THE UNLIMITED FREEDOM CASTLE

With the holiday season in full swing, The Unlimited Freedom Castle brings you an original Chirstmas tale!

Dear Child Services,

Hello there. My name is Tara Teegarden. I’m sure you know who I am from my many phone calls, but I thought a letter would be a better way to get in touch with you. You can’t just hang up on a letter!

I want to say, right here from the get-go, that our Christmas ended up being a blessed day; one that we won’t soon forget! Well, except for me, I have some blurry spots in there, but who doesn’t?! Even though the events of that day were deemed hazardous to our son, Terrance, many times over, I can assure you that they were in no way planned. I hope to show you that we Teegarden’s are a family, and just because a few slightly harmful mistakes were made doesn’t mean that our home is what you call an “unsafe place for children”.

I think it’s important for you to know exactly what happened that evening, and that way you can get a good idea of just how this whole mess was really, at the center, inspired by family and the joys of Christmas!

It all started on December 7th…

Actually, on second thought, maybe first you should know about something that happened this last summer.

My son, as you’ve probably found out, is a wild boy. He loves to shoot squirrels in our back yard, and show his daddy, Terry, what the guts look like when strung up between tree branches. He is quite the climber; our neighbors confuse him for a monkey sometimes – even when he’s not climbing! That’s my boy! I like to picture him hunting an entire family of scaredy squirrels to provide his future family with a nice meal during the winter months. You never know what things are going to get like with the way this economy is going! We could all be living in the trees come this time next year; you just can’t predict the future! I know that Terrance is thinking of his family when he’s out there, hunting down those little vermin.

So, like I say, our little monkey boy climbed up on the roof to corner a squirrel next to the chimney. Terrance was trying a new strangling technique that he learned from a his gym teacher, and just awrestlin’ that squirrel until he couldn’t breathe no more. Well, when he stands up, he realizes that he’s up near 15 feet off the ground with no way down! He’d kicked the ladder off in his ape-like forgetfulness, and the boy was just plum stuck. However, when his family (me and his father, if you forgot) arrived home, we got him down, safe and sound, and shared the squirrel for dinner. That’s turning a negative into a positive, Mr. Child Services!

You’ll see how that is important near the end.

Now, let’s see here: we’re back to the beginning of December where this whole mess started really packin’ heat. Lookin’ back I have to say that family spirit was at an all-time low for the holidays. A big storm system was kickin’ in, and looking to leave us snowbound for the rest of the winter. Terry had just taken on another shift at the factory to make up for lost wages, and I was workin’ as many weekends as possible at the Cheri’s to pick up extra tips. I even bought a new push-up bra to work up my cleavage area, and the only thing extra I got was when a nice man bought me a baggy Christmas sweater with a note that said, “take a hint”. I think he liked me! I’m a married woman, Mr. Child Services, and for my family’s sake I did not wear the sweater. What I mean to say is that with the way things were lookin’ Terry decided that we didn’t have enough in the bank to power Christmas lights on the house this year. Terrance was devastated. Heck, I was devastated. We were both just devastated.

The problem, as I assume you know, is that Santa Claus is unable to find your house and know that you’ve got the Christmas spirit unless you’ve got some shiny lights on your gutters. There are just too many houses in the world to fly to all insufficiently spirited homes. Here we are, a needy family with only three weeks until Christmas, and I’m worried sick that Santa isn’t going to make it to the house! How would we explain it to little Terrance? I rightly assumed that he would be devastated, not to mention my own love of Christmas morning, presents and the like. I’ll just say that I was a word that starts with “deva” and ends in “stated”. I would do almost anything to make sure Santa would be delivering what’s rightly ours!

“Listen, Tara,” Terry says to me. “Santa is gonna find our house. You and Terrance don’t have nothing to worry about”. In our family you can trust your husband, so you can bet I believed him.

Now, for this next part of the letter, I’m really goin’ to let you in on the mind of Tara Terrance, AKA me. I want you to see what I was seein’, hear what I was hearin’, and feel the feelings that were inside me at the time.

The day was Christmas Eve. Good old December 24th to the layman. That winter storm I mentioned briefly before had turned into the most DEVASTATING storm that we’d ever seen in our small town. Power had gone out in the city, and although it did not matter in the Teegarden household, as we had been using candles and logs for the month, it was a definite morale killer. Over our traditional Christmas Eve family dinner of Ham-like meat, Terry promised that Santa would be visiting our family that night. He assured us that Mr. Claus been alerted to the power outage and economic troubles in our area and that he had a special way of finding our home. I tell you, it was hard to believe him on account of he was giggling the whole way through, but I trust my husband! However, little Terrance threw a fit like we had never seen. You see, Terrance had asked for specific Squirrel killin’ bullets from inside this magazine, and he did not believe that Santa would make it to our humble home without the proper Christmas lights to show him the way. He stormed off to his room to sleep the long, cold night away.

His tantrum shook me to the core. I went to bed unsure of whether Santa was going to make it to our house. My stomach was upset, and I cannot tell you if it was Christmas sadness or the “ham”. The feelings are so similar, I tell you.

Sleep did not come easily, and when I finally did fall asleep it did not last long. You see, at around midnight I heard something up on the roof. It sounded like there was a clatter, arising from right above me! I lay in bed with the covers over my head for the next minute or so, and you wouldn’t believe it, but I heard the sound of footsteps. Santa had gotten out of his sleigh and was walking to our chimney! Terry was right: Santa had found our house!

I couldn’t just sit there anymore; I had to tell Terry, but when I rolled over he was nowhere to be found! My first thought was that he was in the bathroom, to tell you the truth. That “ham” just had something strange about it, and Terry has a bit of a weak stomach anyway. Still, I couldn’t hear any noises (foul or otherwise) coming from the toilet, and so I decided to get up and look for him.

It was almost impossible to find your way around our house in the dark like that, so I lit a candle. Terry likes to use the flashlight, but if I’m up at night I like to pretend I’m living in the olden days, so sometimes I’ll just light a candle and wander. Anywho, I was taking my sweet time around the halls, because if Santa was in our house (which I’m sure he was) I didn’t want to scare him, or make him disappear. But all of a sudden I hear a big CRASH coming from the living room, and my first instinct is to run in there and see what the heck was goin’ on! Maybe Santa was hurt, you never know, he probably doesn’t count on families not having any power!

So I run out there, with my candle, and to my surprise I can just barely see Terry lyin’ on the floor in a heap of presents. PRESENTS! Santa really had made it to the Teegarden home! Even though I was jolly with excitement, my husband was sorta sobbin’ like a baby on the floor.

“What the HECK happened out here, Terry?” I says to him.

Here he is rubbin’ his noggin’, saying, “I think I broke my arm. I couldn’t see anything out here without the flashlight”.

So I says to him, “What were you doin’, honey? Chasing Santa around our living room?!”

I have to say; Terry perked up all of a sudden, and had the most ashamed look on his face, almost like the time I caught him wearing a wig and my only pair of frilly underwear (he was going to stretch them out!). He just started crying and crying, and I could only stare, confused, at his tears. Terry has always been a man with soft sentiments, but I had never seen him bawl like this! He said he was so sorry, that he’d ruined Christmas, and that he was going to make it up to me. I didn’t know what he was talkin’ about! The presents were all there, lined up under the tree, and I could see Terrance’s squirrel bullets sticking right out of his stocking. Santa had come! I thought. But that’s when Terry laid the real bombshell on me.

“You’re not mad that you found out I’m Santa?” he says.

I did a double take, except with my ear instead of my eyes. Here is my husband, claiming to be Santa Claus! “You must have hit your head, too, when you fell!” I started laughing.

“Tara,” he fires back, “I put all these presents under the tree. It’s best you know now that I’ve been Santa since our first Christmas together. It was your father before that”.

All of a sudden I start gettin’ woozy myself, and thinkin’ back on Christmases past, and next thing I know I wake up in Terry’s broken arm with a powerful headache and nasty bout of nausea. After throwing up multiple times into an unfilled stocking I wanted to lie down, but Terry said I couldn’t on account of the fact that I probably had a concussion. Turns out if you have a concussion you are susceptible to comas, and apparently those are full of trouble! Terry said he would stay up to keep me awake, and then try to drive to the hospital in the daylight with his one good arm.

Well, it was about 1:30am on Christmas morning, and we were just sittin’ there in the living room, surrounded by presents and I had an idea: a family idea! Since we were already awake, warned against the medical damage of sleep, why not just get to the best part of Christmas: opening presents! Cradling his broken arm, Terry smiled at me, and I stumbled my way back to Terrance’s room to wake him. He may have gone to bed in a huffy puffy mood, but I was going to wake him up with a big surprise. Well, it was when I opened his door that I found an even bigger surprise: Terrance was gone!

His sheets were on the floor and his bed was empty! All I remember is screaming and the next thing you know I’m waking up, staring at Terry’s crying face…again! If there is a record for possibly Christmas concussions you can be sure I’m near the top! Anywho, when Terry found me he saw exactly what I had saw right before I conked out: Terrance’s window wide-open and nasty breeze of wind and snow driftin’ in.

A kidnapping? On Christmas? Did Santa kidnap our child and give him to a family who had asked for a 9-year-old boy on their Christmas wish list? Will we have to call child services? What exactly does child services do? These were the thoughts running through my concussioned brain as I looked out Terrance’s window into the snowy Christmas night. I was so scared for my baby that I yelled his name out at the top of my lungs, wishing that Santa would bring him back! And that’s when I heard it. Just above the window I could hear someone, almost like a loud whisper, sayin’ “Mommy! Mommy!” There was no denyin’ that it was Terrance…and it sounded like it was comin’ from the roof!

Terry and I run outside in our PJ’s and start yellin’ for our only child, and I’m hopin’ he is safe and not tied to our chimney with magical elf rope. From the backyard we got the best view of the whole house and there was Terrance, frozen solid to the shingles and holding our flashlight in the air! I propped up the ladder, shimmied my way to the top and pried our little darling from his perch. The little prince was as cold as a skeleton’s bathtub, and I thought he might have a touch of the hypothermia, which would not be good for his self-esteem at school. However, he was unfrozen enough to move his lips and his first words after “I think my pee is frozen to my pants,” were, “It’s Christmas! Get me down, Mom!” He sure was my same old family-loving son!

On the way to the hospital Terrance told us the story of why he’d decided to get on the roof. It seems that after our dinner conversation he was so scared that Santa wasn’t going to make to our home that he just had to do something about – for the family! After he heard us get into bed he stole the flashlight and went to the top of the roof. He waved that beam of light around, side-to-side “like a lighthouse” he said (he saw one on some other boy’s internets), hoping to signal Santa and his sleigh. What an inventive and family-oriented boy! After a while he started to feel his legs go numb, but he wasn’t going to give up on his family’s dream. Plus, the ladder had fallen and there was no way he could get down! Moving on though, between that time and the part where I saved him, he had wavered in and out of consciousity, and NEVER even saw Santa land his sleigh! What a disappointment!

So that’s the story! You know, Mr. Services, I’ve heard the accusations that I drank too much “alcohol” with dinner, and that Terrance had rope burns on his arms from being tied to the chimney. What a riot! How would I have been able to climb up to the roof and tie him there if I had been drinking? Hearing charges like that, I can only laugh until I cry! Those accusations are about as far-fetched as the rumor that Santa isn’t real!

Anyway, regardless of what you believe about Santa, I hope you can see that our son made his own decision to go on the roof. He was trying to help his family, but by doing that he can no longer be apart of his family? That is just not the Christmas Spirit that I know, Mr. Services.

In closing, I want you to know just how warm and happy we all were in the hospital on that Christmas day. Seriously, it was a lot warmer in that waiting room than it had been in our house during the entire month of December. We sat close in a circle, smiling together, and even though I threw up all over my new pair of reindeer socks, and Terry’s bone was starting to show through his skin, we were both just relieved to know that Terrance’s body temperature was on the rise, and that he was most likely only going to lose his right hand, which had been frozen to the aluminum barrel of the flashlight. We were closer than we’d ever been! Please don’t take that away from us.

Thank you for your time and Happy Holidays!

Tara Teegarden

P.S. I was going to include a picture of that sweet hospital scene, but I’m attaching it with a letter to the insurance company. Actually, if you have any advice on how we can get these bills lowered, it would be much appreciated.

Stumble It!