Dec 21, 2011
Christmas Fears
Last week I was invited to a gathering of moms and kids from my husband’s ward. (They split the wards just after I quit attending so I don’t actually know many of the people my family attends church with. My daughter, however, spends every Sunday with these children [and their mothers - who chiefly seemed to be members of the Primary presidency] and so I thought I ought to go and get acquainted.) As we were sitting around the kitchen one mom raised her concerns about how to break it to her kids that Santa isn’t real. Image(s) courtesy VintageHolidayCrafts.com
She told us that when she was a girl her mother played up the Santa thing to the hilt. She would wake up Christmas morning not just to presents and some half-eaten cookies, but also sooty footprints in the living room and reindeer tracks in the yard. Her mom put enormous energy into making certain her kids believed in Santa (and the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc). But then — on their ninth birthday — she took them out for ice-cream and just gave it to them straight — “Santa isn’t real.”
Imagine the broken hearts. More
As I mentioned before, I recently got some wonderful news. Without Facebook accounts (gasp!), my wife and I don’t have the convenience of info-bombing all of our friends and relatives at once, so we’re sharing the news the old fashioned way: calling people up, meeting people in grocery aisles, work cubicles, walking down the street, etc. (It’s actually kind of fun to retell the tale for the umpteenth time, but perhaps this means we’re vain, attention-hogs, you know?) Last week, during the upteenth-and-one rehashing, an acquaintance interrupted, smiling, and said, “You know, we’ve been keeping you in our prayers this whole year, just hoping things would work out for you.” 
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