Echoes of Christmases Past

Do you have a favourite Christmas memory? Or do you have too many Christmases that you don’t care to remember? My younger brother has one of those stories that you wouldn’t wish on anybody from when he was very young. You see, where I come from (Sweden) Santa comes to your house on December 24th, and when I say he comes to your house, he comes through the front door while you’re awake, not through the chimney while you’re sleeping, either! Usually it’s the dad from next door who’s got dressed up as Santa, or some uncle or whoever is game. There are masks and beards and suits to buy in the store, and one year, my very young brother (something like 2 years of age) had found such a mask with attached beard. He’d somehow managed to get to close to an open flame. Do you know what happens when fake beard made of fluffy cotton meets flame? That’s right…WOOF! The result wasn’t so much a disastrous amount of burns to his face and hands as a long-lasting terror relating to anything Santa Claus-ish. Me, on the other hand, I have another Santa malady story… When I was about four or five years old, we lived at the top of a hill. The house backed on to a grassy ravine. That ravine was great for tobogganing and snow ball wars – no trees or shrubs, just a long, wide open slope that came to a soft low grade stop at the bottom. Man, we could make those toboggans go! I don’t have any idea why Santa, a.k.a. my dad in disguise, decided that it’d be a great idea for Santa to come up that cotton picking ravine, as opposed to come up the street and in the front door like any other Santa…I guess he had this idea that it would be picturesque and exciting for me and all my (seemingly) 100 cousins, aunties and uncles to all gather on the patio to watch Santa with his big burlap sack full of gifts come up the snow-clad hill. Oh, it was picture, alright, only not how he’d intended it… (I’d like to point out that this is the same hill that my older brother used to run up and down…with me on his shoulders…in order to make himself a hockey super star, and he was a whole lot younger than dad and I was a lot lighter than the burlap sack full of gifties, but it’d still just about kill him!) More than half way up the hill Santa ran out of steam, slipped in the icy snow, fell and slid back down the hill while we, the children, watched as our Christmas presents were distributed all over the darkened hillside. I remember crying from feeling sooooo sorry for poor Santa. Later that night, Dad returned from “some errand” (you know the one that made him miss Santa’s arrival), and only minutes after that, we heard this funny sort of “clink-sploosh…clink-sploosh” sound emanating from the patio where we’d just stood watching Santa back slide. What can that be, wondered the children. My dad did not wonder. He immediately recognized the sound of the beer that had been left to cool in flats out on the patio freezing in its glass bottles, causing the bottles to explode and the beer to spill down the patio and onto the lower deck and lawn. My poor dad… The whole incidence only got worse by the fact that in the spring, when the snow thawed, I found Santa’s torn burlap sack spread out all over my dad’s bed of pruned roses… Oh, dear, poor Santa! And then I cried for his troubles again. What malady could possibly have befallen him that was so bad that his sack would have torn and somehow ended up on dad's roses?! I really, really loved Santa. Especially when he looked and sounded like my dad.

Happy Holidays to all of you!

(Oh, and remind me in the New Year to tell you about a True Reid New Year’s Eve…)