I love Santa Claus. And I’m not just saying that to get great presents, really. (Although, hope you remember that, Santa, if it helps). I love the tradition, and now that I’m the one who’s spending his Christmas Eve thinking about Santa Claus plans, making phone calls to friends to see if anyone would be ready to don the red suit and get inside the character, I actually like it even more.

My Santa is not the one that gets in through the chimney in the night. My Santa is the one who walks in to see if there are any nice children in the house, and then leaves his big sack of presents to us.

Although, it’s not that straightforward. It’s almost never been that straightforward.

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Every year, Son, Daughter, and I take the ferry over to Finland about a month before Xmas. We go see the grandparents, and other family, and spread a little advance Xmas cheer. Each year, we drive up to Dad’s, and we go to hockey games.

A few weeks ago, we made our 4th Annual Road Trip to Finland, and we saw two games, one of them a road trip inside our Road Trip, as we drove 150 kilometers to catch a Finnish league game in Kuopio. And not only that, but we watched it from a luxury suite.

That means one thing: Real food.

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“Is the number 17 in there? See if number 17 is there,” I heard from around the room.

I lifted one of the sweaters in the white box, just to see what was available. There are many codes in hockey, most of which I wouldn’t be able to repeat, but one of them is not to make a big deal out of your own number. On any team, everybody always knows each other’s numbers so it’s not a problem, but when you’re playing shinny … it’s a different story.

I lifted one sweater – a number 3 – and put it back down. I picked up another one. It was 21. I put it back in the box.

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Listen, man. I don’t know how many of you people believe in astrology … yeah, yeah, that’s right, baby. I am a Sagittarius, the most philosophical of all the signs. But anyway, I don’t believe in it. I think it’s a bunch of bullshit myself. But I tell you this, man. I tell you this: I don’t know what’s gonna happen, man, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. All right! ALL RIGHT!
– Jim Morrison

About 15 years ago, I went through a big Jim Morrison phase in my life. I don’t remember exactly what triggered it, but it most likely was the Oliver Stone movie which came out in 1991. I probably watched it on video in my apartment, and decided that I was Jim Morrison.

Although, I always knew I wasn’t Jim Morrison. I wasn’t crazy like Jimbo, I wasn’t dangerous like Mr Mojo Risin’. Yet, I also knew that even if I wasn’t the Lizard King, I, too, could do anything.

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It’s not unusual to lose things in a move. Moving every little thing you have, your entire life, from one place to another is a big undertaking in itself, and to make it a little more challenging, you often do it very quickly, in a matter of hours.

I’ve moved twelve times in my life, and ten times since (and including the time) I moved from home, to go to college. That time, I had no furniture to take with me, all I had was clothes and records. A few plates, and glasses and forks and knives.

And my VW Beetle.

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FADE IN.

EXT. A small yellow car is driving on a long city street. On one side of the street, there is a river, on the other, some small houses.

INT. Zooming in, we see two young men inside the car.

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On my first day of work in Sweden, 13 years, 6 months, and 22 days ago, I took the subway from my apartment, a place that a friend of a new colleague let me use for a couple of weeks while I was looking for a place of my own, and I headed downtown.

I had only lived in Stockholm for five days, and had mostly just walked around the neighbourhood – and accumulated parking tickets right outside my apartment building.

I got on the red subway line towards downtown, and sat down reading a book, like a real Stockholmer. And then, as the subway train got closer to the Old Town where the office was, I … well, I panicked. I got off at a stop that was just before the Old Town, foolishly thinking that it would be faster to walk from there than to walk from the actual Old Town stop.

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In April 1917, when the Russian Bolshevik leader Lenin traveled through Stockholm, the Swedish Communists Ture Nerman and Fredrik Ström took their comrade to PUB where they bought him a new suit so he would look good coming back to Russia.
– Wikipedia

Hundreds of thousands of Finns travel to Stockholm each year, most of them on one of the two ferry lines that have their ships go back and forth the two capitals – Helsinki and Stockholm – and one former capital – Turku, Finland.

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In my first year of college, I spent most of the weekends at my Grandma’s little place a half hour north of Helsinki. Well, I actually drove up and spent most of the weekends with my cousins, my uncle’s kids, who shared their yard with Grandma and Grandpa.

They were – are – just a couple of years younger, so e had a lot of fun doing stuff that Grandma and Grandpa probably wouldn’t have wanted to do. I say “probably” because we never asked them if they wanted to come out and go ice skating on the gravel road in the winter, or watch MTV or old TV shows on VHS, or drive up to the sports field and kick a soccer ball with us.

And when it was time to go to bed, we didn’t ask them if they, too, wanted to lie in the dark, listen to music, and crack silly jokes – but then again, by then, they had been asleep for five, six hours.

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On a recent Sunday afternoon, I happened to be in the audience when three Finnish NHL players held a press conference about their game later that week in Helsinki, Finland. The Anaheim Ducks players were on the podium, in their impressive looking suits that they’re required to wear as stipulated in the Exhibit 14, Paragraph 5 of the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ association.

While listening to them, I happened to notice that two of them were wearing very impressive looking watches on their arms.

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