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Intro: The 12 Days Of Christmas Memories
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Closing
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Early in the grade school years, at my birthday party in February, my friend Andy gave me the space Lego set Shuttle Craft. And so it began. Space Legos were the perfect toy for me -- I have a gift for three-dimensional awareness, I was starting to become mystified with astronauts and outer space, and there was something magical about the way that just a few hundred nondescript little blocks could transform into something much more than the sum of their parts, and in an infinite variety of ways.
My Lego collection grew rapidly, but my hunger for Legos grew at an even higher rate. I had already taken to studying the Lego catalog as my bedtime reading, and there simply weren't enough events in the year where I was guaranteed to get more Legos. One year in March, with my birthday just behind me, I realized that it would be Christmas before I could expect to receive more Legos. But my Lego mania knew no bounds, and December was further away than I could stand to wait.
On a sunny March afternoon, I sat down at home at my little wooden desk, took out a sheet of red construction paper and some Crayola crayons, and wrote a letter to Santa Claus. In true kindergartener fashion, this letter obeyed no rules of letter writing. Most of the letter consisted of the list of Lego sets that I wanted for Christmas; when I ran out of room wherever I was writing, I found a blank spot on the page and continued with the next item on the list. But this wasn't merely a wish list. I told Santa that I couldn't wait until Christmas, and I did so with these words:
"SEND THEM NOW OR I'LL BLAST YOU!"
That's right, I made a threatening bluff to Santa Claus, just because I didn't want to wait nine months for Christmas to arrive. So when I handed this letter to Mom and asked her to mail it to the North Pole...what could she have thought? I mean, perhaps it's funny now, but if your supposed little angel threatens a munificent stranger who brings joy to kids all around the world...out of mere impatience...I mean, how the hell are you supposed to deal with that?
Mom probably did the best thing -- she took the letter and told me she mailed it. Then about a month later, Mom suggested to me that maybe it wasn't very nice for me to have threatened Santa like that, and that perhaps I owed Santa an apology. Overcome with the feeling that I may have screwed myself out of presents, I sat down to write Santa another letter, this one on light blue construction paper. I apologized to Santa for threatening him, and I told him I could wait until Christmas to get my presents. Then I used the rest of the sheet of paper to list all of the other Lego sets I hadn't been able to fit into the first letter.
Shortly thereafter, my parents told me the secret of Santa Claus (his suit is laser-proof), probably so they didn't have to deal with this shit anymore. And as we know, that went well.
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