Christmas Without Santa


 

What if the stockings were hung by the chimney and no one cared? Well, if you have kids who are too old to believe in Santa, but too young to appreciate a fifth of tequila under the tree, this is indeed what you have.

We are into our second official year of life without Santa. (The two years before that were questionable.) Needless to say, this changes the approach to Christmas morning the way Herman Cain changed the approach to job interviews.



Pre-Non-Believing



Here are a few things that are different when you no longer have to look your child in the face and lie for four weeks:

1. No more being up at 2:30 in the morning assembling a toy that will be broken and missing pieces (if not largely ignored) by 10:00 AM. This also means you may actually be on speaking terms with your spouse in the morning, though you will miss drinking beer in the basement with two thousand toy pieces the size of thumb tacks scattered around.



2. Since the kids now know you are a liar, they see no reason why they have to wait until Christmas morning to get their presents. They will say, “If you already bought it, just give it to me.” You will tell them some stupid anecdote about how it will be more fun to wait until Christmas; about how they are still your baby; but really, you think of just getting it over with and giving up the goods.

3. You won’t have to pay $19.50 for a picture of your child with a drunk Santa that will go immediately in the shoe box with the 2,395 school pictures you have. (You have this many school pictures because it is cheaper to buy the package with fifteen life size cut-outs and 300 8x10’s than the five pictures you actually want.)

4. You have to find some better hiding spots for the gifts you do buy. Bonnie and I use the “In Plain Sight” tactic. (This differentiates drastically from when the boys were little and we could literally hide them in plain sight – like in the corner with a blanket thrown over them.) Today, we need to be a little more ingenious, and choose a place they would never think to look – somewhere like next to the clothes on the floor in their room.

5. For the first time, you consider how much interest you are going to be charged on your credit card to pay for Christmas gifts that will total the GDP of some developing countries.

So when the jig is up and you have nostalgia for bursting smiles Christmas morning, it finally hits you. The laundry and the homework, the appointments and the meetings, set that all aside, if even for an hour, and bask in the greatest gift – family. Whether it is the one God gave you, the one you made or the one you found. It is, after all, the one gift that no one returns.