Act 23 How To Ruin The Holidays: Insomniac Style

I don’t sleep much. And the more I think about it the more I realize how far back it goes. So this is to share with you how I have ruined various holidays with my insomnia. Christmas: Now every child has had a Christmas where they had trouble falling asleep. The lights outside the window are bright and inviting and the excitement that has been building is almost palpable. Relatives are coming into town and the sugar high that you have been on for the past 48 hours doesn’t help. But when the sugar stops flowing and the threat that if you don’t go to sleep Santa will not come finally takes over and eventually the sugar plumb effect takes over and normal children drift off to peaceful slumber. On the other hand, as an insomniac, sugar only refuels the batteries you have in reserve and the thoughts that just won’t die make it all but impossible to dose off without a drink of water and two Nyquil chasers. So around 4 in the morning when it was pretty self evident that sleep would completely evade me I decided to get a glimpse at the fat man myself. I could hear the deep breathing of my two brothers I shared a room with and decided that the time was right. Ever so softly I crept from my bed hearing every sound I made amplified in the darkness. My first instinct was to just jump out at Santa but then I decided that that would probably put me on the top of the naughty list so I needed another plan. I knew that my parents sometimes checked on us to make sure that we were asleep and I figured if I could fool them then maybe Santa’s sixths sense for unruly tots might also be flawed. So I hatched a daring plan. Now the Christmas trees when I was a boy where massive. Towering in the corner of the living room across from the fire place, so I knew there would be enough light to see the elf slave master. But I needed to make sure that he didn’t see me. So I wrapped myself in wrapping paper for better camouflage worm crawled under the tree and strategically placed the few gifts that where already under the tree into a kind of box fortress from which I could peek out through the arrow slit like cracks. Then to make sure that I was covered I broke a branch off of the back of the tree with ornaments on it and put it on my back. That’s right, I was a 5 year old kid wrapped in tinsel and wrapping paper hiding under the recess of the Christmas tree with presents piled in front of me in the configuration of a castle wall with a heavy branch draped over my head and shoulders stabbing me mercilessly with those evergreen needles and dripping sap in my hair. It was a hiding place that Rambo himself would have been proud to call his own. This is how I found out that there was no Santa and silently wept under the tree as I saw my mom and dad eating the cookies we left out. Insomnia 1 Christmas 0. Let me fast forward you to Easter. I know that New Years is next but that is kind of the unofficial insomniac holiday so it is hard to ruin with not sleeping. Unless you count the fact that you didn’t sleep for the five days prior to the New Years and actually have trouble staying awake the one day a year it is socially acceptable to do so. Damn Insomnia 1 New Years 0. Ok so Easter I always had trouble sleeping because I was on the top bunk bed and the heater was positioned just above my face and not only was it extremely uncomfortable bellowing scorching air directly into my face but every time it turned on it woke me up and owing to my condition falling asleep is quite hard. So Easter, I get up when the heat kicked in at 3 in the morning and decided to get a head start on finding those ever elusive Easter eggs the bunny so aptly hides. So I sneak outside with a flash light looking for brightly colored hardboiled breakfast in the grass. But after looking for an hour I found nothing. Now I am skeptical mainly because I had found out the same year that Santa was in fact not real so I go inside the house and find the basket of Easter eggs sitting in the fridge not touched by fluffy bunny hands. I waited a few more minutes hoping maybe that the hoppity hider might suddenly appear but by this time it was 5 in the morning and I was growing weary that my childhood might be slipping away so I bucked up my courage and went to the only person I knew could reassure me; my Mom. I silently slipped into their room where they where fast asleep and gently roused her so not to wake my Dad. All that I wanted was for her to lie to me so that my fading innocents could be restored so I said, “ Mom the Easter bunny hasn’t come yet the eggs haven’t been hidden.” Now there is something that I didn’t know at this point about my Mother. That when woken from a state of deep sleep she is the most honest person you will ever meet, also she will not remember what she told you the next day. So this is how the conversation went down;
“Mom the Easter bunny didn’t come yet the eggs haven’t been hidden.”
“Oh I completely forgot. Would you do it for me?”
Sniff…..Sniff…”ok Mom” sniff….sniff…… Yes that was me holding back tears as my mom returned to peaceful dreams while I went outside in the early morning air and hid the eggs for my brothers and sisters so that they didn’t find out that the Easter bunny was in fact a lie. Insomnia 1 Easter 0. So for the final tally that is Insomnia 3 Holidays 0 Insomnia wins again. Actually lets give insomnia 1 more point because I wrote this at 4:30 in the morning and have to be ‘up’ in a half an hour for work as always insomnia wins again.