Why do we spend billions of dollars on homeland defense technology when a group of children determined to get to the bottom of Santa Claus can do a better job inspecting packages?
After purchasing all that my son and daughter might want from Santa this year, I inadvertently left the toys in the trunk of the car.
That was my first mistake.
Then, this past Sunday, I loaded the car with both kids and drove to the grocery store, completely forgetting what was still in the trunk.
That was my second mistake.
After completing the purchases, we made our way out of the supermarket and I headed toward my date with destiny in the parking lot. My 5-year-old daughter waited for me by the side door while I prepared to load the groceries. I opened the trunk and the toys briefly flashed themselves to the world and I gasped and made a fairly common but regrettable expression.
That was my final mistake.
My daughter, sensing danger — or something — repeated the expression and came at me like an airport security official as I slammed down the trunk.
My daughter’s next reaction was a confluence of words: “There’s My Little Pony and giraffes for princesses and Dora on the Thomas the Tank Engine.”
How did she manage to see every toy in the trunk and remember each one of them — both hers and her brother’s, let alone express it all in one sentence? She’d had only but a second!
In the next moment, a multitude of options spiraled down upon me: protect youth; maintain Santa; Jesus is the reason for the season; plausible deniability. I desperately tried to stop laughing under the weight of the parking lot interrogation by two little kids determined to get to the bottom of things.
Denial first: “You saw nothing! There is nothing in the trunk!”
My daughter rejected that nonsense: “There is a My Little Pony in the trunk,” she refuted with arms crossed on her chest.
Logic next: “Is there?” I asked. “Well, that depends on what thedefinition of the word ‘is’ is.”
But she immediately saw through that one, tossing it aside, making me feel like a subversive terrorist passing a checkpoint under the gaze of a government threatened by an encroaching spiritual movement.
Finally, magic: “You only imagined you saw something.”
“No, I saw it,” came the swift reply. The world as I believed my daughter knew it was about to end as I faced a memory like a steel trap, eyes that could photograph a landscape in a microsecond, and a mind that must be loaded with facial recognition software.
I have recently heard that the Phoenix airport is experimenting with an X-ray that can see through clothes and discern body parts with amazing detail. Why bother? All we need to do is tell children that Santa might be sneaking a few toys into the country. Such machines would pale in comparison to children who thought Santa’s subversive elves were in one of those massive crates coming into the port in Long Beach.
I called my wife and gave her coded instructions, convinced that my daughter could even now spell the word “bamboozle.” I parked the car and walked around the garage with the kids while my wife swooped through the other door, emptied the trunk and hid the toys. My daughter immediately ran for my wife and together they opened the trunk of the car and saw nothing!
Mission accomplished: faith in Santa restored.
In the calm after the storm, I wondered what motivated my need to protect my daughter’s belief in Santa Claus.
In a world where people fly planes into buildings, I hope to protect my daughter’s belief in someone who flies reindeer onto rooftops and whose justification is to magnify the joyous innocence of childhood spirituality and who is encumbered not by competing religious beliefs, but simply by gifts.
And by gifts, I mean lots of toys; toys that are not, nor ever were, in the trunk of my car, so help me God.
Thomas J. Impelluso is an engineering professor at San Diego State University.
Guest commentary submissions of up to 650 words may be sent to openforum@denverpost.com.
