FOUNTAIN: Dear Santa, it’s been awhile, but can you come through again?

Dear Santa, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written you.

I hope you and Mrs. Claus and the elves and all the reindeer, especially Rudolph, are doing well and preparing for your annual grand flight across the globe.

I’m sure you’re busy loading your sleigh with lots of toys for girls and boys, and turning up the Christmas cheer. So I promise not to take too much of your time.

So, Santa, I am admittedly a little old — and gray — to be sending you my Christmas list. But I’m still a kid at heart — sort of — even if my tastes have grown beyond that Strombecker racing set and that NHL Stanley Cup table hockey set you delivered bright and early one Christmas morn back when I was a young’un.

There was the time you brought me the hockey stick whose hard plastic end I curved with a little heat from the kitchen stove — so my stick could cup the puck. I was the envy of my block.

There was the train set that smoked and shrilled. The Tonka trucks.

There was that year I got spinning Battling Tops. The year you brought me my basketball, and all the years we got Monopoly and other board games. I would call my cousins Michael and Arty on the telephone and we’d excitedly tell each other all the things we got.

The toys were always accompanied by endless striped red and white candy canes and assorted chocolate, butterscotch and cinnamon candies and also pecans that I cracked between my teeth. And fruit — lots of fruit. Santa, you were the man!

“Santa Claus, go straight to the ghetto,” James Brown soulfully bellowed my Christmas anthem.

Santa, you always came through.

Nowadays, Santa, you probably don’t get many letters from grown folks. And that’s likely because we’ve stopped believing in you a long time ago. Or maybe it’s that we figure that we’ve probably been on your naughty list so many times that you aren’t likely inclined to issue a seasonal pardon.

But just in case you are in the business of bringing Christmas gifts to those still young at heart and you are perhaps willing to at least take a peek at “our” Christmas lists, I’m sending you mine — with hugs and thanks in advance for your consideration.

Hmmm, I know I’m probably supposed to ask for something like world peace, for an end to hunger or goodwill toward men. But please forgive me if drop the political-Christmas correctness and keep it real:

Santa, I’d like a set of highway pegs for my Harley and a shiny backrest. I’d like a new bottle of Sauvage cologne. A couple of new dress suits, a new pair of boots and maybe a new smartphone…

On my big list is an all-inclusive vacation for two to Maui, Aruba or Cancun.

If that’s not possible, then how about tickets to the NBA All Star game (Los Angeles, Sunday, Feb. 18)? Or tickets to a Cavaliers vs. Warriors NBA Finals game seven?

Or how about a 2018 MLB World Series championship for the Cubs?

Santa, can you make the Bears great again? (OK, I realize there’s only so much YOU can do. I’ll put ’em on my prayer list.)

So maybe you could just send me a do-it-yourself lawn mower, or a self-cooking barbecue grill.

Or maybe you could just send us a little snow this Christmas since I really already have everything I need: Breath, food, friends, family and sweet Christmas memories.

Oh, and Santa, after Christmas, could you take the snow — every bit of it — all the way back home with you?

Email: Author@Johnwfountain.com

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