Set Up Like A Deck Of Cards

The Santa Chronicles

On Christmas Eve, when I was around 6-7, my mum was giving my sister a bath, so I told her I was going to set a trap for Father Christmas, to prove he’d been there. At the time, I thought my mum was proud of me for my ingenuity. Now I realise she hated me, because now she’d have to find out what it was I’d done and trigger it.

So I shut myself in the living room, and sellotaped two lengths of black thread inside the fireplace, and then moved the electric fire back into place in front of the fireplace and cleaned up after myself.

When I told my mum that my trap was all ready, she asked me what I’d done but I refused to tell her, as it might ‘compromise the situation’. Those weren’t my exact words, obviously, but I’m proud of myself for having a grasp of the idea.

Anyway, I thought it was a normal Christmas Eve. Turns out my mum was going fucking nuts because she couldn’t figure out what I’d done. Every time I left the room, she was tearing it apart trying to find the trap.

So the next morning, I get up and THE STRING WAS BROKEN! I was ecstatic.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that my mum told me that she was almost in tears while she was putting the presents out at 1am. She had called my aunty and the parents of some of my friends to see if I’d discussed my trap with them. It wasn’t until she was putting the stockings out near the fireplace that she saw one grubby little fingerprint on the wall behind the electric fire, so she pulled it out and, after a couple of minutes, she found the thread and cut it.

Kept me believing for another couple of years.

I love stories like this. This one was inspired by Beeps.