WHY I HATE X-MAS

      There are so many reasons to love the holidays: time off from work and school, seeing your family, good food, and when all else fails, of course, presents! When you’re a young kid, your parents usually work hard to make sure X-mas is special and even minimal effort still makes it a happy time.

      It was X-mas eve 1988. I was eight years old and still believed in Santa. I kept watching the clock, counting down the hours until his visit. In fact, I had butterflies in my stomach every time I heard what sounded like hooves clattering on our roof, thinking Santa may be here early. Only thing is that we lived on the 1st floor of a two floor apartment building. So this didn’t make sense unless Santa’s reindeer broke in to the upstairs apartment. I was also aware that as excited as I was, I needed to be asleep if Santa was to feel safe delivering my presents without being detected. I did not want to get in the way of that. Before hitting the hay, I put out some milk and cookies.

      Next morning I jumped out of bed and ran over to meet my parents in the living room, bursting with excitement! While walking across the room, I nonchalantly glanced towards the X-mas tree to see how big the presents I’d be opening were. I didn’t immediately notice anything, so my next thought was to stop and make sure Santa liked his milk and cookies. 

      The glass was full and the milk was becoming gelatinous. The cookies were whole. I was confused, but maybe he had so much milk and so many cookies at the other houses he visited that he was stuffed by the time he got to us? It could happen.

      I waited for my parents’ OK to start looking for my presents near our tiny plastic tree. Instead my father walked over to it, and grabbed the presents off our fake fireplace mantle. He handed them to me since I was too short to see the tiny presents that high up. They were pretty small. One was the size of a business card, and the other was the size of my hand. I still had hope. As they say, good things come in small packages.

      I first unwrapped the flat package. I immediately recognized it from the front of my cereal box a few weeks back. It was the free prize inside. Even worse, it wasn’t the usual toy based on some new exciting kids movie or after school cartoon. It was a piece of cardboard with a printed image of 15 leprechauns. The cardboard could be cut into 3 pieces. Basically it was an optical illusion. When you switched 2 pieces around the image then became 14 leprechauns. Voilà! This would be hours of fun!

 

      Even though I believed in Santa, I had heard a rumor that some parents supplement Santa’s presents with some of their own. This free, cardboard present was obviously from my father, one of the cheapest people to ever live. Good thing I saved the best for last. Santa’s gift would make up for this, tenfold, because I was very good as usual this year. Dean’s list and perfect attendance were only the tip of the iceberg.

      I opened the slightly larger gift slowly, building up the tension. It didn’t take long to see it was a yo-yo. I put forth as much fake excitement as I could muster. I knew the Santa I had built up in my head couldn’t be real, because he would never have been so careless. I had seen the bad kids on TV whose houses got skipped over and I knew I wasn't like them. 

      The rest of the day was spent demonstrating the optical illusion to myself over and over, learning to ‘walk the dog’, and accepting that X-mas was nothing but a big joke. On a good note, I later became a local yo-yo wunderkind, mastering the Sleeper, the Forward Pass, Walk the Dog, Around the World and more. You can still find me touring the east coast as Susana the Amazing Yo-Yo Girl. OK that last part is not true.

The year I stopped believing.