“He’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice. Santa Claus is coming to town.”
Ok. I heard that sniff. But here we are, 10 months from last Christmas. That equals out to a cough, a sneeze, two rollovers in your jammies, and bam – it’s almost here. You know it, too.
But that’s not really why I’m singing that song. It’s the “naughty and nice” part that’s stuck in my head like popcorn between the teeth. After the summer we had, I’m needing a whole lot of “nice” to recover from all the “naughty” that went down.
"The 'Dad' sign is off," their father announced recently during an outbreak of naughty. "You know, like the taxi signs?"
I spluttered, stunned. On my visage, thunderclouds gathered, and he disappeared with a clatter and a whoosh, suddenly “needing something” out back by the property line.
The homemade ice cream he made in his inaugural run was awfully nice, though. Handing over a dish of coffee-flavored ice cream with chocolate chips, he'd grinned like the proverbial cheshire cat with cream on its whiskers and, I noted, some on his shirt. Yes, it was very nice.
It was nice, too, when the teenager finally got his driver's license. I'd forgotten how nice it was when a whirlwind could haul himself to his own whirlwind activities, allowing mom to opt out of at least part of that maternal whirlwind of chauffeuring.
It wasn't nice, though, for him to drive off like he did, laughing like a hyena (what else?), leaving his younger brother to walk to the library from Dollar General. No, it wasn't nice at all. It was that other word. It was naughty, too, for College Kid (aka Big Brother) to unleash his own inner hyenas, slapping his knee and snorting when he heard about it.
