NMy son recently asked me what it was like with Santa Claus. Whether he would come, whether he existed, whether one could believe in his existence. Or whether in the end it is nothing more than a well-intentioned story. I said, sit down, son, you're only seven, but I'm going to tell you a story. The story of how I once met Santa Claus when I was your age. I immediately felt like a mixture of Captain Blaubär and Erich von Däniken.
It was 1990 and I must have been about four. I had just had a brother. Looking back, 1990 seemed to me to have been a turbulent, blurry year. At least judging by the pictures on my dad's Hi-8 camera.
We had just moved into a new house, which my father was proud to show off. But mostly he filmed the roses, and when I came into the picture, I dragged someone behind me or stood directly in front of the lens with my colored glasses and made no move to leave the picture. I was: a stressful child. So because my mother had to intervene repeatedly and it happened to be December, at some point she said: “Watch out, Santa Claus sees everything!” I explained to my son that I was practically as unconvinced of his existence as you were – and a doubter!
Because the baby didn't have any wishes yet, my wish list got longer
December was peaceful at first, apart from the baby, whose arrival weighed quite heavily on my soul, and when I wasn't teasing him or trying to get rid of him somewhere, it seemed, and the Hi-8 films documented this, that I was mostly seemed busy cutting out pictures from catalogs, with his tongue on his upper lip, and then carefully and firmly gluing the pictures onto a piece of paper. Because the baby couldn't express any wishes yet, it only made my wish list grow longer as I recognized the opportune moment.
I had no idea that my mother was already running her finger through newspapers and talking to civil servants in kindergarten, while I stood immobile in front of the shop window in mittens and a thermal jacket, watching the people from the toy stores put cotton wool into the chimneys of the model trains stuck. When we argued and I slammed the door, my mother would shout up that Santa Claus would see it all again. But since there was no way I could get people to provide me with truthful and valid evidence of the existence of this man, even with my kindergarten friends the presents were always just left under the tree, I ignored the warnings and treated everything as fake news away.
I continued to be cheeky as hell, dreamily and tiptoeed a sign saying “Reserved” into the shaggy branches of a Christmas tree and let myself be pulled away on the sleigh, all the while thinking: sleight of hand. I wasn't worried at all. But that was to change on December 24, 1990.
#careful #Santa #Claus #sees