Christmas Magic (trumps your bad attitude)

      This blog post is really about one thing... because honestly Christmas magic has been hard to find for the last 2 weeks. Instead of capping my semester after exams I continued working through the 17th (really longer) and then had a whole lot of catching up to do on gift shopping, planning, and general tidying of the house post-semester. It's even been hot, rainy, and now there's a threat of tornadoes!

     Add to that several rounds of illness through the family and we've missed EVERY Christmas party on the books for the last 2 weeks. Even today was a little hard to get through with exhaustion related to this cough/fever/cold/flu yuck.

     But despite all this, what was most important for my husband and I was getting our daughter through what could possibly be her last major Christmas. You've seen the movies 9/10 is about the age that kids "stop believing" and while some (Polar Express kid) find the magic again... some grow up to be stuffy unbelieving adults that are often the antagonists in the same Christmas specials we watch each year. This age (9/10) is a fragile time and the last great holdout for the late believers (the ones that have sheltering parents, or the ones that don't socialize much, or the ones that just want to cling to the innocence and hope of Christmas)

     Exacerbating this issue is a few kids who are already the "Christmas Special Antagonists..." one of whom confronted my daughter and a friend telling them "for absolute sure that the elf on the shelf isn't real. Parent's move them, anyway." This caused some distress and frustration for my girl, even though my daughter's friend gave a great retort: "Who cares... I like finding them each morning!"

But my kid is a thinker (wonder where she gets that from?), and really mulled this over. She spent a few weeks being snarky and sort of acted out against the fun of the situation. Poor kid even saw her big Christmas present in the back of dad's car (big fluke -just awful). It seemed like fate was against us, and it wasn't until she heard Absolutely Mindy from Kids Place Live Satellite Radio that she came up with her plan and changed her mood about Christmas.

It seems Mindy was curious about kids who had tried to catch Santa. She wanted to know if it worked. Of course, Old Saint Nick was too sly for any kid to catch him... but one child reported that her Elf on the Shelf had actually moved the camera to keep Santa from being seen! So, the begging began: "Dad... PLEASE... let's set up your camera so we can catch Santa." About a 5 days of begging resulted in some last minute planning by dad to set up his motion sensor webcam to try to catch Santa in the act... or at least see what our Elves would do (side note, we had an extra elf show up this year and she's been nothing but trouble). As Christmas neared and the time for our elves to depart did too... all we could do was wonder what would show up on video.

Christmas morning the video's were forgotten as soon as the girls saw their presents (though there had been some brief chatter about it between 5:30 and 6:30AM when I was trying to get my oldest to go back to sleep. It wasn't until almost 8:30 that we finally got around to retrieving the video... and well, you've got to see it to believe it!

Our youngest bolted out of her chair as soon as she heard the giggling (you can see the reaction video the "motion sensor camera" picked up when their dad set up the video on this same channel); our oldest has been talking about the video all day and night. No matter what her future brings as far as believing or not - I'm hoping this video taught her something. She told us: "I don't care what XX said! She should see the video" (funny thing is this is the same kid we taught to be uber skeptical about commercials and what they tell you on TV) and maybe that's where the second lesson comes in - some things are just what you want to believe, for good or for bad. Sometimes we need to test our theories, even if we don't know what to expect. Sometimes we need magic to trump the junky attitudes in life. Sometimes we need our hopes to triumph over reality.

And for me... a believer and a skeptic... a realist and a dreamer... a seriously conflicted individual who expects the best and worst out of life....

in light of all the horrible things I've seen in the media this Christmas season, I'd rather have my kid believe the impossible for one more year than have her face the worst of humanity. It's a gift we could give this year, and even though the video's a little creepy, it set both of their imaginations to light. Hope you get a kick out of it too!

Merry Christmas 2012