The blessed season of Christmas is upon us once again. It’s the season of goodwill, a time for loving and sharing, a month of giving and receiving. Here in the Klaus family, we take Christmas quite a bit more seriously than you may be used to, mainly because we’re descended from the original Santa Claus. No, not Saint Nick; we mean the literal Santa Claus. Father Christmas. The one who flies around on a sleigh, bringing presents. Yep, that’s our great ancestor. Stand-up guy!
It also means we have to get really into Christmas, since it’s in our genes, so I’ve been making multiple runs to the local hardware store. Sandringham is the best place for hardware and timber, and I’ll tell you why: it’s because you can also get trees there as well. We always make annual trips to Sandringham, so we can buy a load of timber and a gigantic tree. We need there timber for our family tradition of building a gigantic sleigh, pulled by gigantic reindeer, then decorating them with so many lights that they can be seen from the International Space Station.
Did I mention that the sleigh and reindeer are forty feet tall? Because they are. You’d think we could just use the reindeer and sleigh from last year, but we can’t, because every year it gets ceremonially set alight on Boxing Day. This is to represent the death of that year’s Christmas, although every year it rises, rises from the ashes like a phoenix. I cry every single year, even though I know that Christmas is coming once again, in 365 days.
That’s only the beginning of the set up, of course. Our preparations for Christmas take ten days, utterly transform our entire home into a winter wonderland and require our own power grid because of all the complicated lights and wiring. Which reminds me, we must make a trip to Cheltenham. Electrical supplies aren’t going to buy themselves! Ho ho ho!
-Samara Klaus