three reasons why, pretending for a moment that santa claus does exist and, within that little daydream, that he died, i should not be chosen to replace him:

1. by the time i got around to wrapping my presents, we were out of wrapping paper. so i used newspaper. on the front of all of barclay's presents for me, there were cute, silver Christmas trees and cute gift tags that said awfully cute things on them. on the front of my presents for barclay there were headlines about the stock market and murders and politics and stuff. murder is not cute. politics is not Christmassy.

2. i took one of barclay's presents out of its box so as to sneakily wrap it in a different package and, in doing so, to disguise it so he wouldn't be able to guess what it was before he actually opened it. then, i wrapped another one of his presents in that box...and let him open the that second present first.
so it was like, "oh, this is sweet, thanks!"
"uh.....look inside the box. you get that present later." ugh.

3. we got to present number two and i couldn't find it. it wasn't under the tree anymore. i wrapped all mine in newspaper. all the presents under the tree had those silver trees all over them.
"are you sure you wrapped it, suzy?"
"yes, i know i did!"
"are you sure you put it under the tree?"
"yes!!"
"and it's not any of these?"
"NO!!!"
we paused present-opening time for a quick game of scour-the-house-for-the-missing-present. i stormed angrily around every one of the 480 square feet in that little house, berating myself loudly for losing one of barclay's Christmas presents. "i just DON'T know HOW i could LOSE a STUPID present AFTER i WRAPPED it and put it UNDER the STUPID TREE."
after a while i plopped onto the couch, feeling as though i'd thoroughly ruined Christmas for both of us. the tears were close to the surface. had someone broken into our house and stolen just one single present from under our tree?
barclay picked up one of the silver tree packages and handed it to me, "this one doesn't have a name on it...it's not one i wrapped for you..."

i flushed a deep, Christmassy red. there it was. i'd forgotten that i'd wrapped just one present in the real wrapping paper before having to resort to newspaper.

4. and the clincher:

see those blue socks? those are mine.

chock FULL of goodies.


my poor, poor husband got the lonely black sock, and knew at first glance exactly what he was getting.



and so ends my essay. point made.