I still wake up early at Christmas.
Not four-thirty early anymore. My body won’t allow that kind of devotion now. But something in me still stirs before the light, the way it did when I was nine years old and convinced that sleep was a foolish thing to waste on Christmas morning.
It was 1978. I know that because the house smelled the same way it always did back then—coffee, pine needles, and whatever optimism my parents had left. I slipped out of bed at 4:30 like a burglar who knew the floorboards by heart. Every step was planned. Every creak, avoided. I made it to the bottom of the stairs and paused, listening for movement, breath held like it mattered.
Nothing.
Santa had come.
The living room glowed softly from the tree lights. Colored bulbs reflected in the window like they were trying to escape. And there it was—my Hot Wheels racetrack. Long, looping, impossible. Plastic orange curves laid out with precision and care. I stood there for a moment, stunned, reverent, like I’d wandered into a cathedral.
Then I did what I always did. I touched it.
By five-thirty, it was in pieces.
At the time, I had no idea that “Santa” was my father, or that he’d spent hours the night before on his knees, squinting at instructions, snapping plastic together while the rest of the world slept. I didn’t know that patience is a limited resource, or that adults keep it in smaller containers than kids assume.
All I knew was that I needed to understand how it worked.
I wasn’t destructive. I was curious. There’s a difference, though it often looks the same from the outside. I wanted to see how the cars stayed on the track. How the launcher snapped back. How the curves held together. By the time the sun started thinking about rising, the track was reduced to a tidy pile of parts and one very confused child.
My father came into the living room around seven.
He stood there, hair flattened on one side, coffee not yet poured, staring at the wreckage of what had once been a masterpiece.
He did not say anything at first. That silence told me everything.
The Hot Wheels track did not make it through the morning intact again. Santa was… displeased. I learned something important that day about effort, though it would take me years to understand it fully.
The Tonka dump truck was another matter entirely.
It sat there like a monument. Bright yellow. Massive. Solid. Steel, not plastic. A truck that meant business. It made the Lovall dump trucks that rumbled past our house all summer look tired and worn. Those trucks were dented, scratched, chipped, scarred by work.
My Tonka truck was perfect. That bothered me.
As I stood there turning it over in my hands, my mind started working. If this truck was going to be real, if it was going to work, it needed history. It needed damage. It needed proof that it had lived.
My father owned a ball-peen hammer. I remember that detail clearly. I also remember the sound it made when it met yellow steel for the first time. Sharp. Final. Satisfying. One dent. Then another. Just enough to give it character. Authenticity. Realism.
This decision did not go over well.
My father’s reaction was immediate and loud, and deeply educational. It turns out realism is not always appreciated when it involves brand-new toys and tools from the basement.
But I was not trying to ruin anything. I was trying to make it better. I always was.
Looking back now, I see a pattern. I took things apart too soon. I wanted answers before I was ready for them. I believed perfection was suspicious and that anything worth loving should show a few marks. That hasn’t changed much.
Christmas is still my favorite time of year. Even now. Even with the years stacked behind me. I like the quiet mornings. The lights. The smell. The way memory sneaks up on you when you’re not paying attention.
Sometimes I think about my father, kneeling on the living room floor in the middle of the night, snapping together a racetrack for a boy who would dismantle it before breakfast. I think about how angry he was—and how he still showed up.
I didn’t understand then that love often looks like effort you don’t see until it’s gone. And maybe that’s the real gift. Not the toys. Not the magic. But the hands that built things quietly in the dark, knowing full well someone would come along and take them apart, just to see how they worked.
I suppose I was always that kid. And in some ways, I still am.
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