Santa Claus Comes Calling

One December evening as my family ate dinner, our meal was interrupted by a phone call. I looked at the caller ID and it read unknown caller or something to that affect. These calls are mostly a nuisance, but sometimes I like to have fun with them. This was one such time (sorry telemarketers). I picked up the phone and politely said, hello. The voice that replied most definitely belonged to an adult male. Anyhow, he said something along the lines of, can I speak with Ashley.

Ashley is my daughter and at the time she was four or five years old. Obviously, I wasn't going to blindly hand the phone over to my daughter to have a conversation with some strange man. Accordingly, I followed up by asking, whom may I say is calling. The response came quick, assertively and caught me of guard. Santa Claus was the answer. I wasted no time in retorting, yeah right! Then I gave him the old clickerooo.

My wife asked who was on the phone. I whispered in her ear, some guy saying he was Santa Claus. Her expression changed to that look that no husband wants to see in his wife. She was clearly not impressed with how I protected and shielded our daughter from a phone intruder. I was truly befuddled. However, she soon explained to me that she had arranged for Santa to call for Ashley. Upon hearing this news, I felt bad. I wondered if Santa might call back. I hoped he would. I certainly didn't want to deprive my daughter the opportunity to speak with Santa Claus on the phone. I also needed a means out of the dog house. Santa did not call back. I guess he had a big list of children to call that year. I tried to make up for my error by calling my daughter from our other phone line and pretending to be Santa. Apparently I was not very convincing. She quickly made a positive identification; happily saying, Daddy you are not Santa. When I surfaced, we all shared a chuckle. Luckily for me, my wife is a forgiving woman and she did not hold my mistake against me for very long. Since than, with some reminders from wife, I arrange for Santa to call our house.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN) on November 4, 2009:
Santa Claus Comes Calling

Image Attribution: By Rlevse (Skip The Teddy Bear) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons