When I was as small a child as I can remember ever being, well before I understood Christmas to be the stressful holiday it seems to have become for adult people, the days leading up to the Big Event filled me with one overriding fear. It wasn’t that Santa might forget me; that had never happened. He’d had my beggin’ letter for the better part of a month by then; there wasn’t much more I could do to swing the outcome one way or another.
It didn’t have anything to do with the various transgressions I’d committed over the course of the year either. I knew I wasn’t an angel but I had friends who were a lot worse than I was and their behaviour didn’t seem to jeopardize their annual booty count. I may have had the usual number of fights with my brother and sister but I wasn’t a potato-stuffed-in-the-neighbour’s-tailpipe kind of kid. At least I wouldn’t be for a few more years.
My biggest fear was this: our house didn’t have a chimney. No hearth, no fireplace, no chimney to speak of, unless Santa was dumb enough to slide down that little pipe that came up from our furnace in which case we’d all be eating barbecued elf the next day instead of turkey. This worried me… tremendously. I was tortured by images of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, Blitzen and Rudolf prancing and pawing up on our roof while Santa, looking puzzled at not finding a chimney, shrugged his shoulders, twinkled his eyes and said, "No chimney? Screw ’em. On Dasher... etc."
Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, A Visit From Saint Nicholas , very precisely spelled out the mechanics of how things were supposed to work in the nighttime hours of December 24th. By the time I was ready for bed, I figured I’d already pissed Santa off because my stocking wasn’t hung by the chimney with care. My stocking was laying on the couch or taped to the wall. Even then I understood Santa was a very, very busy guy. He wasn’t going to want to have to spend extra time at my house just because I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain. He had a schedule to keep and it didn’t make it any easier if some wanker didn’t play by the rules. Stockings belonged on chimneys. What was there to argue about?
Of course, exactly where my stocking was really wasn’t the most pressing issue keeping me from falling asleep, a condition my parents assured me was a prerequisite for any Santa action to take place. Santa still had to find a way into our house. Mr. Moore was very clear on this point. "... down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound ." No chimney, no Santa. Capiche?
In the hours leading up to Christmas, I couldn’t help but to entertain some serious questions about my father’s sanity. After all, he’d built the house we lived in. In fact, when I was born, it wasn’t a house at all, just a basement we all lived in awaiting a house to be built on top of it. It was his design, his labour, his and his buddies’ sweat that put the eventual structure in place. What was he thinking? Why didn’t he build a chimney, a fireplace, a big hearth? Wasn’t this at least as important as a bathroom? Those early Christmases may have been the first times I ever questioned my dad’s infallibility. How could this towering figure of a role model overlook a chimney?
My parents, not insensitive to my holiday stress, were quick to reassure me Santa wasn’t so rigid he couldn’t roll with the punches. They said he’d just park the reindeer in the front yard and come in through the door. I didn’t buy it. I was pretty sure if I could get into houses through chimneys, I’d feel a little put off by the idea of walking through the front door like any mortal schmoe. I suspected something very important to me was in serious jeopardy if that was the best we could do.
I made sure my parents left the front-door light on – since I couldn’t talk them into a sign on the roof saying "Sorry about the chimney; please use door." I bribed the chubby old guy with some extra milk and cookies and a little something for the reindeer as a kind of pagan offering for our shortcomings in the chimney department. Then I trundled off to bed and tossed and turned until exhaustion got the better of me. The next morning was never a disappointment and I forgot all about my personal chimney daemons until the next year.
At least during those early Christmases in Iowa we had snow. Then my parents announced we were moving to Arizona. I thought that was pretty cool. We were going to live where the cowboys lived – the wild west, just a couple of hours from Tombstone, the OK Corral and Boot Hill.
It wasn’t until early December the horrible reality of living in Arizona dawned on me. There wasn’t going to be any snow in my new home at Christmas! What the hell good is a sled pulled by nine tiny reindeer in a place where there isn’t any snow? To make matters worse, the new house my father had picked out for us didn’t have a fireplace or chimney either! Carumba! I was doubly screwed.
By that time in my life I had an inkling – Warning: Don’t let the children read this! – Santa wasn’t a real person, at least not in the sense you and I, okay, you, are a real person. But assuming, for the sake of greed, Santa was real, I figured no snow and no chimney was going to sorely test his patience with me and, truth be known, I probably hadn’t been as good that year as the year before; after all, I had one more sibling to abuse by then.
The last day of school before that first Arizona Christmas we assembled and sang carols. I felt like a fraud singing Frosty the Snowman and White Christmas. Who were we kidding? We lived in the middle of a desert. I fell asleep on Christmas Eve a skeptic and awoke with my belief renewed for at least another year. No snow, no chimney and the old guy’d pulled it off again.
Santa, you never failed to amaze me. Now, not to be greedy, but could you maybe bring me some snow… please.
PS. I have a chimney now. Please just leave the snow on the mountains.
