When I was a kid, I absolutely believed in Santa Claus. I bought into all of the lore: Coming down the chimney (even though we never had one), reindeer on the rooftop, sneaking around in the middle of the night, filling our stockings and providing my brother and me with gifts that my parents swore they couldn't afford.
I remember some Christmas Eves in which it was difficult for me to even fall asleep. I was so excited about the prospect of being deemed a good little boy and being showered with presents as a reward. I recall one night in which I was laying down in my Aunt Cind's room and started hallucinating about the Three Kings. (And Mom and Dad wondered why I appeared to be so grouchy the first thing those mornings.)
That all changed after the Christmas in which I was 10 years old. I realized the truth about Santa. However, Loyd still believed, so I still kind of had to go along with it. But I wasn't going to lose any sleep over Santa again.
I remember a "Bad News...Good News" cartoon in Mad Magazine. In the first panel, it said, "Bad News is finding out there's no Santa Claus." The second panel said, "Good News is finding out it doesn't make a difference" and showing a boy under the Christmas tree with a lot of gifts. That's pretty much how it was for me and Loyd. We were still greeted with large presents on Christmas morning, regardless of whether we believed in Santa. The only bad thing was that when we were teenagers, Mom and Dad still insisted that we wake up early on Christmas morning, even though there were no other little kids in the house. I was REALLY grouchy then.
But one thing I did like about how Christmas was done by my parents was that Loyd and I were always aware of who was giving us gifts. We knew that only the special Christmas morning gifts and stockings stuffers were provided by Santa. All the other gifts were clearly labeled who they were for and who they were from. Santa was not going to be used as an excuse to avoid writing thank you notes.
So I frequently wondered how I would handle Christmas when I grew up and had kids. I certainly did not like my sleepless Christmas Eves of anxiety and wouldn't wish them on anyone else. After Boyd was born and we had experienced his first Christmas, I had a discussion with Myz. I told her I would prefer if Boyd didn't absolutely believe in Santa. I didn't know how we were going to get it to work, but I didn't want him to believe that Christmas was all about Santa. We never came to any real consensus about it, but we knew that we wouldn't have to worry about it for a couple of years.
That and the next two Christmases were spent with Marina's younger brother, his wife and their daughter Quyd (Boyd's cousin), who was five months older than Boyd (and experienced her first Christmas when she was a month old). Those holidays went off without incident and we didn't have to do anything special for Christmas morning. We just had to wake up, wait for other family members to arrive and then open presents.
But that all changed for Christmas 2016. Boyd was three years old and Quyd had just turned four. They had both watched enough TV in December to know that somebody was supposed to come down the chimney in the middle of the night and deliver presents. They were excitedly talking about Santa coming. I hadn't anticipated that they were going to understand this. I didn't know what we were going to do. We hadn't gotten them anything special. In addition, I was prepared to try to explain the Santa thing to one child, but I wasn't going to be able to do that with a child who wasn't mine. It looked like we were stuck.
On top of that, I had to hope that no one questioned how Santa was going to get out of the fireplace without breaking his neck:
Fortunately, Boyd fell asleep that night without any issue. Myz went out into the living room for a bit. I thought she was setting something up and waited for her to come back. When she did, I went into the living room. Imagine my surprise when I saw a cup of milk and a little bag of Oreo Minis there and NOTHING ELSE! I rushed back in the bedroom. Myz hadn't fallen asleep yet. "Hunny! There's nothing from Santa out there!" "Well, no, we don't have anything!" "We can't do that! The kids are expecting something!"
Myz and I went back out. We already had stockings sitting out with their names on them (along with other ones for the rest of the family). Fortunately, we had a couple of candy canes that we were going to give the kids the next day. We put those in their stockings and grabbed bananas and apples to fill the rest out. We didn't have any little toys or other gifts to put in, so it was all food items.
I also got out a piece of printer paper and quickly wrote a note from "Santa" to Boyd and Quyd, telling them they had been good and wishing them a Merry Christmas. I hoped they weren't expecting more.
As it turned out, I had a hard time falling asleep that night, worried about the reaction of the kids.
We were still in bed the next morning when we suddenly heard a SHRIEK from the living room. Boyd got up out of bed. I scrambled to grab my phone so I could take video and pictures.
Quyd was screaming, "He came! He came!" She held up the note and somehow, she seemed to be able to read what it said.
They were both excited about they had received. I was relieved. After this, I realized that all we needed to do was just fill their stockings. We would likely put other things like toys and other knick-knacks, but we weren't going to have to go overboard and set something special up each year. It looked like we had reached the perfect compromise between doing nothing and killing ourselves for the kids each year.
However, Myz decided to add a new twist for the next year. in 2017, Quyd and her family no longer lived with us, but we still planned to fill her stocking as they still lived in the same town and would be coming by to spend Christmas Day with us. I had shown Myz a YouTube video of parents who had left snowy footprints in their living room. I just thought it was funny. I didn't present it as a Christmas morning routine that we should co-opt. That year, Myz got a can of spray snow and put footprints on our carpet.
When Boyd woke up the next morning and saw the footprints, he said, "Somebody's going to have to clean that up!"
We did the footprints again the next year, but the spray snow can ran out. For 2020, I pretended that Santa couldn't leave snow footprints because of COVID-19 and left paper footprints instead. Boyd still seemed happy about it. We did the same for 2021, but I stopped doing that in 2022.
One year, Myz wanted to put a Nintendo Switch in the stocking. I didn't want to do that because it meant we were going to have to outdo that the next year. However, Myz couldn't get it to fit in the stocking, so it just became a gift from Mom and Dad. I was relieved.
A few years ago, I was discussing our Christmas routine with a co-worker. I mentioned that Santa only puts gifts in the stockings at our house. Her eyes widened, like she just realized that she didn't have to go crazy for Christmas all those years with her kids (who were already adults).
Boyd is now 11 and he's started to get a little cynical about Santa Claus. He says he'll continue to believe until he's 13, but I think the end is going to come a lot sooner than that.
And what's going to happen to the blog a this point? I don't know. Things are very complicated in my life that I don't have much time to myself to work on it.
At least I still do one post a year.
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