In the spirit of the season, here’s the story of my very first Christmas memory. We were living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and I was 6 or 7 at the time. In other words, getting to the age where I was starting to doubt Santa Claus. Maybe I had heard other kids saying Santa wasn’t real, I don’t really know, but apparently my parents decided to help me believe for at least one more year.

I went to bed on Christmas Eve like a good little girl, visions of sugar plums dancing in my head… well, visions of the toys I wanted anyway. My parents told me that Santa wouldn’t come until all good little kids were asleep, so it was not hard to get me to go to bed. Getting to sleep was a different thing, but I finally dozed off.

In the middle of the night, my older brother woke me up, shaking me quietly, with a finger to his lips, shhhhh. He motioned me to get up and follow him, and keeping as quiet as we could, we crept out of my room and down the long hallway to the living room. There we stopped and peeked around the corner to where the Christmas tree was sitting in front of the big living room windows. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but Santa Claus himself! He was bent over, pulling wrapped packages out of his big white sack and putting them under the tree. I probably gasped in shock, because all of a sudden he looked up, right at us, and said “What are you two kids doing out of bed?”

OH NO! Santa himself saw I wasn’t being a good girl! You never saw a kid move so fast as I did, turning around, racing back down the hallway to my room, jumping into bed, and pulling the blankets up completely over my head. I was so afraid Santa would take my toys back since he saw I was being bad! Eventually I fell asleep again.

I have no idea what my brother did, all I knew was I had to get myself back in that bed RIGHT NOW! I can still picture it clearly in my mind, Santa bending over his bag and looking up at me. Even now 50 years later, the memory is as clear as if it happened yesterday, that’s how much of an impression it made on me. Of course, years later I can see that it was my dad, dressed in a Santa suit, and holding a white pillowcase! But to a little 6-year-old girl, he was really Santa. Thanks dad 🙂