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Confessions of a 47-year old child (or, what I told my daughter when she asked me if Santa was real)
This is the story I shared with my daughter when she asked me, three years ago, if I believed in Santa.
When my twelve year old daughter was three, we were taping Christmas shows and came across a Muppet production called The Christmas Toy. It's a lovely story that I won't go into.
The important thing is: my daughter decided she wanted Rugby Tiger, one of the main characters, for herself for Christmas. It was the main thing she told Santa she wanted.
One problem. Unlike probably anythhing else ever produced by a outfit like the Muppets, there were not spin offs from this one show.
We tried the internet. When we finished with the toy stores in Fargo, I went to the library and from the phone book got a list of likely store in the Twin Cities. After a lot of calling, nana. Nobody know what I was talking about
Wonderful. My daughter's first real "I know what's going on around me" Christmas, and she was not going to get her Santa wish. My wife and I were seriously depressed as only a first-child parent could be realizing that the Christmas Toy would not happen.
Then, about a week before Christmas, I stopped in a drug store in town. They had a big table full of stuffed aninals, which I had dilligently search through before.
I couldn't help myself, and decided to dig in again. And there, not very far down, was a stuffed tiger that was the very picture of the one on the television show.
I had found Rugby tiger, in a drug store in my home town of less than 10,000 people that could not be found anywhere else on the planet.
Christmas was saved.
And that, I told my daughter, is why--even as I sit up late wrapping the "Santa" gifts---I still believe in Santa.
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