I know this is late, but it’s been a busy few weeks and I’m (as we all know) inherently lazy.
My fondest Christmas memories are of the night before Christmas when my brother and I were tucked into our beds, excited and trying not to fall asleep, only to hear jingle bells outside.
We’d both run into each other in the hall and run to a window. We’d never see anything and our mom or dad would show up and point out that if Santa Claus was close enough to hear, we’d better get to sleep.
Of course at some point I stopped believing in Santa and discovered that the ringing had been coming from bells my father had set up outside our window, with a string running to the back of the house and into their bedroom window.
So my other fondest memories are of the years I assisted my parents in staging this all for my younger brother’s benefit.
Not shockingly, when I became a dad, I wanted to continue this tradition.
I recall my wife not being sold but to me, it was something that would bring a little magic to their young lives—and perhaps a little to my own as well.
We travel a lot during Christmas, so my opportunity to do this has been sporadic. Sometimes the kids would pass out on the way home from somewhere and the last thing I’d want to do was wake them up. Sometimes we weren’t in a place where jingle bells weren’t feasible to ring.
I didn’t really get started until we moved away from California and to New York.
One year I ran a string across the roof of our apartment in Queens, dangling jingle bells down next to our kid’s window. The string ran back to the kitchen in our apartment where I could reach out a window and pull it.
It worked a little bit, but I ended up having to go up the fire escape, onto the roof and ring it by hand.
In the dead of night. In ice and wind.
Which ended up working so much better because the kids heard footsteps on the roof which made them insane.
This year was the year Alpha Tween stopped believing. I don’t remember when it happened and was not a shock—his faith had been tested two years prior when he found candy alarmingly similar to what was in his stocking in the kitchen cupboard.
We pointed out that certainly we could buy the same candy as it was in all the stores and—because he still wanted to believe I’d guess—he let it go.
But at 12, most kids are done and so was he.
He was excited by the prospect of helping me continue the tradition with his younger brother though, so when I went to tuck in the Professor, Alpha had already hid two sets of jingle bells out on the covered front porch of our apartment.
So as I lay down with our youngest, down below Alpha was leaning out of a window with bells in his hands and gently ringing them.
The Professor flew out of bed and looked out the window to their room. He spied a red light in the sky—what I can only imagine was a plane—and while he mentioned it might be a plane he also thought it might be Rudolph.
Shortly after, Alpha came upstairs to get changed for bed and I went downstairs and duplicated his efforts.
When I passed Alpha on the stairs to the boy’s bedroom, he smiled and nodded and I knew they had heard.
This could be the last year for The Professor to believe. As a younger sibling, it seems the magic doesn’t last as long.
No matter how long though, these are the memories I will always cherish—and I hope they will as well.
There’s precious little magic in the world, save for what we make.
Perhaps we just need to make more of it.
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