Heather Christena Schmidt

… is of course that they turn into me.

My darling Pookie home schools and so never gets much exposure outside of daily ME. Being gifted and stuck in a state with an awful paradigm of education, right now this seems to be the best choice, except for in one instance: all this time together means she’s quite obviously turned into me. What does that mean, faithful blog followers? It means she’s snarky, sassy, sarcastic, and jokes around constantly. She also tells it how it is, and rather bluntly I might add. I find these to be among the greatest qualities a human being can possess, although I’m finding myself now in a position of having to tell her to tone it down a bit because – quite frankly – I don’t want people to hate her as much as they hate me. Being me often comes at a high price.

So today, sitting at Quizno’s while eating sandwiches and talking about the Christmas party we’re hosting tomorrow, Pookie turned to me and made the snottiest face I have ever seen and announced loudly that she doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. She said it’s far fetched. She said that the idea of a “fat guy coming down a chimney is just absurd,” and that she refuses to leave out cookies when they’ll just be thrown out because Santa doesn’t exist. This apparently came because she found one of her gifts wrapped up and labeled “From Santa,” and despite my explanation that I put “From Santa” on everything so that no one feels embarrassed if they didn’t get her as many or as quality of gifts as others do, she apparently figured it out. Just like me, since making the discovery, she has sat and thought on it, overanalyzing it until all of the inconsistencies in the entire Santa Hypothesis are now blatantly obvious to her.

I feel sort of bad for her, actually. Not only am I the worst present-hider and liar when said presents are found, but the last few years she has had to endure one drunken Santa character after another when getting the yearly picture at the mall. She doesn’t like eating meat either (that’s right … she calls herself a vegetarian) and year after year prime rib and other such meat-centric dishes are forced down her throat on Christmas Eve when we attend the annual family events. Christmas is a rough time for little Pookie.

Did I mention she’s only seven?

We should consider that this is coming from the kid who told me this past April that the Easter bunny is “…nothing more than some psycho dressed in a bunny costume. What kind of a kid likes to sit on the lap of that kind of a weirdo?” See what I mean by blunt? She has a point, though. The concept of the Easter bunny never made much sense to me either. How, exactly, our culture went from Jesus to a pink bunny leaving behind colored and inedible eggs is still beyond my level of analytics. Back to the kid, sometimes I think she tries to be snarky and funny not because she actually is, but because she knows how much I am – more proof, though, that she’s turning into me whether it be directly or indirectly.

In the end, you’ll see Pookie still dressed in her Ho Ho Ho pajamas and insisted on leaving some carrots in the front yard “just in case this whole shenanigan is real and the reindeer are hungry” – said flippantly as she rolled her eyes and tossed them on the ground. (We celebrate on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day…so the nonexistent Santa is due to come tonight.) Then she walked inside, lecturing me about how Christmas isn’t about the gifts anyway before leaving some carrots and a bottle of water near the tree. “What are you doing, Pookie?” I asked – legitimately bewildered. “Like I said, if this whole Santa drama is real, I should leave something. But Santa drinks too much and has clearly eaten too many cookies in his day – as evidenced by his increased belly size in Santa Buddies. So I’m going to leave him carrots and bottled water instead. Maybe then he won’t drive his sleigh so drunk anymore.”

Okay, darling…