“Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus.” –The Sun, 1897

It happened one day when I was nine.  My brother Matthew and I were goofing around in the basement when I saw it:  the empty package to the totally awesome, all I ever wanted Magic 8 Ball I had gotten from “Santa.”  Matthew does a pretty good lip-quivering imitation of when I asked him, “Does that mean Santa’s not real?”  He laughed, and then I ran off in tears.  (Due to my dramatic delivery, he thought I was kidding, and we’ve since reconciled).  I spent the next two hours crying and shouting accusations of dishonesty at my mother.  I asked her, “Why did you lie to me?” over and over.

I hardly remember anything from my childhood, but I remember that life-altering day.

There was never supposed to be a Santa for my offspring.  This condition was made very clear when I was pregnant with Geraldine, and Nate, not having such strong opinions, agreed.  But then, when she was four, something awful happened:  Santa propaganda from the ouside world seeped in and made a believer of her, despite our efforts.

Despite my frustration, we played along with both girls for a couple years.  But, every time I heard one of them say “Blah blah blah Santa blah blah,” I’d start to cringe.  Then, if there was another “Blah blah blah Santa blah blah,” I would wince.  A third time would result in twitching.  I have a low tolerance for twitching.

During a cringe-wince-twitch episode last week, I signaled Nate that I couldn’t take it anymore and was going to tell the girls the truth.  I ignored his “Are you sure this isn’t the worst idea you’ve ever had?” look and sat them down individually to talk about it.  I thought it went pretty well.  When Nate asked Gigi if she still wanted to pretend about Santa (which was original approach all those years ago) she said, “No, Daddy.  Once you know the truth, you can’t go back.”

I prematurely counted it as a win, before the signs that she wasn’t totally okay with it started showing up (e.g., she started reciting names of trusted adults who reportedly still believed in Santa).  Then, this weekend, it came to this conversation:

Rhys:  Daddy, I still believe in Santa.

Nate:  You do?

Gigi:  (yelling from the bathtub)  Me too.

Nate:  (to Gigi)  Why?

Gigi:  Because I can.

Nate:  *facepalm*

Me:  (shouting to both of them)  Well, I don’t want Santa to get credit for all those Christmas presents I just bought!  With my own money!

That one will go down as one of my greatest parenting moments, I’m sure.

The same problem, with a slightly different face, came up again yesterday when I heard Rhys say from the other room that she was going to write a letter to Santa.  Then she quickly covered, saying “I mean Grammie!  I’m going to write a letter to Grammie!” I asked if she was really going to write to Santa, and she said, in an exaggerated tone, “No, Mama, Santa’s not real.”  Then she gave me this placating smile, like she respects the fact that I’m completely jaded, but that she’s privvy to a source of wonder and enchantment that I just don’t understand.

My kids are sending me a clear message:  They want me to retract my previous statement so that their imaginations can run wild and enjoy the season to its fullest.  Call me stubborn or Grinchy or whatever, but that is one thing I am not going to give them.  I respect them, and I believe they possess the emotional intelligence to handle this particular transition from fantasy to reality, without crushing their spirits or ruining Xmas in the process.

I need a new approach, though.  Obviously.  Yelling about how much money I’ve spent ain’t helping.  I have a few ideas, though:

• Look at different Xmas traditions around the world, and holiday traditions of people who don’t celebrate Xmas—not a lot of consistency there.
• Pose annoying logistical questions—how does Santa do it, anyway?
• Play lots and lots of Xmas music to keep the spirit alive!

In the spirit of that last one, the Art of Irreverence will have a ten-part Xmas Music Survival Guide starting tonight at 11:11.  Because, even though I’m pushing the Futurama pronunciation of Xmas this year, I really believe in the fun and the joy and the love of this season.

Image credit:  “Sad Santa Hat” by Flickr user formatc1, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.

We may have started a new Thanksgiving tradition this year.  Turkey, pie, and extended family are all well and good, but we wanted to spend some time together this morning, just the four of us.  This has taken the form of a big breakfast and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.  (I’d never watched it before; it’s kind of an odd spectacle.)

From all of us at the Art of Irreverence… ^[1]

…to all of you, we’d like to say thank you for reading our blog, and making us a part of your lives.  We hope you have a great Thanksgiving, filled with whatever makes you happy!

^[1]  No, I’m not pictured, but someone has to be behind the camera!

The girls’ schools are now in opposite directions from our house, so most mornings I bring Geraldine and Nate brings Rhys.  On my days off, I can bring them both.  Two weeks ago, at Geraldine’s drop off, Rhys said, “But I never got to meet [Gigi’s teacher].”  Since she was still adjusting to the new arrangement, I figured it would be a good idea to walk up on the playground to say hi to the teacher and see how her big sister lines up in the morning.

When we got to where they line up, I found several other parents there, hanging around with their kids before/as the bell rang.  One child was crying, so it made sense for her mother to stay.  But the other parents?  Their kids were having fun, barely noticing them, and they couldn’t just leave them to pal around with their peers under the watch of the playground monitor?  I remember thinking, “It’s the end of the second week of school…cut the cord, people!”  I mean, do they show up at recess, too?  Because that would be Love You Forever creepy, and surely against the rules.

To counterbalance these parents’ hyper-attachment issues, I’ve been going less of the distance up the walkway with her each morning.  I did it in increments, just because she walked really slowly, unsure of herself, the first couple weeks.  But now she knows where she’s going, and gets there with confidence.  Yesterday, for the first time, I had her go up the entire walkway by herself.  All 20 yards of it.  It sounds silly, but the trend among parents is to walk the kids at least to the edge of the playground.

Logistically, I have to drive her to school.  The closest bus stop is half a mile away, and the school itself is 7/10 of a mile, up a steep hill the whole way (we live in a valley).  I still plan on walking her across the parking lot when we get there, because she’s not tall enough for cars to see her when backing up, but she can take it from there.

Agree?  Then I recommend Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids blog, if you’re not reading it already.

I can’t scrapbook worth squat.  My wedding album is an unfortunately memorialized testimony to that.  It comes down to the fact that I’m inept at anything spatially-oriented.  Thankfully I can write, so I’m not a completely frustrated artist-at-heart.  And pasting photos into a blog entry sort of fits the role of a scrapbook, in a manner that accommodates my need to annotate.

But at Rhys’s preschool, they’ve asked for family photos to make a collage so the kids can feel connected to their families during the day, or something.  This involved scaring up decent photos of her non-photogenic parents (hi, nice to meet you) and arranging them in a visually inoffensive way.  The result is what it is:

As you can see, I made ample use of right angles, ensuring that the word “collage” cannot be used even charitably.  But here we are, all family-like, and I can honestly say that, as far as my low standards go, I’m not disappointed with the end product.

Regardless of the arbitrary nature of any calendar system—the Gregorian calendar being no exception—getting to write 09/09/09 for a day is pretty cool.  Better yet is taking said arbitrary date and turing it into an event of sorts, like WMUR’s Day in the Life of New Hampshire.  I’m not desperate for our 15 seconds of fame, but I did think it would be neat to be a part of something connecting people across the state.

As we are inclined to do a couple times a month, we went down to Arms Park[ing lot] to walk along the river.  We brought along some peanuts to feed the ducks.  You can see the dozen photos I took on Flickr, but these are my favorites:

In theory, I’m a pacifist.  In practice, I sometimes get combative.  One place where this happens is on the playground.  If some kid cuts my daughter off in line for the slide, I may look for a way to trip him later on, or not-so-subtly shove him out of the way if his caregiver isn’t looking—and they never are.  I don’t think I’ve ever actually acted on such urges, but the blind rage that motivates them throws question on that assumption.

Okay, I’ve been known to make some loud comments about rude children.  Which prompts Nate to ask me, “How are you a children’s librarian?”  That’s easy to answer:  Because that equation is completely different.  My library patrons aren’t treading on my offspring, so their antics don’t offend me.  Certainly not on a personal level.

I have a hypothesis that my playground hostility is due to a natural instinct to preserve the species.  Another example of a preservation instinct is my missing tooth hypothesis.  See, after Geraldine lost her first tooth, I got squeamish when I looked at her.  I might have thought myself a bad parent, but my sister made an offhand comment about having a similar feeling with her son.  I looked straight into his mouth, which was missing several teeth, and felt nothing.

I had a similar reaction when Rhys had a patch of eczema on her back.  Trust me, I’m not the type to faint at the sight of blood—let alone rashes—but I was no longer able to look at her back during a bath, and it became Nate’s responsibility to administer the lotion.  I can see myself looking at other people’s lesions and infections and third-degree burns and to-the-bone puncture wounds and still feel less affected.

I suppose I could call it my eczema hypothesis, but that sounds much less intriguing than “missing tooth hypothesis,” don’t you think?

So, I was talking about my playground hostility with someone the other day, and I was about to divulge my preservation-of-the-species hypothesis, but I stopped short.  The reason?  I was about to use the word “evolutionary,” and someone had just entered the room that Nate recently identified as a rather adamant creationist.  Then came self-doubt.  So what?  Since when do I censor myself for fear of treading on someone’s misguided beliefs?

This is the rationalization I’ve allowed myself:  Although I consider it well-reasoned, my hypothesis is short on credibility, and I didn’t think conjecture would hold up well against blind faith.  If I thought there might be potential for debate instead of immediate dismissal, maybe I would have said it anyway.

My other rationalization is, there should have been beer at that party.

Ingredients–

• young children (recipe was field-tested with two girls ages 4 and 6)
• exhausted parent(s) who sleep late
• old, dried-out paint brushes that were never rinsed thoroughly (preferably ones kept out of reach, requiring step-stools and climbing on counters)
• baby wipes

The method was not observed, but the results looked like this:

Pretty cool, right?  Quite creative.  Then we find out that they did all this in the playroom, which (having never been intended to be a playroom) has white carpeting:

On one hand, the carpet could be seen as art, in and of itself.  On the other hand, the landlord probably won’t appriecate its artistic merit.  And he’s going to be in the apartment tomorrow to fix some sort of bathroom drainage problem that the third floor is having.  Time for carpet cleaners and crossed fingers.  Wish us luck.

During my last hour of work today, I perused what I assume is the latest issue of School Library Journal—the issue with the KT Horning cover story, at any rate—and in it there’s an article about using word clouds for signage and publicity.  Using Wordle, specifically.  And it looked like a whole lot of fun, so I started playing with it.  I got to thinking, hey, wouldn’t it be great if I could make these for the girls?  I bet they’d get a kick out of it.  Then I realized I could do so easily using their school evaluations!  Behold the results:

After I reviewed the The Legend of Zelda 1 a few weeks ago, I had a minor dilemma on my hands.  Should I donate it to the library, or keep it as part of my love for all things Zelda?  I went for the latter, which was good because Geraldine has enjoyed reading it (or looking at the pictures, anyway), something I didn’t expect.  And, not only that, but she’s written a story about it!  It goes like this:

“OCNE A PONE A TiME ThARE WASE A LITTLE GILR HOOW WASE NAMED ZALDA. ThA END.”

Picture it with the S’s backwards and giant periods.  Or, see the whole thing here.  If you can’t tell, I’m bursting with pride.