Santa Is Real... My Letter To My Sons On Christmas Day by Wal Ozello

Every Christmas morning my wife and I leave a personal letter from Santa to my sons. Since my youngest son is coming of age we fear that this may be the last year he believes in Santa. It's about time that he knows the truth.  So instead of pulling him aside and breaking the news to him before going into Middle School, we decided we'd leave a special Christmas note for the boys this year explaining how real Santa really is.

Here's a slightly edited version of the note below.  From all of us at Pencilstorm, a Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Dear Ozello Boys:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

You’ve had a wonderful year and you boys never cease to amaze me with how kind and loving you are.

You’ve both been doing great at school, at sports, but most importantly have shown love and kindness to everyone. It’s beautiful to watch you grow and become the men you’re going to be! You have strong compassion for others and are such a great friends.

Now that you boys are older, I’d like to address a question that every child your age is asking.

I am real?

Yes I am.

I am as real as the love your parents have for you because that’s what I am. Santa means love and it’s been the magical way that your parents have shown you how much they care about you. Mom and Dad love you immensely and it’s been them all these years who have listened to your heart’s desires and searched high and low for the special gifts that you’ve really, really wanted. It’s been Mom and Dad who work tirelessly to wrap your presents and sneak them under the tree on Christmas Eve after you’ve gone to bed. (Okay, some years it’s been mostly Mom.) It’s been Mom and Dad who write these notes every year and eat the cookies and carrots.

Why do they do this? Why have they worked so hard to keep up this illusion? It’s simple. To see your magical smiles of pure joy when you wake up on Christmas morning and open up your gifts, especially the ones that you didn’t even realize you wanted. They do it because they love you with their whole heart.

So let’s all make a deal. Now that we’ve told you the “secret of Santa,” Mom and Dad will still continue showing you love, especially on Christmas, if you promise to continue growing into the awesome, amazing, loving, caring and beautiful boys that you are destined to be. Deal?  I don’t think it will be very hard for any of us to keep up our end of the bargain. Together, we'll treat every day like it's Christmas and keep the magic of Santa alive forever.

Love,

Santa

Wal Ozello is  a science fiction techno-thriller novelist and the author of Assignment 1989: The Time Travel Wars  and Revolution 1990. He's a resident of Upper Arlington, Ohio and a frequent customer at Colin's Coffee.

Two Very Different Ricki C. Family Holiday Stories

I can’t deny that in some quarters the family I grew up in has been called dysfunctional.  (My family has also been called worse – say, true to our Italian roots, crazy, drunk & loud – but let’s not forget that the first word in dysfunctional is “fun.”)

Two heartwarming Ricki C. family Christmas stories:

1)    In 1969 I was a senior in high school and my second girlfriend ever was a cute blonde majorette.  I attribute that fact solely to the power of rock & roll.  In mid-1968 I was a shy, socially retarded, book-reading geek who had never even spoken a coherent sentence to a girl, let alone dated one.  Then I joined a classmate’s rock & roll band and – courtesy of the six-string piece of wood hanging around my neck at basement parties & sock-hops – I became a local version of a rock & roll star, hence the cute, perky, blonde majorette girlfriend.  (Frankly, I was in way over my head.)

One Saturday night in December I wound up at said girlfriend’s house, playing board games with her mom & dad and two little sisters.  I have to admit, when mom & dad and little sis starting pulling out Candyland, Game Of Life and Clue I had serious, serious doubts about the evening.  My own little family had never played a board game in its entire existence.  From the time I was five years old and could hold my own cards, we had played various card games – poker, euchre, gin rummy – and we played for money, always.  There was no Crazy Eights or Go Fish for this little Ricki C.  Cash changed hands regularly, and I learned young that no money was gonna be given back just because you cried or because you didn’t know how to gamble a hand to a successful conclusion.  There were no backsies in our household.   

Anyway, that Saturday night with my girlfriend’s family turned out pretty great: we played charades and five or six different board games.  Cookies & hot chocolate were even served.  Everybody was laughing and having fun, nobody yelled at anybody else, nobody threw down their cards and called another family member a goddamn cheater, it was really quite festive and charming.  I remember thinking very clearly at one point, “I bet this is what it’s like at the Cleavers, or Donna Reed’s, or the family on Father Knows Best’s house.”  I realized at that exact moment that there actually were families like the ones I had previously thought were only made up for television.  It was an eye-opening moment, a definite epiphany.

By New Year’s Day, the majorette had dropped me like a live grenade for a hippie piano player who could play that Simon & Garfunkel album “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme” all the way through, so consequently my career of familial board-game playing was extremely short-lived.  To this day I find myself thinking about that Saturday night every December.  It’s a warm and comforting memory, a night I was a member of a sitcom family.

2)    Christmas Eve, 1976, my extended family – my mom, my sister & brother, my sister’s husband, various aunts, uncles & cousins, etc. – were all in my sister’s basement on the West Side and everybody was wicked drunk.  It was a rager.  Even by our rather alcoholic standards, that night was especially out of control.  Oddly, though – since virtually EVERYBODY was drunk on their ass – it was a pretty congenial gathering.  People might have been yelling & slurring, but they were yelling & slurring in a really genuinely friendly, familial manner.  (I’d certainly witnessed fistfights in the family when we were less drunk than that night.)

Anyway, at one point the ping-pong table got turned on its side and my brother-in-law was preparing to throw the brand-new, and – I might add – really, really sharp steak knives he and my sister got for a present that night AT MY SISTER, who was standing up against the overturned ping pong table, holding party balloons in her hands AND HER MOUTH.  I fully admit I was also totally drunk that night, but I was seemingly the only person at the party sober enough to realize the knife-throwing act was really not a good idea and I told my brother-in-law, “Hey Jim, come on, nobody wants to go to the emergency room on Christmas Eve, let’s cool it.”  Jim laughed, waved me aside, took another drag on his cigarette, said, “I’ve got this,” and raised the first knife to throw.

“I’m really not joking, Jim,” I said, backing up to where my sister stood – smiling & posing like the lovely knife-thrower’s assistant she was right at that moment – and said, “Come on, Dianne, this is enough.”  Just at that moment – THWACK!!! – a steak knife thumped into the ping pong table right next to my head.  “Goddamn it, Jim,” I yelled as I whirled around, “I told you not to throw this.”  “And I told you to get out of the way,” he yelled back as I pulled the knife out of the table in case I needed to use it against him to stop that particularly dangerous little game.

All of a sudden Jim and I realized we were faced off against one another with knives in our hands on Christmas Eve and we both busted out laughing.  Everybody cheered, nobody got stabbed, nobody wound up in the hospital.  Just another heartwarming Cacchione family Christmas.  – Ricki C. / December 13th, 2014
       

(Pencilstorm welcomes endearing Christmas stories like these from our contributors, or just from our readers.  Send them in, we'll print the best ones throughout December.)

'Happy Holiday Reality Check' by Wal Ozello

Why do I need a holiday to bring me back to reality?

Let’s face it. In today’s media world of Obamacare debt ceiling minimum wage duck dynasty fear mongering, it’s tough to have Christmas Spirit. I’m not referring to the Christmas Spirit that inspires Ebenezer Scrooge to bring a huge feast to the Crachit family after he realizes he’s been a jerk for decades. I’m talking about the wonderful life Christmas Spirit George Bailey gets after realizing his life doesn’t suck as much as he thought it did.

Think about it. Turn on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The Daily Show, or whatever your flavor of news is. Read the Huffington Post, The Daily Kos, or Redstate and you’ll soon discover that your world as you know it is coming to an end. Your ideological opposite is coming for you and they’ll turn it into a world of humans marrying their dogs or the dissolution of Medicare. All this clutter is just smoke and mirrors to the true reality of your life.

This Christmas Eve morning, I turned on the news and started hearing all the hype and thought, “How bad is my world?” After some deep thinking, I realized I have it pretty good. My guess is you do, too. Here are the basics:

1) I’m alive. My children are alive. My wife is alive. What more can I really want beyond this?

2) My family isn’t in any immediate danger. In other words, I don’t live in a war zone. I live in Upper Arlington. My biggest concern here is what type of parking spot I’ll get at Giant Eagle. Could you imagine not wanting to leave your house in fear of getting shot by gang fire? Or worse, yet, a suicide bomber?

3) I have easy access to healthcare. All this argument over obamacare is a big huge pissing match between two political parties. Seriously folks, it’s not the end of the world either way. No one’s gonna die in this country because Obamacare is or isn’t gonna happen. Can we all just realize that come January 1st, we’re going to just as healthy as we were on December 31st?

4) I have roof over my head, two cars in the garage, heat, water, cable, internet access, computers, cell phones, food in my refrigerator, clothes in my closet, and enough extra money to do fun things once in a while.

Seriously, what do I really need beyond all this? What more do I need in life that I don’t already have? Advertising would tell me I need more: that cool tablet/computer, new iPhone, blueray movie, kindle fire, or expensive jewelry for my wife. The media would tell me I need more: we need to repeal obamacare, raise the minimum wage, and stop those pesky republicans/democrat/teaparty/whoever from destroying the American Way.

I’m going to have none of that. I’m just fine.

It will be a great Christmas at the Ozello’s this year. Not because the kids will get a bunch of cool presents, but because we’ll be together. Playing games, eating great food, in my warm house and remembering the most important part of Christmas is not getting everything you want. It’s appreciating everything you have.

Wal Ozello is the author of  Assignment 1989: The Time Travel Wars and is the lead singer of the Columbus hairband Armada. He's a resident of Upper Arlington, Ohio and a frequent customer at Colin's Coffee.