Christmas Creeper

“That should do the trick,” Cree heard his father say as he stood up outside the bedroom door.

“You’ve outdone yourself this time,” his mom answered in an exhausted cheerfulness.

“Let’s get to bed before Cree wakes us up.”

Christmas Trapped

In spite of himself Cree smiled with a strange sort of confidence. It was five o’clock when he looked over at his nightstand, and slid silently out of the creaky twin bed. The clothes he planned to wear were lain neatly on the floor. Cree could slither into them without much trouble at all. He even looped his belt without a whole lot of trouble, or noise.

When he was set to go, Cree gently slid his fingers over his nightstand until they came across a neat pair of Fiskars. These he gripped and brought them down to rest in his belt like a little knife. Thinking through how he was supposed to disarm his father’s ingenious trap, Cree slipped his hand under the bed as well to see if he could find any other useful items. A ruler happened to be lying there and that gave him a brilliant idea; he picked it up carefully, checking to see if anything was on another part of it, before picking it up like a sword.

The Escape

Crossing over to the door, Cree gently opened it a couple of inches and slipped his tiny hands through until he found a string. With the ruler, he felt around until he could pull it towards the door with the small amount of slack his dear dad had left. Once the trip wire was close enough for the scissors to reach, Cree snipped it, using his thumb to hold the string to the ruler. Imagining how the string was tied to the door, he brought the ruler up until he heard the bells lift off of the doorknob.

With the bells in hand, he gently opened the door and let himself out.

“Now for the payback!”

Cree stepped to the next door and quietly began wrapping the string around the doorknob in a very delicate fashion. The instant the doorknob turned, the bells would come crashing down.

“At least I won’t have to wait for everyone else to get up.”

Wakeup Call

Around six-fifteen, it happened, CLANG! CLANG! “What?”

His mother was the one making her morning rounds and she had tripped the trap. In moments Cree heard his father say his name and come rushing into the living room. There he sat, as calm as he was awake, on top of his stocking eating a couple of loose peanuts.

Suddenly they all heard little Kadi, “What the matter? Did Santa take Cree?”

Lessons Learned

• Avoid noise triggering traps when trying to keep my children in their beds
• Use knots that leave no slack, to avoid smashing small hands or fingers
• Never allow children to sleep with school supplies, or random roguish machinations