Who Comes Around on a Fire Truck?

It’s getting to be that time of year. Any night now, we’ll here a fire siren outside, and as it gets steadily closer, we’ll get nervous thinking that one of our neighbor’s houses must be on fire. We’ll go to the window, and squint into the darkness at the slow-moving fire truck with its lights blazing, and as we here the distant sound of Christmas carols, we’ll eventually we’ll realize, it’s Santa Claus!

I don’t have a photo of Santa on the fire truck, so please accept this badly Photoshopped image as an illustration:

I’m not sure how widespread the practice of having Santa ride around town on a firetruck is, but they also practiced this holiday tradition in the New Jersey town where I grew up. My sister was very young then, and was excited to see Santa riding around on the fire engine, but this did lead to some confusion. In her young mind, she now associated Santa Claus with firetrucks, and anytime we happened to see one would get super excited thinking Santa must be there. It could be April or July, or some other non-Santa-ish month, and she would be eagerly looking for the fat guy in his red suit, or begging my parents to let her go see Santa Claus.

But really, I have no right to pick on her, since it seems every year we get tricked by the close fire sirens and flashing lights, imagining the worst before we remember that it’s December, the one time of the year that you can glimpse Santa on a fire truck.

— Alissa