Nom de Plume

Elizabeth just wrote about getting into the holiday season with trees and ornaments and all that jazz. She says she had a little mailbox that she used to write letters to Santa for all her pets. Our letter-writing routine was that I wrote a letter and then we burned it in the fireplace. My mother claimed that the charred bits flew to the North Pole and reassembled in Santa’s hands. I think there was something about the fireplace purifying the letter so only the nice kids’ letters made it.

At the time, this seemed normal.

But what I want to know is whether anyone else had this same tradition. You see, my mother really had a lot of fun screwing with my head when I was a kid.

Take the Easter Bunny, for example. According to Mom, the Easter Bunny was actually a woman. Every Easter, before she went off to work, she would deliver eggs to households around the world. And being a successful, entrepreneurial sort, she delivered them in style: from her green and yellow briefcase. There were vague mumblings about an unemployed Mr. Easter Bunny.

Then there were the supermarket seeds. Noting that grocery stores seemed to appear out of nowhere, she claimed there were supermarket seeds. Grocery store owners would buy a seed, plop it into the ground and –sproing!–the very next day, there would be a brand-new supermarket. (The sproing! was her very word, BTW, and was accompanied by a throwing up of the hands.) I think I was 10 or so before I realized this wasn’t true. I casually mentioned supermarket seeds to a friend. She stared at me wordlessly, and then cracked up. I never lived it down. She sproinged! in front of all the kids at recess for months.

And of course, I shouldn’t neglect to mention that my mother had me so well-trained at five that she would trot me out at cocktail parties just so she could ask me what my purpose in life was in front of amused guests. “To support you in your old age, Mommy,” I would chirp. Then the kicker: “In the style to which you would like to become accustomed.”

You have to hand it to her; getting a five-year old to say that last convoluted bit is no mean feat.

I’d like to think that I’m not terribly warped by all this, but who knows? So back to the original question. How did you get letters to Santa–and was she screwing with my mind there too?