Christmas Admissions

True stories, from yours truly, on this terribly unproductive day at the office:

I totally believed in Santa Claus, right up until Grade 5, when I read that he wasn't real in a Beverly Cleary (or Judy Blume?) book. I may have told this story before. It was also how I learned about the wonders of female menstruation.

The Chip and Dale segment of the Disney Christmas Special always made me wish I could live in a Christmas tree. I can't be the only one who feels this way.

My most memorable Christmas, #1, was in 1985, when a Christmas Eve snowstorm left my mother stranded at the hospital where she worked. We had to wait until she got home to open the gifts, and man, it. was. agonizing. I hereby coin this: the Great Christmas Pause of '85. I think we probably called her every fifteen minutes to see what was up, before going back to stare wistfully at the piles of unopened presents under the tree. In the end, I got the He-Man Cyclops doll (sorry, action figure) and the IQ-2000 board game. It was a good haul.

My most memorable Christmas, #2, was a few years later in our "new" house. I woke up really early, like 3:00 AM or something, and there was no way I was going back to sleep. The rest of my family refused to get out of bed (rightfully so) and I was left to spend the next 3-4 hours eating the candy from my Christmas stocking, perusing my O-Pee-Chee hockey sticker book, and speculating on what could be wrapped in that gigantic flat package under the tree (it was a bulletin board). This must have been 1987, because Patrick Roy hoisting the Cup was on the cover of my sticker book (man, the things you remember). The haul that year also included SpotBot.

In the days when we were still dragged to Sunday school, there was an activity that required us to place a single piece of hay into a paper manger for every good deed that we did over the week. By the following Sunday, I had a single piece of hay in my "manger", which I generously gave myself after holding the door for someone at the grocery store. Meanwhile, other kids' paper mangers were collapsing under great bales of hay, leading me to suspect that (i) my idea of a good deed was somewhat different that theirs, (ii) these kids were probably really annoying to be around, what with the incessant good-deed-doing, and (iii) I must have been a pretty rotten kid. In retrospect, all of these things were probably true. Man, I hated Sunday school.

Nowadays, I can barely bring myself to make a wish list, but I am pretty excited to see how Lydia is going to react.

Merry Christmas, team.