If you don't believe, you don't receive

My mom always told us as kids (well, she still does) that "if you don't believe, you don't receive."

I believe. I really, truly do.

And I can prove it. I even wrote an English paper about it, just to make sure any nay-sayers out there knew there really is a Santa Claus. Of course I can't find it in my boxes of junk downstairs at the moment so you'll have to hope I don't leave out any important details to the story.

I think I was about 12 the Christmas I saw Rudolph's nose. Yes, the famous, red nose. Old enough to know certain things, yet still believe in the magic of the Christmas season. We always spent the night at my Grandma's house. The cousins slept upstairs in the living room where we could look at the wall of windows and spy, hoping to see Santa himself. Well, one year my brother Jesse, my cousin Zac, and I woke up hoping it was 7 am and time to go downstairs to open presents. We whispered back and forth until we realized we still had a couple hours to go. So we headed over to the window to look at the lights twinkling on the fresh, fallen snow. Suddenly we saw a red light glowing in across the street. But the thing about the light was, it wasn't a Christmas light hanging on someone's house. It was above the houses.

We all turned to each other in shock, our hearts pounding. Without a word we knew. We knew. We jumped back into our sleeping bags and tried to fall back asleep out of fear we had just blown it with the jolly ole man himself. I've never been so excited and nervous! It nearly killed us to stay put in our sleeping bags until morning. Our poor parents, grandparents, and aunts & uncles! We couldn't contain our excitement as we recounted the night's events. At first they thought we were totally joking and tried to tell us it was just some Christmas lights, it was the neighbor's Santa on their roof, and we were just making it up, but with three kids insisting we had seen Rudolph's nose and telling the exact same details, they finally believed us.

And to this day, I know I saw Rudolph's nose. Just ask Jesse or Zac, they'll tell you the same thing.

I believe. Do you?