The Truth About Santa

I’m taking a little break from my Ode postings to have a little Christmas fun... for those of you having a good time with the song parodies, Mary’s will be up sometime tonight or tomorrow.

For today though, I’m in a Santa mood... we put up the outside lights over the weekend and I’m getting the front room and dining room carpets cleaned tomorrow so I can put up the tree this week... we’ve just started our Advent Calendar and the kids each made their Advent wreaths... I can finally turn on some Christmas music and actually enjoy it... whenever the stores or radio plays it prior to December it just cheeses me off!

Anyhoo......... somewhere in blogland, sorry I don’t remember now whose blog I was on – if you recognize it as yours just yell at me for the lack of linkage in the comments – they were discussing when they found out the truth about Santa... it got me to thinking because my daughter just figured it out this year... she has a friend a few years older than her who told her that Santa is mom and dad last year and she’s been doing some detective work since then about Santa, the tooth fairy, and the Easter Bunny, one of many reasons that I call my daughter ‘Ms. Marple’ .... to her credit, she took it all with a grain of salt and is playing along so her brothers don’t find out. She also knows not to mention it in school at all, in case there are some hold overs in the fourth grade that still get to believe in the magic of it all.

Truth be told, I don’t remember ever believing in Santa. That doesn’t mean I didn’t, only that by the time the secret was ruined I was far too young to still remember it as being a big deal. Then again, I was the youngest of three, with two very cynical and worldly brothers that were older than me. My first memory of the fat man was when I was three years old, going on four. I know this because it was the same year that I split my head open a few weeks before Christmas and some things you just remember... I remember going head first into the coffee table. I remember my mother freaking out and putting me up on the counter while she got ice and frantically called my father, as she was home along with three kids (ages 7, 5, and 3 at the time) and my dad had the only family car. I remember watching drops of blood drip past my eye, and not knowing enough to cry about it... I also remember looking down at my oldest brother, whose head was only a little taller than the kitchen sink. He looked up at me, matter of factly, and said, “Head wounds bleed profusely, you know. You could bleed to death.”

Seriously, that’s exactly what he said, the little jag off... he was always like that, though, the kid read science books for fun and he used his rocket scientist IQ to scare the bejeezus out of me... which worked, after he said that I started to cry... anyway, my dad’s friend came and took me and my mom to the hospital, I got stitches and a candy cane and I think I broke the poor nurse’s fingers because she told me to squeeze my hardest while they were giving me the stitches and she looked none to pleased by the time I left...

Anyhoo, in all the hubbub and excitement, we never made it to the mall to see Santa, and my mother was not happy about it. She kept telling my dad they had to go and he kept putting it off for a myriad of reasons (by the way, she got her own car as a Christmas gift that year and she never did thank me for the head wound)... by Christmas eve she was frantic about it and gave him quite an earful... My dad, in turn, called a guy he knew that was a cabbie and just asked the man to meet him at his office that he needed a favor. The cabbie flew right over, thinking my dad needed a ride or whatever, and my dad greeted him with a Santa suit. This poor guy had no idea what he was in for, but he went ahead and put the thing on and my dad brought him home.

The fat man came in the door with my dad with a present for each of us – mine was a cupie doll with a plastic swirl of hair and eyes that closed when you laid her on her back. And I will never forget this for as long as I live – ‘Santa’ sat each of us on his lap in turns, as he sat on my dad’s big old recliner. He asked us what we wanted and smelled like cigars. And under his breath he muttered, “Ho, ho, ho, I could be at the airport right now makin’ fifty bucks! Ho, ho, ho!”

I still think that was about the funniest Christmas Eve in the history of man. My parents weren’t normal, but God love ‘em, they did their best and they were a damn good time.