Recently after a grueling day of kindergarten Tyler was parked at the kitchen table sifting through his Legos while I was stationed at my second home, the kitchen sink.
“I can’t find my storm trooper,” he said, half to me and half to himself. “But that’s OK. I’ll just ask Santa to buy me a new one.”
“What makes you think Santa has time to make you a new storm trooper?” I asked while scrubbing a scorched frying pan with SOS. “He has a whole world full of kids to make presents for, and he’s only got a year to do it.”
“He’s got his elves,” he shrugged. “They’ll make anything he asks them to.”
I paused to examine my brillo-blue fingernails and wondered about elf labor laws and the working conditions at Santa’s workshop. Did they get reasonable health insurance? Time and a half? At least two twenty-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch break per shift?
My thoughts were interrupted as a I pulled another pan out of the murky water. “Now where did I just put that SOS?” I wondered out loud, stirring the water with a spatula.
“Why don’t you just ask Santa for a new one?” Tyler suggested. “Then you don’t even have to look for it!”
It was time to have the talk.
“Tyler, Santa doesn’t have time to drop everything at the North Pole just because you lost your storm trooper and I lost a piece of brillo,” I said. There’s all kinds of problems in the world, much bigger problems than we have. The Middle East is still going crazy, global warming is wiping out entire species every day, and we’re all standing on the edge of something called the fiscal cliff. The last I heard, there were a bunch of people locked in a room trying to figure it out, and I don’t think Santa was one of them. So I don’t want to hear anymore about asking Santa for small favors. OK?
I thought he was considering my spiel, because he never did respond. When he was finished with his Legos, he found his shirt stuck to the arm of the kitchen chair.
“I don’t like this chair,” he whined as I freed him. “It has pegs on it. Let’s tell Santa we need chairs with no pegs!”
“OK,” I sighed. “Maybe if we’re all really, really good.”
It must be hard to be a kid from New Year’s to Thanksgiving, when Santa and his elves fall from the limelight and barricade themselves in their workshop, endlessly preparing for the season ahead. During those months, there’s no one to solve their problems, replenish their shortages, toil away just to fulfill their insatiable material desires, or make their every whimsical dream come true.
All they can do is dream away until next Christmas. Until then, there’s always welfare, sweatshops and Walmart.