I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before – so if I did, you can just skim on past or perhaps visit one of the other fine blogs I’ve listed over on the right. See you tomorrow!
Okay, for the rest of you – I just wanted to say that when I was a kid of Santa-believing age, every Christmas Eve was a hellish sleepless night for me. That’s right. Hellish. You know why? Because Santa won’t come if you’re awake. And if you do happen to wake up, you have to pretend you aren’t awake because what if that noise wasn’t really the heat registers but Santa in the living room? My house growing up was tiny – 4 rooms and a bath, and if I breathed the wrong way, Santa would know for sure and he wouldn’t leave anything. So I would lay in bed, rigid with fear, waiting for either sleep or sunrise.
Doesn’t that sound happy?
It wasn’t. I did the same thing the night before Easter. I was always the kind of kid who heard noises at night and assumed the worst. I am exactly the same as an adult. It was a blessed relief to learn the lowdown on Santa, let me tell you.
Okay, so fast forward to last night. Junior asks me what he should do if, on Christmas Eve, he needs to get a tissue in the middle of the night. Because he’s not supposed to be awake, you see. Oh God, how cruel to make our children so much like us. Junior may look like his dad, but he’s got so much of me in him. His current paranoia is tornados hitting the house, or fire burning it down. I refuse to admit to him that tornados are a big fear of mine. Even though, as I told him for the 100th time that I’m almost 40 years old and I’ve never seen a tornado, so I’m pretty sure we live in a safe place. It’s weird how you have to act like you aren’t afraid of things you are, just to keep your kids sane.
Anyway, I told him it’s okay for him to get a tissue, Santa knows that sometimes people wake up and roll over. And that Santa is in and out in an instant, so chances are, he wouldn’t be there anyway. I mean, what else do you say without blowing the whole thing. I just wish someone had told me that when I was little, but who’s to say whether or not it would have made a difference.
