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This whole Santa letter gig is new to me. My parents never tried to get me to believe in Santa Claus. They were pretty religious (to the extent I never got to watch any movie with a witch in it, not even a Halloween one), so they told me Christmas was all about Jesus’s birth and all that secular Santa stuff was a load of bull. I outed Santa to several kids at school, much to their parent's chagrin.
Was I hurt by my unbelief? I doubt it, although it did take away the possibility of getting something I knew we couldn’t afford – knowing there was no magic workshop introduced a concept of frugality for me at an early age.
Despite my own upbringing, we let the three-and-a-half-year-old little angel fervently believe in Santa. We’re also religious – we emphasize the nativity more than the fat guy – but we started trotting out “Santa’s watching” shortly after Halloween as a discipline tactic.
The little angel hasn’t written a letter to Santa yet. Instead, we follow the time-honored list-making technique perfected by my husband during his childhood.
I was talking to my beloved about this post, and I asked him if he remembered writing Santa letters, since I know I certainly never did. He said no, not really, but it was more all about the LIST. I also made the LIST; I just delivered mine directly to my parents. In order to construct the LIST, you must first have the 300-million page Sears or JCPenney catalog. JC Penney is actually charging for their Big Book now. What a crock. But you have to get these paper monstrosities, because there is nothing like 35 pages of Technicolor bliss in the toy section to send little hearts aflutter.
I have always been a planner. I would figure out what I wanted for Christmas in mid-November and stick to my story. My beloved says he and his younger brother (he is seventh of eight) would gather around that catalog and make a four-to-five-page list of what they wanted for Christmas.
“If we didn’t do this, we would get a John Deere tractor because my dad worked near a farm implement store, even if the words 'John Deere' had never come up in conversation once since my birth,” he says.
This year, the little angel handed me a pen and paper and began dictating the list she was also scribbling on her own piece of paper. (She can only write her name, so hers looked mostly like loops.) This is her list:
• Ponies
• Baby ponies
• Princess cell phone (I refused her one once in the drugstore check-out line, and she has never forgotten it)
• Hoppity chicken (we discovered this chicken at Bed, Bath and Beyond that clucks madly when you slingshot it across the room – I can’t believe she remembers this, either)
That’s pretty much it, though every time she walks into Target or Wal-Mart, we have to go on a tour of the toy aisle, bypassing only the “scary” toys and Bratz aisles.
Will we go so far as to mail this tome to Santa? Not this year, at least. On Dec. 1, her daycare has a parent’s shopping day out, so we’ve informed the little angel that we scheduled a meeting with Santa for that time. She understands meetings and offices, as we've both always worked full-time outside the home. She didn’t blink an eye when I told her we couldn’t miss the appointment with Santa because it’d been rescheduled three times already.
Hey, who mails stuff anymore?
