There are raccoons in my chimney, no doubt about it.  You can hear them every night, running across the roof and then you can hear them crawl down into the chimney and hit the damper.  If you put your head in the fireplace, you can hear them scuffle around, too.  Obviously this situation itself isn’t ideal especially since it’s cold and I would like to use my fireplace without the fear of accidentally cooking a live animal rotisserie style but the other problem is my son.

He turned 10 this year and my wife and I decided that it was time to tell him the truth about Santa Claus.  Two weeks ago after he made a comment about what Santa was bringing him for Christmas, we sat him down and started to explain the truth. With tears in his eyes he started to ask the heart wrenching question, “So Santa isn’t real?”  I’m not kidding when I say right at that moment we heard little footsteps dance across the roof. My sons eyes lit up, first with excitement and then with anger as he pointed his finger at my wife and I and blatantly accused us of lying to him because “Santa’s reindeer were here right now checking to see that he was in bed”, he followed that statement off by storming upstairs so he wouldn’t be caught out of bed past bedtime and would remain on Santa’s good list.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the do-good attitude that the Santa myth instills in him, but I don’t want the truth coming from anyone other than my wife and I.  The problem is that with these raccoons in the chimney he thinks every night Santa’s reindeer drop off an elf that crawls into the chimney to check up on him; so until we get rid of the raccoons, we can’t solve this problem.  We want to have this taken care of before Christmas so that we can finally start a fire and we can move past the Santa idea.