A pointless Christmas story, just for you

It's Christmas Day, and the last thing you need is to read more of my drivel. So just a quick Christmas story that may be of interest only to me...

I must have been 6 or 7 years old. We had an old manual typewriter with which I was just fascinated. I loved playing with it. This was long before word processing and personal printers, so I enjoyed the fact that I could create something semi-professional-looking just by smashing on a few keys.

I would type on that thing for an hour at a time. Sometimes I would type real words. Other times I would type my name (over and over and over). And other times I would fill whole sheets of notebook paper with random letters. That's all I used, of course, was lined notebook paper. We didn't have typing paper in the house, and the only place I ever saw blank white paper was at school

Anyway, I used this typewriter a lot. We kept it in a burnt orange plastic case (this was the 70's, after all). One Christmas Eve, I had a dream that I came out of my room on Christmas morning and ran to the living room. But instead of my presents being laid out on the couch like they normally were, all I saw was a small square of that lined notebook paper taped -- yes, taped, like with Scotch tape -- to one of the couch cushions. And typed on that paper was an all-caps message from Santa:

"SORRY, NO PRESENTS FOR YOU THIS YEAR."

Not sure what I did at that point in the dream. Probably screamed or something. Terry says all of my stories from when I was a kid end with the phrase, "...and then I cried." Which isn't true, but for purposes of this dream, it probably was.

Of course I woke up and it was still Christmas morning, and Santa HAD left me presents so all was well. I even got the Evel Knievel Stunt and Crash Car I had been hoping for. That was awesome.

There's no real point to this story other than: (1) It's Christmas and that's about the only Yuletide nugget I could think of, and (2) I'm even stranger than I thought, and I've been that way for a long, long time.

Merry Christmas, blog readers. Your comments and feedback over the first two weeks of this venture have been greatly appreciated. Here's hoping I can think up enough material to keep it going into 2012...