Dear Mr. Claus,

May I call you Kris? I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your yearly contribution to the marked improvement in my daughter’s behavior at the end of the year. Although I do have to say that it is a tad disconcerting that, unless reminded that you can see her when she’s sleeping and know when she’s awake, I can’t get her to put one foot in front of the other without a fight. Not to mention that, after having reread that last sentence, I just realized I may be a little bit afraid of you now.

No matter, Kris. I may call you Kris, right? Santa seems to be reserved for the sitting on your lap crowd, and I am obviously beyond that. But do you mind if I ask you to submit to a background check before next year’s mall photo and gift request? (I do hope you understand.)

I found it quite charming how you made Buttercup so comfortable during her time with you this year. She can’t wait to see if you brought her that special doll she asked you for. And no thanks is necessary, Kris. My husband and I took it upon ourselves to go to extreme lengths to purchase the requested item, buy a special roll of wrapping paper that is only being used for gifts “from you”, and hide said gifts until one of us can sneak downstairs after she falls asleep on Christmas Eve to leave the small stash of goodies “from you” beneath the tree. We all know the economy sucks and I’m sure the lost manpower during the last round of elf lay-offs still has you frantically trying to keep up with and meet product demand by the expected deadline. We will, however, be submitting an itemized expense report outlining all expenses incurred on your behalf and expect to be reimbursed for our troubles. I hope Paypal works for you and the Mrs.?

I’d also like to ask your opinion on parenting tactics come the day after Christmas. Let’s face it, Kris. She’s four and has no real concept of time. Next year is about as threatening to her as next week, and because neither is happening in the next five seconds, they don’t matter in the slightest. That means I’m looking at about 10 months of parenting hell because I can’t drop a Santa-bomb until Target kicks the Halloween candy to the curb, skips right over the Thanksgiving turkey, and starts blasting the Christmas music early enough to make even you want to throw up. And please give me more detailed advice than last year because asking her to “follow me in merry measure” when we would both rather throw tantrums frankly does me no good.You deal with a world-full of children in one 24-hour-period, while they are all sleeping of course, so I’m sure you understa…

Oh never mind.

Anyway, feel free to stop in on Christmas Eve and don’t feel that you need to BYOP (We already covered the presents, remember?) but do enjoy the cookies we will be baking in your honor. We left a magic key for you to use since we don’t have a chimney and you can’t seem to remember the alarm code before the damned thing goes off, so please, consider the key our gift to you. We will leave it hanging on the front door. We just ask that you remember to lock up after you leave. And for the love of Christmas, please make sure to pick up and properly dispose of any reindeer business before you take off. I’ll be sure to place the garbage can where you can find it.

Please give my love to Mrs. Claus and remind Rudolph that he’s always special. I do remember how the therapist said he thought Rudolph only felt worthy of attention after a major snowstorm and all.

Sincerely,

Aspiring Mama and The Husband

Ever since I can remember, the response to “My birthday is the day after Christmas,” has been one form or another of  “Oh, that really has to suck.” I used to argue the point as a child, especially when I was young enough to still be included on Santa’s list because really, gifts from Santa, every relative in a huge family, and the parents kind of made up for the constantly combined gifts. I got older eventually and Santa Stopped bringing my presents. My refusal to get pregnant without planning the child’s birthday to be as far away from Christmas as possible is probably more telling about what it’s like to have been brought home in a Christmas stocking than anything else.

I’m the oldest of five girls and my sister immediately following me was born on December 23 just a few days before my second birthday. Trust me, I’ve made it perfectly clear to my mother that she should have seriously considered knitting during the month of March instead of working on procreating. Think of the children, lady.

Because we celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve with our extended family on my father’s side, my sister and I would jointly blow out the birthday candles on the shared cake, laughing every year as our names got jumbled because it was more fun that way, after our holiday meal. Our birthday gifts were then handed over as a means to distract us for a few hours. Tradition in our family dictated we open the presents under the tree at midnight, after placing the baby Jesus in nativity scene between Mary and Joseph, to remind us of the true meaning of Christmas. I’ll be honest in telling you that all of this was lost on us as children because the chance to stay up all night and sleep all the next day was something we looked forward to all year just as much as opening our gifts to see what Santa brought us.

Nonetheless, that was how it went, and we eventually got smart enough to start putting the presents in pile for each relative around 11:30 so that the moment my tia had placed the baby Jesus in the  collective rip of wrapping paper signaled the start of the races. We’d stay up for hours playing with our new stuff; sisters and cousins trying to fight the sleep that would eventually see us nodding off into a pile of wrapping paper before we were shuffled off to our make shift beds. Morning always came late on Christmas day with dinner leftovers for breakfast (Mexicans are famous for scrambling anything in eggs and calling it a meal) and adults playing poker while we basked in the New Toy smell of as-of-yet-unbroken toys and games without any missing pieces, at least until my parents herded my sisters and me in the van so we could drive over an hour to my mother’s sister’s home for dinner with her side of the family. By the time we got back to my tia and tio’s house that night, we were tired enough to not be kept awake by the always loud and sometimes louder jokes and resulting laughter while the adults finished their poker game and enough beers to rival the empties found on the floor after a college frat party.

Sometime around noon, our rumbling stomachs would be loud enough to stir us from our beds the next day. Tio would already have been up for hours and something scrambled with eggs would greet us for breakfast. The rest of the adults usually joined us later and dove into a steaming bowl of menudo to cure their hangovers. Sometimes I remembered it was my birthday before the first relative kissed me and wished me a happy day and sometimes I didn’t. Either way it kind of didn’t matter because I’d already opened my birthday gifts after dinner and before midnight on Christmas Eve. At least there was leftover cake.

I’m not telling you this to feel sorry for me, unless you are also a Mappy Birthmas baby, because then you are totally allowed to relate. My birthday is what it is, and even though the date isn’t even singularly spectacular enough to refer to it as anything other than “the day after Christmas,” only three birthdays in my entire memory actually sucked.

The most obvious one is my 30th birthday, which came just about four weeks after my father died unexpectedly. Then there was that Christmas when I was about ten and had begged and begged all year for a ten-speed bike. Points for you if you’ve already figured out why your father proudly putting together your new Birthmas gift in the living room turned out to be the world’s biggest punch line until summer. But perhaps my favorite was the year an aunt took me to see The Nutcracker Ballet and I sat through the entire performance proudly playing my “air flute” on my lap during the appropriate parts. We were there because I had asked her to bring me because I was learning some of the music in concert band. And it sucked because I soon learned that my ticket was my Christmas gift and hers was my birthday gift.

The kicker was that we didn’t even have good seats.

This year I finally realized I’ve hit that time in my life that children won’t understand themselves until they, too, get to where I am. It’s just a day. Another year. I hear most women turning 34 are like that, which makes your birthday and my birthday just about the same.

And for the record? Buttercup was born in June.

See? The Universe? It’s all tied together, yo.

***

I’ve decided I don’t give a shit anymore.

Not about an agent. Not about a book deal. Not about the number of blog hits I get. And not about the fact that my platform is barely big enough to reach the cookies on the top shelf.

I’ve had one dream since I was 8 years old: to become a published writer with a book of my own. My inspiration was Gordon Korman after my fifth grade class was assigned to read the book that got him a book deal when he was all of about 13.

I know. The pressure was on, yo.  And I had three years to deliver.

To say I had a midlife crisis at the age of 14 is an understatement. I was devastated in only the way a teenager with a broken dream can be. And please, let us not focus on the fact that I couldn’t even blame the Man for keeping me down. Gordon Korman got a book deal because his English teacher was blown away by a writing assignment that turned into a manuscript that turned into a career that has spanned decades. I didn’t have a book deal before getting my driver’s license for the very obvious reason that I hadn’t done any work to fucking earn it.

I got over myself for a while and moved on. There was middle school to deal with. And all the hell that comes with it.

And there was high school. That was a nightmare. So busy concentrating on the cliques I didn’t qualify for to make many meaningful friendships with those who I could have. I joined student congress, played varsity tennis, was part of the Spanish club, played a few instruments in the concert and marching band, organized class trips to Cedar Pointe in the hopes of earning some cool points with the In Crowd…

And then I found myself holding in the tears when my speech wasn’t selected for my classes graduation ceremony. I never wrote for the school paper. I wasn’t an enterprising young writer with a check list of publications in which my work had been accepted. I was just a girl who wrote essays and shared them with friends on the phone at night who turned in what I assumed was a given for the commencement ceremony speech.

Are you following along with me, here? I assumed that because my dream was older, my visions of the future grander, and my ego bigger than was good for me, that I didn’t need anything more than a bit of patience for the Universe to send a message to the right people about my hidden genius.

Stupid? Yes. And had I outgrown that thinking, it might have been excusable. To my credit, I did…for a little while. I was too busy to writing for the college paper and failing math classes and finally graduating with honors. Then I was too busy getting married and buying a house and working as a city editor for a small town newspaper. I was too busy to do much, really, until I left my job at a respected newspaper for bed rest, have the baby, survive the first two years of her life, lose my father, and move cross country.

That’s about the time I decided to take a breath and start a blog to get my name out there for the book idea that had just come to me. Twitter was an obvious choice, and while other writers worked on multiple projects and vented about rejections from literary magazines, I happily wasted away hours online “building my platform”  and yes I totally just did air quotes because I still blindly thought that was all I needed. Surely an agent would stumble across my blog and discover me. Talent like this can’t be ignored, right?

Every twitter follower gained was another reason to think I was more of a someone than I had been yesterday. Every blog hit a reason to think things were happening for me. And when I started querying my book, you can bet your ass I assumed I was going to be one of the lucky ones.

Multiple rejections?

My work not actually ready?

My query letter sucking?

Nah…

I was, quite obviously, wrong.

Just like the fourteen-year-old with the midlife crisis, I had no one to blame but myself for my misery. Dreams coming true are not usually the stuff of fairy tales. To happen, they take work on the part of the dreamer.

Do I still wish for a book deal? Sure. But I’m also very aware of the fact that focusing on the goal is not the point of The Writing Dream. The point is actually writing. Everything else is just gravy.

I ran for Student Council every year I was in high school. And every year, I lost.

To the cheerleaders.

To the football players.

To the homecoming kings and queens.

And yet, I still showed up to the 7:30 a.m. meetings once a week, on the advice of our advisor, and was promptly voted in as an “alternate” by the peers who had kicked my ass in the popularity polls. Should one of them decide that sleep was more appealing than showing up bright-eyed and busy-tailed, ready to Make a Difference, I would get my chance to step in and shine.

I may have lost every election I ran while in high school, but I finished every year off as an official member.

After my freshman year, I really didn’t see a point in running an election. the popular kids were going to vote for the popular kids no matter what I said, and that was going to be that. Why bother trying? Why not just slink in to the first meeting and silently announce my intention of replacing the first cheerleader to cry Uncle?

Because I needed to try for me. And when I lost? Again? And Again? I needed to pick myself up and drag my ass to those meetings to show ME that I had it in me.

I’m 33 now. This isn’t high school.

And I have a new campaign to run. I am up against my present-day version of cheerleaders and homecoming queens who have a huge head start on me…and I have until 9 p.m. on Friday (pacific standard time) to get enough of you to each cast one vote for me to make it into the top 20.(tip: you don’t even need to watch the video. Or “like” anything. As long as you have a Facebook account? You can vote.)

If that happens? I get a chance at a dream job.

If it doesn’t? There is no alternate.

I’ve got one shot. The high school me might have shook my head and looked the other way, figuring, “Why bother?”

Today?

I’m giving it my all.

Thank you for the opportunity.

It’s where I do my writing for me everyday. Knowing that my words are for me first. The three people who read my blog second.

No pressure. Except for when I get bored and obsessively check my stats and realize I passed the three reader mark a while ago and freak myself out of blogging because OMG… PEOPLE SEE THIS THING?

Or like today. You know. When your wildest bloggy dreams come true and BlogHer says they’ll syndicate one of your posts?

Yeah, dude. Major performance anxiety.

If you are a regular reader here, please stop by say hello over there. If you came from there and landed here? Please don’t be alarmed if I start talking to myself or when The Husband decides to interview me or if I start calling for my finger monkey named Platform. Oh, and that murder rap is all talk. All talk, I tell you! I mean really, have you ever heard of a murderer who writes fairy tales?

*blinks innocently*