Santa's Bells

"Santa was here!" shouts a cheery voice with sparkling eyes, making Christmas morning even more delightful.  Busy little hands sorting through wrapped presents, holiday music playing over the speakers, and blurry-eyed parents from staying up late to ensure someone was fast asleep before completing the final details of Santa's visit, gather around the Christmas tree.

Each year becomes more challenging to make Santa's visit believable. Initially, living in a small house requires Santa landing in the yard where simply making sleigh tracks in the snow with cross-country skis is all that was needed.  As years passed, the sleigh tracks needed spaced further and further apart.

"Hey, where's the reindeer footprints?"

"Oh, um, er, let's see.  Oh ya, while Santa is in the house, the reindeer hover in a floating gallop waiting for him to return to the sleigh" I responded years ago making a mental note where footprints poked in the snow by ski poles were an added accent in later Christmas visits. If it was not a white Christmas, then a garden hoe dragging parallel lines in the dirt driveway made adequate sleigh tracks.

Placement of the sleigh tracks is dictated by a developing brain carefully thinking out proper placement for Santa's sign on where to land.

Regardless of the year or snow conditions, a bell from Santa's sleigh always is left behind.  Most years the bell falls directly into the sleigh track to ensure it is found, but some years, Santa's sleigh would brush against a tree.  High up, a branch snags and removes a bell requiring a ladder to retrieve the annual treasure to be added to the collection.

Approaching pre-teen years, when friends convincingly state there's no such thing as Santa, the masquerade on Christmas Eve becomes more challenging and culminated last year with extreme details.

With no snow, sleigh tracks cut through the garden via a hoe depicted how Santa crashed through the cinder block border and across the garden.  A potato hill, unharvested with tracks on each side, showed how the sleigh straddled the small hill, but was flattened on top due to rubbing against the bottom of the sleigh.

While he was sliding down the chimney, impatient reindeer pawed in other unharvested potato hills and helped themselves to the unearthed treats. As Santa gorged inside the house on homemade cookies, he pocketed the carrots left beside the cookies intended for the reindeer. Upon returning to the sleigh, he handed out the carrots that were chewed with open mouths, dribbling masticated carrot pieces all over the soil.

After Santa clambered back up in the sleigh, prancing reindeer prepared for take-off , stamping the dirt with their signature hooves.

(Authentic hoof prints are compliments from an elk leg found one day while mountain trial running.)

And, because Santa was in diabetic shock from excessive sugar cookie consumption, and the reindeer struggled to fly from eating too many potatoes and carrots, the sleigh crashed into the top of the tree where, yet again, a bell was left behind.

The accumulation of the annual bells are sewn on denim that hangs from a doorknob with each bell tagged with the year and location of the discovery.

Fortunately (maybe unfortunately), this year the charade is not needed since the myth of Santa has been exposed.  But, a sleigh bell will be waiting to be picked up by little hands each Christmas until the hands mature and are moved out of the house.

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!