EllRay Jakes Rocks the Holidays! by Sally Warner

he can supposedly hear me thinking. Of course he can’t, but it’s true that my brain is buzzing. Today has been packed so full that I am numb.
    And it’s true, I cannot fall asleep.
    It rained all day, but that didn’t slow us down much—though Alfie worried aloud about Santa’s reindeer slipping tonight on our wet tile roof. Dad didn’t calm her down any when he joked that Santa might sue us if he fell.
    “Don’t say that, Dad,” she said. “He might be
wistening.
”
    Which is Alfie-speak for listening.
    “I guess I’m excited about Christmas,” I tell my dad. “But I also feel kind of—”
    “Sad? Nervous?” Dad says, trying out a couple of sentence endings for me.
    I nod my head the best that I can on my pillow.
    It’s hard to explain my mixed-up feelings. But my dad seems to understand.
    “I remember that feeling,” Dad says. “You’re nervous that maybe you won’t get what you want tomorrow. Or even if you do, you’re sad in advance because Christmas morning will be over so fast.”
    “And I’m
not
sure about what I got for Mom,” I tell him. “That napkin holder with the chickens painted on it, remember? I don’t think it’s good enough.”
    “Listen, son,” my dad says, sitting on the edge of my bed. “Nothing is good enough for your mom, because she’s the absolute best. She’s our queen. But she’s going to love it. It will go right on the kitchen table, just you wait and see.”
    “She would pretend, though,” I say. “I want her to
really
like it.”
    “Well, you have no control over that, EllRay,”Dad says, laughing. “None of us does. But that’s Christmas for you! Maybe all we can do is to try hard, and then
hope
for the best. Did I ever tell you about my most perfect Christmas ever? The year I got exactly what I wanted, and then some?”
    “Nuh-uh,” I say, shaking my head in the dark as Dad settles in next to me, on top of the covers.
    I love my dad’s stories about when he was a kid.
    “It must have been, oh, when I was nine years old, just a year older than you are now. And the biggest ‘wow’ toy that Christmas was the Nintendo Entertainment System.” He sighs, remembering. “It was really expensive,” he says. “Something like one hundred and fifty dollars, which was a
lot
back then. And the games were forty or fifty dollars each. I don’t know.”
    “That’s a lot even today,” I point out. “I mean,
really
a lot.”
    “True,” Dad says, nodding in the dark. “And you know Pop-Pop,” he says, talking about my grandfather, who lives near San Francisco now. “He was always careful with a dollar, so I was
sure
he and Mama weren’t going to get it for me. And even now, people call that Nintendo the single greatest videogame console in history,” Dad adds, sounding like the hopeful nine-year-old kid he was back then. “That’s how good it was.”
    “But Pop-Pop was a doctor,” I say. “Don’t doctors make a lot of money?”
    “Some do,” Dad agrees. “But Pop-Pop was just starting out back then, and he was not in private practice. He was a
Navy
doctor. You know, at the Naval Hospital San Diego? It became the Medical Center a short while later,” he adds.
    But I want Dad to stick with his perfect Christmas story.
    “I guess you got it, though,” I say, prodding him to tell me what happened.
    “Not only did I get it,” Dad says, “but I also got the G.I. Joes that were on my list. Mercer, Red, Dog, and Taurus,” he says, still sounding impressed all these years later. “And on top of everything else, my grandparents gave me this really special toy called Talking Alf. ‘A.L.F.’ stood for ‘Alien Life Form.’ It was a hit TV series, see, and I just loved it. And Talking Alf was really expensive too. But oh, how I wanted that toy—because sometimes, I think I felt like an alien, too.”
    My own dad felt like he didn’t blend in? Was it because he had brown skin?
    Well, he still does.
    I
do not
like talking to my dad about