Happy (Santa) Holiday 2015

My parents had a very stoic take on childhood imagination. There’s no Santa, my brother and I were told plainly. No Easter Bunny. No tooth fairy. No God.

If we wanted to be creative we could practice chemistry. Or physics. Or study geods.

I’m not bitter. I look on my parents’ lack of ability to get on board with these harmless fabrications as their sincere belief that it’s wrong to perpetuate lies. As someone who believes firmly in God we simply agree to disagree on that front.

But I do remember one magical childhood Christmas spent at my grandparents home in Hillsdale, Michigan. It was a white Christmas, which was extra special as my brother and I were raised in Virginia where it rarely snowed. My family was there, as was my mother’s brother Tom and his wife Charlotte.

Aunt Charlotte has a serious side. She is very practical and no-nonsense. And Tom and Charlotte hadn’t had their children yet so my brother and I got all of the adults attention.

On Christmas morning there were deer tracks meandering outside my grandmas dining room picture window. How thrilling! But Charlotte stepped it up a notch. She told me and my brother, in all seriousness, that those were no ordinary deer tracks. Those were reindeer tracks. And she grew up on a farm. And she’d know.

I was almost convinced that my parents were wrong, simply wrong, about Santa. If Aunt Charlotte said Santa had come, and she was a genuine adult with all that secret adult knowledge, then surely it was possible?

Thanks, Aunt Charlotte! That was my closest run-in with Santa and I’d hold it up against any other child’s Santa thrill.

Happy holidays everyone, have a wonderful time.