Today we begin the week with a cautionary tale.
A story of what can happen when a Prude of Strong Convictions turns to lying and deceit.
Our story has a happy ending, but beware. Never take happy endings for granted.
Your Prude, who ordinarily delights in touting the virtues of honesty, for years engaged in living and promoting the most blatant of lies.
Yes. Your Prude not only allowed her boys to believe in Saint Nicholas, she encouraged, nay, nurtured that belief as vigorously as she encouraged them to believe that
‘early to bed and sleep through the night would keep a mother from looking a fright’
‘early to bed and sleep through the night would keep a mother from looking a fright’
On St. Nicholas Day Eve (Dec. 5) she would let them fill wooden shoes with straw, carrots and an apple for St. Nick’s horse, and cookies for the old man himself. She helped them write letters to Saint Nicholas and scurried them off to bed so she could begin the process of nurturing this untruth she had fostered.
She would bury the carrots and apple at the bottom of the trash, fling the straw to the 4 winds, eat the cookies, and lay out gifts for each boy. She would make hoofprints from the horse in the snow outside the door that led to the road. Then, in fanciful handwriting she would answer their letters. One year she even took a photo of the corner of a red tablecloth and let the boys believe it was part of St. Nicholas's robe.
But when her boys were almost old enough to shave and still believed in St. Nicholas, The Prude knew she had carried the deception a shade too far.
With tears in her eyes, she had to explain to her oldest boys that St. Nicholas really had not come all those years. The last vestige of their innocent childhood was gone as they asked in the quivering voices of youths whose voices were beginning to change, “You mean YOU got to eat all those cookies?”
The Prude continued prevaricating about St. Nicholas for her 3rd son. But as he fast approached adolescence still wondering how St. Nicholas could be 1700 years old and get around so well, The Prude knew it was time. Son 1 and Son 2 stepped in to Break the News, while The Prude sat in a corner sniffling into a tissue as her last child was dragged from a world where innocent children are lied to by their mothers.
In spite of years of falsification, The Prude's sons appear not only unscathed by their mother’s duplicity, they still view her as an honest sort of parent.
There may be a moral here about the permissibility of fanciful white lies in the interests of advancing the cause of whimsy and imagination.
Or The Prude may open her door one December 6 to a 1700 year old man in a red robe who wants to know where all his cookies have gone.
