Post Bedtime on Christmas Eve, Eye of the Hurricane

I still have much to blog about and many updates to make, but as I sit here in a dim living room which is slightly cluttered with leftovers from the day's hubbub, hoping my children are falling asleep quickly so I can go to bed soon too, I just wanted to sit and think and write for a bit. It's not even midnight so that's pretty impressive.

We've had a very nice December, although we have had exactly zero snowstorms. Not even very many flurries. We have had quite a bit of rain the last few days. Troy and I have been torturing ourselves by thinking of how many snowy inches would have been piling up if it had only been 10 degrees colder. Oh well. Actually, all the weather reports are predicting a pretty decent storm coming in tomorrow so we might have a white Christmas after all, but it would have been really nice to have been snowy all month long. My dream? Thanksgiving night, just as we're finishing the last of the pumpkin pie and putting away dishes, we look outside to see in the light of a street lamp little flakes starting to drift down and stick to the cold ground. As the evening wears on and we allow ourselves to turn on the first Christmas music of the season the snow picks up and silently fills the sky. Then it would proceed to dump snow for four solid weeks until Christmas was over. Then we'd get a lovely January thaw. Yes, I would love that.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a little memory. Gregor has known about Santa Claus and my extremely close relationship with him for quite some time, maybe two or three years. And his excitement and giddy anticipation has not decreased in the slightest. Perhaps it has even increased. And now he's trying to get in on things a little bit - he likes talking to Skippidy about Santa and he wrote this really cute little note in swirly handwriting saying Enjoy Your New Toys! and signing it Kris Kringle. It's adorable. And it reminded me of a Christmas a long long time ago when my big sister and I decided to play Santa.

I wish she were here with me right now to help me remember more details, because it's actually pretty hazy. But it definitely happened. I must have been 9 or 10, and she was 12 or so. We were still living in Boulder Colorado, and I seem to remember that Margaret approached me with this idea. Basically, she wanted us to pool our money together (it couldn't have been much) and buy secret presents for everyone in our whole family, including ourselves, so that no one would know that we were the ones who had done it. We wanted to go out and get these gifts, secretly wrap them, and get up in the dead middle of the night on Christmas Eve and sneak out to the living room and put them with all the other gifts and my parents would think that maybe, just maybe, Santa had really come to visit.

Somehow the two of us managed some alone time at a mall....which makes me wonder if I'm remembering this incorrectly and we were actually a little older and we had already moved to Salt Lake City....I dunno. Who cares. Anyway, we managed some alone time at a mall and picked out small gifts for each of the six people in our family. Sadly, I can only remember what one of these gifts was. It was for my dad, and it was a small metal globe of the world, about the size of a softball. It was also a bank. Though I have no idea what the other gifts were, just thinking of that little tin bank fills me with the absolute magic and delight of Christmas. To have a secret, to be doing something good for someone else, to be included in on a plan of my big sister....it was just magic.

Amazingly, it totally worked. We got the stuff. We got it wrapped. We even wrote out notes in this shaky cursive we practiced, trying to make it look like legit Santa writing. We shared many sly winks and sidelong grins at each other. We really did wake up in the dead of night, crept into the living room, tucked the gifts in with the other things and in the morning got up and played it very cool. What I will always remember is my dad opening that bank, pausing, looking up at mom with clear bewilderment in his eyes, and mom looking back and blankly shaking her head at him. How I didn't burst into giggles I have no idea. Maybe I did. Maybe after the magic of the morning and the success of our plan we ended up blurting out the uncontrollable truth to our parents. I don't remember. I just remember being so completely energized by the success of plan that I was pretty much floating for the whole day.

Now that was fun.