Published Wednesday, December 22, 2010 5:15 PM
Updated Wednesday, December 22, 2010 5:16 PM
I must admit, I've always been a little skeptical of everything, which may be why I’m a journalist as well as a jerk. But even as a kid, I often wondered if the Fat Guy Who Gives really did give that much of a reindeer’s rear end about what the bad kids of the world did.
Make a list? Check it twice? Who would have time for that, anyway?
I can remember all the awful things I would do, and somehow Santa either didn’t know about it or didn’t care. On the other hand, maybe he did -- I never got that motorcycle, pump-up pellet gun, or hang gliding lessons for Christmas. I did, however, get the occasional stupid magic trick kit or dorky sweater. Maybe the guy’s just subtle.
Still, fairness, or the lack thereof, is a bitter pill we all swallow early and often. We all wonder how some seem to get away with everything while others have all the luck of a possum at a steamroller convention.
The bad kid in my neighborhood -- he was one of my best friends at the time -- got away with murder, yet he got more stuff at Christmas than all the other kids in town combined.
While not the possum, I was definitely not Ritchie Rich, either – and my transgressions were always discovered swiftly and punished immediately.
This guy never got in trouble! He broke windows and peppered gutters with his fancy pellet gun – the one I never got for Christmas. Thanks to his favorite pastime of playing with matches, he was the sole cause of a couple of fires in the nearby woods, not to mention a couple of flaming paper bags full of dog poop left at front doors. Yet I never saw his parents do more than ask him why he felt he needed act out this way before attempting to appeal to his reasonable side.
I’ll say this for his parents: they were way ahead of their time. Today, asking why and appealing to a child’s reasonable side appears to be the only strategy parents go to when it comes to dealing with their urchins. Back then, it was the belt and the home prison sentence – our parents not only did not care to hear our side of the story, they did not care whether we even had one.
The only time I ever saw this kid get in trouble was once when he scared his baby brother -- that poor kid went through more Huggies than most maternity wards. Keep in mind I only saw it happen once -- my friend getting in trouble, that is; I saw him make his kid
brother blow out his britches many times.
It usually worked like this: Wee Baby Brother would be in his crib upstairs, having just been put down for a nap. The problem was, the crib was situated right next to a laundry chute. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, a laundry chute was an ancient technology -- a hole in the floor upstairs, if you will, through which a house wife – that’s a mythical creature long since declared non-existent by modern feminists -- would drop her family’s dirty laundry from a point upstairs to a downstairs laundry room.
Anyway, the baby would be settling down for his nap or maybe just smiling and cooing at the mobile of rubber duckies hanging so pleasantly above his crib, when all of a sudden the laundry chute trapdoor would burst open, a hideous green face with stringy gray hair and huge yellow eyes – a mask stuck on the end of a broomstick -- would slowly rise through the trapdoor until it was about eye level with the baby trapped behind the bars of the crib, and an evil disembodied voice would moan from below, “MIKEY! DO YOU SEE THE GREEN LADY IN THE WINDOW? BUWAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Usually, my friend’s mom would charge frantically up the stairs, a new box of Huggies in hand, and in a conversational tone ask my friend why he felt the need to frighten the baby, then attempt to appeal to his reasonable side. This time, however, both parents actually raised their voices at him. I didn’t know what else they did, but I was pretty sure that, having committed such a heinous crime that close to Christmas, whatever they didn’t do the Fat Guy would more than make up for.
He called on Christmas morning -- as I was unwrapping a big box – to ask me if I wanted to watch him shoot out some car windows with his new pellet gun.
So I put on my new dorky sweater, put away the magic trick kit, and headed out the door.