Santa Claus: The Alarm Clock

When you live in an apartment complex with both gas and wood-burning fireplaces, a fire truck is the last thing you want to wake up to on a Saturday morning! Then, much to your sleepy surprise, you recognize a pattern coming from its loud, obvious siren: honk, honk, honk. Honk, honk, honk. Honk, honk, honk, honk, honk, i.e., Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells! Jingle all the way!

Now, no one can ever accuse me of always being appropriately cheerful. I will admit to being inappropriately happy, but that is a story for another day. After making sure the cats were not stuck under the bed where they fled at the first honking of Jingle Bells, I grabbed my camera, jeans, and a coat to put over my over-sized nightshirt and walked to the lake to await the fire truck.

I am fairly certain there are some children in my building, yet not a single child was outside waiting on Santa with me. I immediately made a mental note to make a poster to carry that reads, "I am a blogger. I am only here for the post and pictures".

To make matters worse, notice how slim this Santa is here. Has Santa undergone a makeover when I wasn't paying attention? Apparently so. You know how recent weight loss people are all full of themselves with pride and they want to tell you every last detail of their accomplishment while you are sitting there trying not to eat that last French fry? I'll bet this Santa has a "my stomach must have shrunk" story. Word of advice from me to you, Santa. If your internal organs start shrinking, you should call a doctor not brag about it.

Well, apparently Santa took one look at me and, in his recent weight loss smugness, decided I didn't need any candy from his plastic red tub. Santa wakes me up at 8 a.m. and won't even feed me breakfast? What is up with that?

Excitement over. Time for a pot of coffee. I should have written this after the coffee then maybe I wouldn't have been so mean to Santa Claus, in all his recent beefiness.