Yes, Salvage Chick, There Really is a Santa Claus.

For a minute there last Sunday, I really believed that there wasn't. Or that he had skipped town early along with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy and all my other dashed hopes and dreams. Why was I so disillusioned? I finally saw the inside of Yard Sale Buddy's House! Sometimes when my husband is channel surfing he'll flash by an episode of Sanford and Son and I'm like, "Stop! Stop!" so we watch for a while while I marvel at the junk all over the house commenting enviously "I bet that's what Yard Sale Buddy's house looks like inside." It's not like he's never invited me in, but I've always found a reason not to go in thinking I'M NOT WORTHY to see the Holy Grail of Junkdom. I knew he had one cat, but I figured there were about 18 more inside along with piles of newspapers dating back to the Nixon Administration, and other crazy treasures like a stuffed wooly mammoth and possibly a mummy sarcophagus or two. So on Sunday when I stopped to drop off his Christmas present (a sweatshirt that reads JUNKMASTER: Search and Rescue Team - how PERFECT is that?) he said OH, I have something for you, come on in... and without thinking twice I followed him in. To a seemingly NORMAL house! Oh... my... where were the twenty years worth of National Geographic magazines? And was that DAYLIGHT streaming in through the windows? Just when I was marveling he has a REAL LIVE PET BIRD in one of his famous birdcages, he pointed to the stove and said "There's my turkey I cooked this morning" WHAT? There it sat on the stove along with simmering pots of potatoes and vegetables and gravy. I thought he subsisted solely on Dunkin Donuts coffee... He Can COOK?!?!? Maybe there really IS no Santa Claus after all.