I take children and Santa Clause very seriously. I feel that if a TV show is going to imply that there might be some hint of fiction in anything related to the whole situation, there should be a warning before hand. What if someone sees it who shouldn’t? Call me crazy, but Christmas is childhood, through and through. And I take my responsibility of maintaining the purity of children’s minds on the subject seriously.
So when I am around kids during the holidays, I always talk about the real reason that Christmas exists, the big man watching over us.
“Did you send Santa your letter?” I said to a small child in a post office in Ithaca.
“Yes,” she said.
“I didn’t get mine out until the 13th, so I hope he gets it. But I said ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ which are his biggest pet peeves. Did you?” I said.
“Mom, will you get this lady away from me?” she said.
Normally I have a great rapport with children, but this one must have not said Please, because she had a bug up her butt.
I was fortunate enough to babysit for one of my favorite families the week after Christmas, so we discussed presents, of course.
“Did you get anything you didn’t ask for?” I said.
“Santa brought us like, 10 gifts we didn’t ask for, obviously,” one of the boys said.
How could I be so naïve, I thought.
The second best part of babysitting around Christmas is playing with the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots after the boys go to sleep. Which was almost as much fun as they had opening them Christmas morning probably.
