Santa, The Tree Guy

Waiting for Santa.

Today marks another deadline in the Christmas Decorum calendar. If you don't have a tree up, (in you window,) trimmed and lit by 6 pm tonight, you don't meet the high standards of a home owner, UNLESS you're one of a disappearing breed of parent that lets Santa bring the tree on Christmas Eve, decorate it, load it up with gifts and slip out of the house.

When I was a child, lo those many years ago, I was blessed with a low IQ. I never knew when Christmas morning would be, because no one told me, and I was too slow to add up the clues. I would simply awake in the dark one cold Spokane morning, and run down the stairs and there it was. A cascade of colored lights poured over a tree which had appeared from nowhere. From the glow of the tree I could see gifts piled under and around it.  My sock, and I do mean my sock, which I had hung days ago was now all stretched out of shape by fruits and nuts and one glorious big candy cane. It hung proudly in a line with the other socks, confirming that I had been good, or at least good enough.

I suspect that few parents are willing to wait until Christmas Eve to let Santa bring the tree
 and perform a miracle in their living room.  It is a lot to ask of an old man. Putting up the tree alone is hard work, and then to ask him to assemble bikes and wrap gifts and fill stockings seems over the top, especially when his reward is a deadly carb/sugar disk on a plate. And who drinks milk when they're trying to stay awake?

With my IQ it was just as well that I didn't know much about Santa. I only saw him once a year, in the department store, so he was a fairly mysterious guy. I had no idea when exactly Christmas would be. I didn't need to know. As long as I hung up that sock when my mom said to, everything would fall into place. So on that one, amazing morning when Christmas happened in our house it was the most glorious, miraculous, and mysterious thing that could happen. I knew that after all my scoldings and discipline for bad behavior, I was cherished.

It took a few more years for me to figure out by whom.