Every Mother's Child is Going to Spy

Tomorrow I embark on my life’s twenty-eighth Christmas Eve. As I’m prepping for the occasion, the “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” song is a plane that relentlessly loops the loop in my brain. (By the way, Alvin still wants his huuuuula hooooop.) How that song relates to what I’m about to write in this post, ye soon shall see.

My memory is wandering far away to my Christmases past, back to when I and my four siblings were all little. Every Christmas Eve, we kids would don ourselves in our brand spankin’ new Christmas pajamas that Mom and Dad lovingly gave us, go pick a basement bedroom for us all to set up camp in, hook up the TV and VCR, plug in our favorite old-tyme claymation Christmas cartoons (as well as the Grinch and the Smurfs and the Magic Flute – can’t forget those!), and stay up forever late watching until we zonked out. Click here to see what our all-time favorite cartoon was:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTD0XHRLCOs

But we would never be sleeping for very long, for late-late-late Christmas Eve/early-early-early Christmas Morning was not just any ol’ average timeframe. It was always a timeframe packaged with a serious and dangerous mission.

I think we maybe did not have a tangible alarm clock to utilize, so maybe we relied solely upon the merits of one or the other elder sister’s body clock. Approximately 4 o’clock ante meridiem seemed to be the traditional hour we five children would unanimously agree upon for waking from our forty winks, for to silently parade back upstairs to the living room to spy on the Santa droppings – er, um, drop-offs.

And it came to pass that we’d wake up unreluctantly at 4:00, not necessarily wishing we didn’t have to briefly leave our snuggly blankies (because HELLO! we’re going to see what Santa brought us!). As I said before, we took our yearly Christmas Morning mission quite seriously, and soberly understood that if we were to have ever gotten caught in the act by our parents, there would've been eightch to pay. Days and days in advance, I would carefully identify what specific tools would play perfectly to my personal advantage on the eventual journey upstairs. My childlike reasoning deduced that the following two items would be mandatory:

1) Miniature flashlight, because the shining of any flashlight bigger than the size of half-a-Barbie-doll would be much too conspicuous in the dreaded case that our parents almost catch us red-handed

2) Extraordinarily soft socks, because any ol’ regular white socks worn on any other ordinary day simply were not the softest of the soft, and surely would make too loud of a sound when colliding on the carpet as I tip-toe

We five kids were so expert it wasn’t even funny. Not once—not one year—did we get caught. In fact, till this very day Mom and Dad probably still don’t know of our schemes ;)

Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight

They know that Santa's on his way
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh
And every mother's child is gonna spy
To see if reindeer really know how to fly

Now, as decades have passed and I’m fondly remembering those golden childhood years, what is more dear of a memory than all of the magical Santa gifts combined, is the memory of the loving regard we five tiny tots had for each other. We had so much fun together all the time, especially at Christmastime. I can’t help but believe that, because we jointly maintained a special bond as we grew up together, it’s not hard for us to value and keep that bond now.

I feel like that is what Christmas is all about: love. Love, and the person who is the prime source of love and light: Jesus Christ.