Two memories of Santa deception. 😊
#1 I was the youngest of four kids in my family and my sibs were six, nine, and 13 years older than me. The afterthought kid! As a result, when I was five years old, all of my sibs were already past believing in Santa. It was Christmas Eve. My parents made a pretext to get all of us kids out of the house. I believe they might have asked my brother to take us somewhere to get ice cream? Anyway, we were gone about an hour and when we returned home, there were all of the presents under the tree. And my mom and dad were at the back door yelling "BYE SANTA!!" 😂 "oh wow" they said, "you JUST missed him".
(I know early in the evening on Christmas Eve is not the usual time for Santa to do a drop off, but one of my family's traditions was to open a few presents after we got home from late night Christmas Eve service, so I suppose a delivery while we were sleeping wouldn't have worked).
#2 My sister's husband is the best granddad, and of course part of that is arranging proof of a Santa visit. On one occasion their daughter's family was visiting and daughter's son was about 4, the perfect age for such shenanigans. My brother in law actually finagled something to make marks in the snow on their roof that looked like footsteps (maybe a shoe on the end of long stick?), then leaned himself outside of a second floor window to use it.
Christmas morning arrived. Grandson did not need waking up of course! But my brother in law was up early too and said, "Grandson, you'll never believe it - I think Santa was on our roof last night!" They went outside to look up. Oh, the joy and awe and excitement! It was so sweet.
Merry Christmas to all, and may Santa be good to you.
(pictured: drunken Santas on a pub crawl in Auckland, New Zealand)
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I remember asking when very young, how Santa was going to get in our house as the fire places had been bricked up, my mother's answer was that they would leave the front door open. Today on the radio I heard a great answer to the same question as most houses these days are built without chimneys, Santa has a special skeleton key for the front door!
Happy Christmas and A Happy New Year.
Santa always finds a way!
It’s so sweet for the family to keep childhood beliefs alive for as long as they can 🙂
Great memories. Merry Christmas to you. 🎄
Merry Christmas!
Those are wonderful, happy memories. Thank you for sharing them.
Hugs!
I always loved Christmas. My mom would decorate the house from head to toe. Our house or my house is only 1200 sq feet. But she could cook the Christmas dinner and my family would bring the sides but she still did most of the cooking. By the time families grow and things change we had any where from 16 to 20 people. We didn't care about the room it was about us all being there. We had such a good time. My two cousins who were married would play with my and my brothers toys all day. We had so much fun the last to leave was my cousin Janet and her husband. My mom was like her second mom it didn't matter though it was fun having her here.
My brother and I were so very fortunate to have two very loving parents who would do anything for us, and they did within reason. I had a very happy childhood and when I said about my house. When my mom passed away I bought my brother out and I live in the house that I grew up in.
You were fortunate indeed and I'm glad you have such fond holiday memories. Merry Christmas!
@smartasswoman I almost forgot to ask if you or anyone you knew Celebrated the Eve of the Feast of St Nickolas which was on December 5th. It may have been more of a German Catholic sort of thing. We would always put out our Stockings then and find them full of fruit and candy in the morning.
@justskin1 interesting, nope my family didn’t do that. My dad’s mother was German but not Catholic.
@smartasswoman I had often gotten the impression that for some in Germany many if not most Catholic German families celebrated the Eve of St Nickolas with gifts etc more than Christmas Eve.
Sending you big Christmassy hugs and may you have an enjoyable and very festive Christmas.
I have many loved Christmas memories that I think would be good to share. I will try but have to admit I have had difficulty getting myself to write these past few months. I think I am finally getting over that problem.
Santa always came to our house fairly early in the evening while we were all down to my Mom's parents meeting up with most the Aunts, Uncles and cousins from that side of the family. With seven of us kids Santa never wrapped out presents. Christmas is always more fun when there is a kid young enough to still believe in the house.
Sending you big elfdressed hugs along with Very Merry Christmas wishes.
Seven kids, wow! Where were you in the birth order?
@smartasswoman I was number five. It did have the advantage of having elder siblings who were old enough to start buying us younger ones Christmas gifts and we always had big Christmases.
Sending you big Christmas hugs and may your Holidays be filled with joy and fond memories.
Such a sweet set of Santa stories. 🤗
And to you as well. 🎅🎄
Merry Christmas Paul!
As a kid, Christmas was a special time for me and my siblings. When I was eight years old, my mom and older brother kind of broke it to me as gently as they could. From then on, Christmas wasn't what I expected. My folks always went out of their way to get us what we wanted, but from that point on, I never asked for anything expensive. I knew how hard it was if my dad was paying for stuff and I felt horrible that he would have to spend it on us let alone something really expensive. It just was never the same after that. I felt sorry for my dad because he had to bust his ass at work and I felt guilty asking for something that really wasn't important to me anymore. One year, I think my dad realized that even though he insisted that I ask for whatever I wanted, he knew I knew it was him paying for it and I didn't want to through that weight on him. To this day, I still feel bad for what he did for us. I guess the guilt of him busting his ass for us to have some cool toys was always something that I thought we didn't deserve. I would have preferred he didn't have to work so hard for something that wasn't so important, like toys.
Oh, that's very bittersweet. I have to admit I never thought about Santa being a mechanism to allow kids to ask for whatever their hearts desired. It sounds like you were a very unselfish and empathetic kid, to feel that way once you realized your parents were buying the gifts. A lot of kids would not go through the thought process that you did!
You shouldn't feel bad though. It clearly was important to him to treat you at Christmas.
@smartasswoman Thanks, I knew growing up hearing my dad complain about the crap he would have to deal with at his place of work. I just thought, why would I want him to spend a lot of money on a toy when he had other things to take care of at home.
I took good care of the toys I had already, so it wasn't that I had broken toys and needed something new. Besides, my generation had much more fun creating and making things to play with. We would ask my dad to bring us from his job, rolls of masking tape. Then with boxes from the grocery store we would use the cardboard, empty paper roll tubes and the tape and we would make stuff to play with. Spaceships, card board ray guns. I had more fun making stuff and playing with it than anything you would buy at the store. Once we got older and would explore the tool shed for material and stuff to work with, the imagination would kick in.
@CallMeMrWrong69 my boyfriend would love that story. During the summer he works at a camp called "Adventures in Cardboard" where the kids make their own adventures and build everything (even castles) out of cardboard. So true that kids can have as much fun with their own creativity as with a piece of plastic bought from Walmart.
@smartasswoman My mom would make extra money taking care of a few kids after they got out of school and during the summers while the single mother was working. This one kid who was a spoiled brat had a bunch of cool toys and wouldn't let us play with them, so between my two brothers and me, we built a GI Joe doll size Star Trek shuttle craft that you can sit in the chairs we created for the action figure. The kid wanted to join us but that wasn't going to happen because the kid was a selfish twit.
The thing that was surprising, when the cardboard and tape craft will build started to breakdown from the ware and tare, we decided it to throw it out, that kid got down on his hands and knees and begged us to give it to him. He said we could play with his toys all we wanted.
He was so overjoyed to be holding and playing with our hunk of junk. To be honest, after holding his toys and seeing what they can do it was actually boring after a few minutes. We had more fun with the stuff we made. It showed me that what we created felt better and was more enjoyable than any store-bought toy. We felt that because we added little features like compartments to put action figure gear in it and had a door where a cardboard drone will pop out of, was way cooler. It gave me a sense of accomplishment because it was created by us and not bought from a store.
I expect your older sibs were perfectly happy keeping Santa 'alive' for you.
I appreciate that they were willing to play along!
My parents were more than a little crazy. Around our house, Santa did EVERYTHING while the kiddies slept. That meant not only delivering all the presents, but assembling things like bikes, and setting up and decorating the Christmas tree too.
I think my brother in law's childhood was similar. I recall his father reminiscing about many Christmas Eves where he and his wife were up half the night, drinking and assembling things and wrapping gifts.
Kids make Xmas extra special.
So true. Now that all of my nieces and nephews are all grown up it's not quite the same. Although a new grandnephew arrived last summer and he's local, so I can hope for a bit more fun like this.