The Year of Suspicion

Our niece is 9 this year, and we think this may just be her very last year as a Santa believer. In fact, this is The Year of Suspicion. I think we all had that year, that it is a right of passage for children. You started to hear talk at school or from older siblings, maybe you identified the similarities between Santa's handwriting and your Mom's, or noticed the use of the same wrapping paper on gifts from Santa & from Mom & Dad.

I myself had The Year of Suspicion when my Sunday school leader sent home a letter to parents, requesting they bring "Gifts from Santa" the following Sunday so that the teachers would have time to wrap them before our church party. I was 6, just beginning to read well, and therefore reading everything I could get my hands on (sealed envelope addressed to my parents, be damned!).

This year, the niece greeted us on Christmas Eve with an autograph request. Turns out that she had written a note to Santa to leave with his cookies & milk, that also asked for his autograph. Apparently, the little stinker wanted to compare handwriting samples. I was impressed with her thought process, but Grumpy immediately started plotting a way to get 1 more Year of Belief from her.

...Let me preface this part of the story by telling you all that the Grumpy One, he loves his sleep. He'll nap at any opportunity he gets, he's the king of the snooze button, and he's nearly impossible to get out of bed in the morning. In fact, he's napping now, at 7pm on a Friday night, as I sit in the living room and blog. Welcome to our non-existant social life...

My sleep loving husband crafted himself a plan. He decided to borrow his Dad's Santa suit (Dad plays Santa at a charity event every year), and come back to the house in the middle of the night to deliver presents. He'd also sign the note while he was there, in a handwriting style that was completely foreign to his own.

You'd think he could have pulled this off without the suit, or that one of the 3 adults sleeping in that house that night could have managed to take care of the note from Santa in the wee hours of the morning. But, it was his idea, so he wanted to be the one to do it. And the suit? That was just in case he got caught.

The alarm went off at 4am, and the Grumpy One suited up, drove the 15 minutes to his parents house (hoping all the way to get pulled over and have a lovely little early morning chat with the lucky officer, but no dice), left the presents under the tree and the autograph on the note, nibbled on some cookies and drank a little milk, and drove the 15 minutes back home to de-suit and fall back into bed.

God, this man really needs to be a father. Can you help us make that happen?