November 29, 2016
Just Saying…
By Q.C. Jones
Zat you Santa Claus?
“You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why…”
Is it just me, or have we all spent a lifetime avoiding the naughty list. For well over a half century, I have somehow greeted the month of December teetering on the very edge of Santa’s proverbial list. If my personality has even a tinge of paranoia, it comes by way of borderline behaviors and the vision of Jolly Old Saint Nicolas scratching his head and holding a quill to the no presents side of the parchment.
As a youngster, I imagined Santa positioned just outside the window. Fighting the early winter chill, perhaps shivering in his fur line suit, he took copious notes of my not so good behaviors. Whether at home or while visiting my dear old grandma’s, he conducted a shrouded mission to capture little ol’ me in a moment of rascally action. While others dreamed of sugar plums a dancing, I had reoccurring nightmares of a Santa spying. Although I’m not directly accusing Claus of peeping tom tendencies, the possibility should be explored.
Try as I might, I could never convince my family to keep those darned drapes pulled during evening hours. I surreptitiously visited the shades pulling them down past the sash. I stayed well out of direct sight of the windows. I even stuffed the skeleton key holes of our old house with tissues with hopes of avoiding the prying eyes of over curious elves. Long before words like this were used, I was compulsive obsessive about avoiding witnesses of the North Pole variety.
Somewhere around age six, I realized that Santa made it a habit to hang out in a special house down on our little town’s courthouse square. I was a clever kid. I surmised the coast would be clear until something like 7:30 each evening as Santa held court on his mighty red velvet throne. Temporarily abandoning his naughty and nice kid monitoring, I could breathe a sigh of relief for a couple hours a day.
Obsessing by day and distressing by night, I moved my abhorrent behaviors underground, literally. For example, whenever I “palmed” a Christmas cookie, otherwise saved for special family members and visiting dignitaries, I headed downstairs to a room designed as the family fallout shelter. There were no windows and a thick wooden door blocked the entry. Even if Santa had nuclear driven super powers, the shelter was designed to withstand atomic blasts. Ultimately, even this protection proved no match for the red-suited Claus. He always managed to find out…
Reasoning further, I developed a strong suspicion that Santa could be employing a complex network of spies, snitches and stoolies to monitor my behavior. It could be anyone; the kids at school, grouchy neighbors and even relatives. Could my younger brothers and sisters actually be serving as double agents for the Jolly one?
I set out to devise a master plan for identifying the culprits.
My little brother, some three years younger, would be easy. He was gullible, and we shared a bedroom. Late one night, right after bedtime, I got up and pulled open the already closed curtains. Making a big production of the effort, I returned to bed and whispered, Santa could be watching. Then I reminded him that I had put his dirty socks away, thus saving his stocking from an avalanche of coal. He bought the story hook line and sinker. Now that he owed me, I asked if he had shared any secret intel on my behaviors with Old Saint Nick. Mission accomplished, he denied divulging anything.
Turning my attention to my sister, the very next day I asked if she wanted assistance with her letter to the North Pole. I had an advantage, great handwriting and the ability to spell “Barbie Doll.” Now with my good deed completed and basking in the light of favors rendered, I dropped a probing question on the topic of Santa snitching. Still nothing linked to a naughty report.
The youngest siblings were twin girl toddlers. I doubted their ability to carry out undercover work for the North Pole consortium, but I had to check. I asked my mom, if Santa could communicate with two year olds. She replied that little girls are “naturally nice” until something like age four at which point they turned. I didn’t dig into the turning thing, but it smacked of discriminatory practices. Either way, my baby twin sisters weren’t the culprit.
Cutting to the chase of all this, let me give you the rest of the story. Year after year, I managed to squeak onto the nice list by a thread. Oh, I got the occasional single chunk of coal, a couple of bundles of switches and their postmodern equivalent – new underwear. But I scammed Santa out of an awesome Davy Crocket hat back in ’59, a genuine battery powered robot Christmas morning ’62 and buck knife in ‘72.
Realizing my track record for nice looked better than average and fortified by a bottle of genuine North Pole wine, I traveled down to the Mall and asked Santa directly, “How did you know?” After he finished his customary ‘HO, HO, HOing,’ he peeked over the top of his glasses and said, “QC I could tell you were naughty just by looking at you.” Wouldn’t you know it, Santa can read body language. My advice, only communicate with Santa by mail.
Just Saying….
