Believe

Eaton's Shopping Centre, Toronto, Ontario, 1972.

Compared to the annual photos with Santa that parents do today, I have only two photos of me with Santa - and the second one I did myself. Remember when we had stand-alone photography stores where you dropped off your film then picked up the pictures two weeks later? You could buy film and cameras and all sorts of accessories? There was one of those three doors down from, and on the same block as our funeral home in Cobourg so I walked down one afternoon and had my photo taken with Santa.
Two weeks later, my parents received a call saying my photo was ready!
Santa has always been my guy. Before Daddy, before Ricky Ainsworth in Grade Two, before Alec Maclean who used to get into trouble for reading past reading time in Grade Six (be still my heart!), there was Santa Claus.

You've seen my mantle in a previous post covered in my Santa collection. Well, now I can let my love and admiration for Santa full expression because...

...I get to edit an anthology of stories about Santa.
The idea came up a few weeks ago in conversation with an editor at Nimbus Publishing and I'm lucky they were able to come to a decision so quickly, and while I still have a chance to plant a seed in writers' imagination during this Christmas season. We're publishing it in the Fall of 2020, and I will have a story in it (I'll have to restrain myself as it seems I've written several stories, both fiction and non-fiction, about Santa Claus).

So now Dwayne has just under two years to grow his goatee into a proper beard and be my Santa guy. And now I can totally justify shopping for more Santas. I'm going to need a bigger mantel... and a bigger Santa inflatable!