Surprise!!!!

 

I vividly recall walking in to one of the bedrooms in our house back in Ohio. It was an older home, and at the time the registers to transfer heat upstairs were on either side of the walls opposite each other, one in each bedroom. There were metal vents that could be opened or closed so that you could heat one room, but not the other, if you so desired.

 

I must have been around two or three years old, and for some reason I had awakened early, before my folks were up. I knew that there was a Santa Claus doll filled with sand in the bottom drawer of a dresser in the room I came in to. I had been told in the past not to play with it because the doll had a small hole in it, and the sand would leak out.

 

When you're a little kid, Santa is like a hero. He's never crabby, doesn't make you eat broccoli, and even if you're sometimes bad, he seems to have forgotten all that by the time Christmas rolls around, because he's brought you a bunch of toys. He never gives you socks or pants or jackets like your Grandma does. Plus he fills your stocking with candy. How great is that? So naturally, I wanted to spend a little time playing with Santa, regardless of what my parents thought.

 

Because I hadn't mastered the art of being quiet, my mom heard me open the bottom drawer where she had shoved Santa, even though she was supposed to be sleeping.Through the vent I heard her say, "Tom, put that away, it leaks." Under my breath I whispered, "oh, shut up." Little did I know that somehow what I had spoken in secret would be transmitted with stereo like precision right to my mother's ears.

 

With super-hero like speed, she was upon me like flies on stink. I had no sooner spoken the last word before she slapped the spit right out of my mouth and I was back in bed. I never knew she could move so fast. Needless to say, I never bothered Santa in his resting place again, nor to the best of my knowledge, did I ever tell either of my parents to shut up again, at least not where they could hear me.