A Christmas story

[clementine]

Mirrored from Oh Clementine. You can leave any comments there.

I know I've been posting a lot of Christmas-related entries lately, but, hey, 'tis the season, right? Here is another one for you. This one is another story. It's not funny, however. It's a heartwarming tale of love between two siblings.

You may know that I have a brother, who we will call Bighead. Bighead is three years younger than me. This means that we're pretty close, especially at this point. (A few years ago, a three-year age gap was more significant than it is now.)

When Bighead was in kindergarten, his class wrote letters to Santa. (I remember doing this too.) Now, I don't know how it works in other places, but in Canada, you write to "Santa Claus, North Pole, H0H 0HO".¹ Then, some poor postal worker has to fill out form letter after form letter with children's names. Some of them will write a short line on the bottom to show that they sort of read the letter, like "P.S. I hope you get that PS3 you wanted!" So, Bighead wrote his letter in his 5-year-old handwriting² and gave it to his teacher to mail to Santa.

I don't know what exactly happened, but all the kids started receiving their letters back and Bighead didn't have one. Maybe his teacher lost it; maybe the post office lost it. All I know is that he never got a letter from the post office Santa. He was quite devastated, so one evening I decided to make him feel better. By this point, I was 8 and knew that there was no Santa, so I decided to be Santa.³ I got out my green pen⁴ and wrote him a long, personalised letter in a fancy script. Then I put it into a red envelope⁵ and handed it to my mom.

She knew exactly what to do. She went to the front hallway and came out a minute later with the letter in her hand. She called my brother and told him that she found this letter, and it was addressed to him, and she must have missed it that morning when she got the mail.

Bighead was delighted. He ripped open the letter and devoured every word, fully believing that Santa Claus had written it to him. He brought it to school the next day and made every single five-year-old child jealous that they got back form letters⁶ and he got back a REAL LIVE LETTER FROM SANTA.

1. Our postal codes are 6 characters, alternating between a letter and a digit. [↩]
2. which has barely improved [↩]
3. Now I really am Santa; I eat the snacks my small cousins leave out for him, which makes me kind of sad. I left snacks for him until I was 13. [↩]
4. because green is a Christmas colour [↩]
5. because red is also a Christmas colour [↩]
6. they knew the letters weren't real; they weren't stupid [↩]