Dear Santa

Christmas time is on in the Costello house of course. The boys are counting down the days. Connor is of course much more aware of the whole business than Jamie was at this age, thanks to Jamie. This is Jamie's letter to Santa. Every bit of it, including the spelling, he did himself, though Sarah gave him a mock-up of the Santa picture to work from.

I will transcribe it exactly: "Der Santa Jamie Ples giv we Str Wrs Legos transformers double bladed light sabre dans gontlet." (This latter is a reference to a popular anime show, "Bakugan".)

Jamie is grappling with the reality of Santa. He has asked us straight up if Santa is real and we've pretty much lied, though in our minds we are answering with reference to metaphorical notions of Santa as a manifestation of the spirit of giving, etc, rather than his literal existence. Jamie was growing more and more suspicious, asking questions like how old is Santa and will he die. He is also onto the reindeer and their ability to fly with no wings. He has seen Amazon boxes coming to the house but we told him that Santa is not averse to technology and uses Amazon to bring some of the toys ahead of time. Jamie thought that sensible. He thinks Santa will be very tired after going around the world in one night, but that it will be OK because Santa is clearly nocturnal. This is Jamie's favorite word, because he feels that he too, is nocturnal (this is used to suggest that us keeping him from staying up late is not just unfair but is in fact attempting to reverse nature). He also asked about the volume of mail going to the North Pole this time of year and whether it was just one mail carrier bringing all the letters to Santa. I reassured him that they hired some extra seasonal help.

Oddly, the other thing that seems to have have kept all this skepticism at bay, aside I think from some desire to keep believing, is the elves. We've explained to him that Santa has elves to help make the toys and that is plausible to him. We were talking yesterday and he said he didn't want to be an elf because they had to work so hard to make all the toys. We agreed that they probably get a couple of weeks of vacation after Christmas. So should we all!