No matter what I say, when it gets closer to Christmas, I start to feel something.  I don’t really require material things, which is a good trait because there won’t be any this year, but still, I do like my childhood memories of getting things.  Every year, on Christmas Eve, my parents would give me, and my brother and sister, our new ice skates.  I suppose the tradition is that we could have one present on Christmas Eve night, but that present was always our new skates.  My mom would dress us in matching nightgowns and pajamas and snap a pic of us holding our skates seated at the foot of the Christmas tree.  And then there was the tree itself.

Many of those years, my family lived in Calgary, and if you don’t doubt that place is cold, check the weather.  Well, I say that, and as I type this, today I’m only a bit warmer in Los Angeles.  It could it be that’s what’s making me want to write this — this uncharacteristic cold weather.  Where was I?  Oh, the tree….  My dad would drive us to the Christmas tree lots and I would chose the biggest tree he would allow, and by biggest, I mean the widest.  And there’s a reason I said “lots” because it was a process to choosing the perfect tree.  We would all walk around in that bitter cold as a family, often to about three lots before I was happy, or before someone said “enough Whisper, all the trees are the same”!  They weren’t you know?  They weren’t the same.  I found the very best one, the very fattest one, every year!  Then we would take the tree home.  But don’t think it was to be decorated then.  No, no!  My father waited until the tree was “thawed“, usually at least one day, sometimes two days, with the tree sitting in the lobby of our townhouse.  He would string the lights, never enough in the estimation of my brother, but apparently lights were expensive.  In present-day times, my brother’s biggest rebellion is to that, to the Christmas lights of our childhood; my brother puts so many lights on the tree, the lights blow fuses.  But then, in the days of my childhood, I thought our lights were perfect and beautiful.  After the lights, the children would place the glass ornaments and balls on the tree, while I had the record player repeating Nat King Cole’s Oh I’m the Happiest Christmas Tree, the best Christmas song ever.  Then my mother would place presents under the tree, one by one, until there were presents surrounding the tree.  Santa’s presents would arrive on Christmas morning, and by morning I mean no earlier than midnight and no later than 4:00 a.m., a fact I know from nightly Santa patrols — this tactic I forced my brother and sister to participate in so that I could definitely and directly prove or disprove the existence of Santa.

To talk about that Santa patrol requires a description of our slightly unusual house.  Our house was a townhouse.  It was split-level on five floors, with three levels on the front, offset against two levels on the back, with five half stair cases with see through risers connecting each of the levels.  The stair case went through the entire townhouse like a tower, such that you could see all the main rooms and the lobbies of the floors where the bedrooms were.  The children’s bedrooms were on the top floor.  My parents’ room was on the next one down.  Then the next one was the den, kitchen and breakfast areas, then… the living area — one large room with a dining area, with a patio off the back.  The lower ground floor was the lobby-hall and garage.  There was a basement below it all.  That said, my plan in this patrol, was to hang my head upside down from upper level so that I could see the foot traffic into the living room through the stair risers.  But that required stealth movement from our respective beds and careful placement on the stairs.  And that required flashlights, little tiny stealth flashlights that somehow, although I can’t remember how, came from cereal; I think we collected box tops, then sent in for the flashlights.  And the last step: the plan required us to carefully step in the places where the floors did not squeak.  My brother and sister dutifully started training, under my careful supervision, about now so that I could figure out where the floor creaks were and determine how and when to wake everyone up.  We would do this a fair amount on the pre-Christmas weekend mornings until I thought the mission was ready.  And on Christmas Eve, after the ice skate photo, and dressed in those special nightgowns and pajamas, and after I had feigned sleeping, I would wake up my brother and sister.  We would set out on the patrol.  We would see our parents having drinks and eating cheese.  Most often, our parents would catch us on the quest, and many times I was rushed back to bed, sometimes, carried, still in the upside down position.  Never did we see Santa.

And Christmas morning always came.  I would awaken my brother and sister again, usually around 4:30 or 5:00 a.m., and we would go downstairs to see the already-set-up-ready-for-our-play presents from Santa.  Always, I got everything I wanted, further compounding the mystery and magic of Santa because I never told my parents what was on the list, more proof of the existence of Santa because if they, these people my friends said were Santa, didn’t know what was on the list, then Santa had to exist, he had to be real.  I wrote a list though, a tiny folded ever-evolving piece of paper, and hid it, always in the same place, in the track of my bedroom window.  Track of the window, no parent could find that right?  And then there was money.  We had only enough money for two strands of lights, and for many of those years I didn’t get much during the year, way different from Christmas when I got everything, so no doubt Santa Claus was real and was magical.  He had to be, yet I wanted definitive direct proof of his existence, something more than I could get from my hidden list that my parents never saw, something more than the economics of my life then, something direct and not merely my own circumstantial belief.  But despite all that work on Mission Santa patrol, I never saw him.

Years later I would recount my Santa patrol strategy with my mother, still not understanding how it was that I got everything on that list, how anyone other than Santa could have found the list, how anyone other than Santa could have afforded everything in the years when there was so little.  My mother — a woman who cleaned everything in enormous detail, walls, baseboards … windows — simply told tell me Santa had an easy time because my wants weren’t that big.  But I know they were.  So … thanks … Santa and Mrs. Claus for giving me everything I ever wanted.  Thanks to my dad, and the rest of my family, for always going to lot after lot until I was happy with the Christmas Tree.  Thanks to my dad for going into the forest outside Austin to chop a little cedar tree with an axe the first year I was in law school when neither of us had anything, and still, in that forest going from tree to tree until I was happy with the little tree he chopped down.  Thanks to my parents for teaching me that life is a cycle, that there is good and hard, and that we have to believe.  Thanks for these memories because no matter how little Christmas will bring this year, I had all the Christmases I’ll ever need for a thousand people’s lifetimes!

Still … you know what?  If it’s okay with y’all, I think I’ll make a list.  I’m going to put on it all the secret things I really, really want — big impossible things.  And I know just where to hide it!