked for play equipment for the back yard of the Canoga Park home where she grew up.

“I wanted one of those big poles that have a circle of rings on them that you swing on like a carousel,” Bradley said. “I was convinced I’d wake up on Christmas and there it would be. It didn’t seem unreasonable at all to ask for it.”

She remembers being shocked when she didn’t receive it that year. In fact, she never got it. “I was devastated. I can’t even remember what I got that year--it didn’t make an impact.” Some Christmas wishes are clearly out of the reach of Santa Claus and all his elves put together.

“When I was 5, my mom took me to a big department store and I asked Santa to bring my father back for Christmas,” said Gloria Sander, a Silver Lake resident who is a curator at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

“It was 1963 and my dad was working in Saudi Arabia. I remember wishing for him to come back and wanting it very deeply.” Her father finally returned home the following Easter, she said.

Babette Wilk, a Studio City interior decorator, said unfulfilled Christmas wishes are routine for her.

“You mean all those years I wished for world peace?” she asked. “I haven’t given up.”

Neither has her daughter, Wilk said. “She’s still wishing for a pony. And she’s 29.”

Experts say there’s no reason for parents to feel guilty if their child’s Christmas wishes didn’t come true today.

“Kids have to understand what’s realistic,” said Deborah Stipek, a developmental psychologist and professor of education at UCLA, who runs an on-campus elementary school that serves as a university laboratory.

“Parents should tell the child right away that something’s not a possibility. You increase their expectations if you don’t.”

Stipek said parents can handle children’s disappointment over Christmas gifts by apologizing and saying, “You’ve given me some good ideas for your birthday or next Christmas.” The child’s attention should be then directed toward the toys that he or she did receive, she added.

Most children get over their disappointment on their own.

Barbara Lewis, a marketing consultant from Bel-Air, said she had wished for a doll from Hong Kong when she was 5. “I was anticipating it so much. A friend of my parents was going there and was supposed to get it but she came back without it. I was so disappointed,” she said.

A few years ago, Lewis traveled to Hong Kong and briefly considered buying the doll she never got. “I decided to buy clothes instead,” she said with a laugh.

As for Aubain, she eventually got her Christmas wish. Her mother and an older sister teamed up two years later to get her a Christmas doll. And that launched a doll collection that Aubain maintains to this day.

“I have happiness now,” said Aubain--who with her husband, John, has decorated their mobile home with 9,000 Christmas lights this season.

“This year my wish is for good health.”