The Chronicles Of Nay

Happy Sunday! I hope that everyone has enjoyed this weekend. I have had a pretty good weekend. I slept in today till after 10! It is all gloomy yet warm here. It is so crazy that the first week of December is in the 70’s here. I want some winter!

So this week I have had a lot of conversations with different people about Santa. You know you don’t realize how different something from your childhood was until you become an adult and start swapping stories with others. So a little about how my family did Santa. 

We have always opened our Christmas gifts on Christmas eve. Always, and all of them, even the Santa ones. When we were really young we would all go over to my grandparents house and open all of the gifts there with all the cousins. We would eat dinner and play games until midnight. I remember playing red light green light in my grandma’s hallway. I remember my grandpa telling us to “just go memes” (telling us to just go to sleep!) Around midnight while all the kids were playing in a random back room Santa would come and drop off our gifts. We would open them and go back home! Usually ending up there again the next day! 

In kinder and first grade I went to school with mostly other Hispanic kids. Around second grade I switched schools to a more predominantly white school. I remember coming home one day and asking my dad how Santa was able to bring us our gifts so that we could open them Christmas eve when all my friends had to wait until Christmas day. He got really serious and told me that since there were so many houses that Santa had to get to in one night that he had to start somewhere so he would do all the Hispanic houses first. He then told me that I couldn’t go around telling everyone. So when my friends would talk about Santa Christmas morning I just told them “yeah… the morning right…”. They used to make us wait until midnight but the older we got the earlier we opened gifts. Now we exchange gifts after dinner. 

One of the other things that the Santa of my childhood did was that he brought all of our gifts in the original packages as if they came from the store. When we questioned mom about this she used to tell us that Santa didn’t want all the pieces rattling around his sled. Also if it was something that needed to be built, like a trampoline, it came in original packaging and my dad just built it the next day.  We also didn’t get batteries in anything that needed batteries until after breakfast on Christmas morning. Santa didn’t bring them. Mom said that Santa had more important things to worry about than making sure we had batteries. Mom always had batteries in the special hiding place in the kitchen though. So we had to wait until after we ate and cleaned up from breakfast to get the batteries! 

Finally, since Santa didn’t come after we went to bed I had never put out cookies and milk for Santa. I spent Christmas Eve with a friend last year and she took a couple bites of the cookies and dropped some crumbs on the plate and drank a giant swig of milk. She then asked if I could take a bite of the carrot that her kids left for the reindeer. I know that I must have looked at her like she was crazy but I helped her out. The thought of how that was dealt with had never crossed my mind until that moment!  

So I don’t know if my version of Santa Claus was a win or a fail but what I do know is that My family has always put more of an emphasis on family time during Christmas. The Santa and gift thing is such a small part of Christmas in our family. Like I said I remember spending Christmas eve with my cousins we would also spend Christmas day at my grandmas eating and playing with all the fun stuff we got! I know now how fortunate I was to have grown up with all that I had. I didn’t want for anything (I think that is how that saying goes). My parents worked hard for what we had and what “Santa” brought us but one thing I think they worked even harder at is making sure that we didn’t see Christmas time as just a time for getting gifts. We volunteered, we donated, we helped neighbors and we spent time with the people we loved! We baked family recipes, we cooked things that reminded my parents of their childhood, we watched movies that we all liked, they usually weren’t even Christmas movies. Those are some of the things I remember most from Christmas time as a kid, the time we spent together. 

What are some things that the Santa of your childhood did that you now realize were out of the norm? Or what are some of the things that you as “Santa” do that are “different”?