It was
eight o’clock when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I called to Scott, who was
otherwise occupied with carting in armful after armful of holiday loot from the
car and dumping it under the artificial fir tree in our foyer.
This brief sojourn
at home was the midpoint in our annual Christmas Eve tour of gorging and
gifting. Having finished a traditional holiday dinner at my mom’s, we’d stopped
at the house just long enough to unload the current batch of presents and let
the dog out before hopping back into the car for the next round of merriment at
my sister’s.
I opened the door and there, on our front
porch, stood Santa Claus, flanked by a sullen pair of teenagers in green and
red elf hats who were clearly mortified to be spending the night before
Christmas trailing their dressed-up dad as he canvassed the neighborhood for young
believers.
He must have been a neighbor, but I didn’t recognize the face under
the beard and—I’ve got to admit—I felt a little bit sorry for the unwilling
elves. Don’t get me wrong, it was sweet that the dad still wanted to play
Santa, but the kids had obviously outgrown the bit. His refusal to retire the
red suit smacked of desperation—a last-ditch effort to reclaim their youth.
Four-year-old Sammy, who’d followed
me to the door, was speechless.
“Who do we have here?” asked Santa,
giving me a wink. The elves sniggered and rolled their eyes, certain that this
question gave away the fact that he was not, indeed, the real Santa. They were too old, too cool, to remember the
way faith trumped reason in favor of the jolly old elf.
“This is Sammy,” I answered, nudging
her forward.
Santa let out a chortle so hearty it
made the elves cringe. “Sammy, have you been a good little girl this year?”
Sammy nodded her blonde head, still
too shy to speak. “You have,” Santa agreed. “Your name is on my nice list.”
Nice? Buddy, I wanted to say, you
don’t know the half of it. In May, when a suspicious-looking mammogram had turned
up an unthinkable diagnosis, I’d sat down with Sammy to explain that some cells
in my breast weren’t growing the way they were supposed to and that those
naughty cells would need to be surgically removed.
Her concern had not been for
herself, but for me. "But that will hurt
you!” she’d said indignantly, patting my beleaguered breast sympathetically to
make her point.
In the months that followed, endless
dragged-out weeks between diagnosis and testing and surgery, and doctor visits
and more surgery, Sammy had been my cheerleader.
“Mommy,” she’d
said, as if saying it out loud would make it come true, “you have to be brave
and I have to be brave.”
And brave she’d been—coping with my inability to
lift her after my surgeries, tolerating the tiredness that prevented me from
doing much more than watching television, and playing along with my pretense
that cancer was a perfectly natural part of everyday life. Not once had she
complained that it wasn’t fair or that she deserved better. She’d borne it all,
every last aching minute, with grace.
That’s not to say she’d been angelic.
There had been tantrums with wild, flailing arms and legs, angry moments when
she’d collapsed into a heap on the floor and pretended to be a rock, times
where she’d taken advantage of my exhaustion by engaging in activities that she
knew were prohibited. But those moments were to be expected when cancer barged
into a pre-school life and made itself at home in the living room.
And though she was still plagued by
intermittent bouts of separation anxiety and had taken to nocturnal wandering
that generally ended with her falling back to sleep in the middle of our bed—that
is, when she was able to sneak in without waking us—for the most part, she was a
typical four-year-old, full of wonder and independence and joy.
Santa directed his next question at
me. “Would you like me to come in for a picture?”
My response was ill-advised and
immediate. “Yes, please!”
I led Santa and the elves inside, past
Scott and the Christmas tree and piles of presents in the foyer to the
fireplace in our family room. Santa arranged himself on the hearth and motioned
for Sammy to join him. The ever-more-embarrassed elves slouched into the corner
and tried to blend in with the wall.
“What are you doing?” Scott hissed as
I rummaged in my purse for the camera. “We don’t even know this guy! He could be here to rob us.”
“Oh, come on,” I whispered back,
hoping that the elves wouldn’t overhear. “Would a robber bring his kids with him?
It’s Christmas. He’s just a guy who wants to make little kids happy.”
But even as I said it, I knew Scott
was right. It was the oldest trick in the book—the criminal disguised as Kris
Kringle. Our Santa could have been a pedophile, a mugger, a murderer, and I’d
invited him in, all in the name of a cheap red suit and the fact that it was
Christmas Eve.
Sammy clambered onto Santa’s lap. “Say
cheese,” I said, raising the camera to capture the moment (or evidence, if
needed.) The discomfited elves gave their bells a half-hearted shake, their
pointy hats tipping precariously off their heads, as Santa let out another
jovial, “Ho! Ho! Ho!”
Sammy responded with a smile so bright
it rivaled the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow or the star that led
shepherds to a stable in Bethlehem; a radiant beam that brimmed with the bliss
of every holiday miracle ever granted, every precious package tied up with a
bow and placed under a tinsel-trimmed tree, every choir of angels that ever
raised a song of praise.
Gone was the cloud of cancer that had hung over our
house for the better part of a year, gone was the agonizing worry about
survival and recurrence and what it could mean for our future. It was Christmas
Eve and Santa Claus had, by divine providence or plain old luck, materialized in
front of our chimney to fill not the stockings, but our hearts.
I snapped the photo that would
become the foundation of Sammy’s childhood holiday belief system, the linchpin
in her defense of Santa.
“Mom,” she’d say, when her classmates started making
noise about Christmas conspiracies and the sham of Santa Claus, “my friends say
that Santa Claus isn’t real. But that’s because they’ve never met him! I met
him, the real Santa, that Christmas when he came to our house.”
And I would
remember the stranger in the red suit who showed up at our door, a one-man
bandwagon of goodness and kindness, and have no choice but to agree.
“Well, we probably should be going,”
Santa said, and the magic was broken. He eased Sammy off his lap and stood up,
stamping his black boots to get the blood flowing. “Rudolph gets worried if we
take too long.”
Sammy flung her arms around his legs
in a final hug. The elves jingled their bells and, cracking the slightest of
grins, offered her a candy cane. I blinked back tears and tried to thank the
Christmas crew for stopping by, though I was unable to summon words that did my
gratitude justice.
We followed Santa and the elves as
far as the porch. I put an arm around Sammy, pulled her close to ward off the
cold, and together we waved and watched Santa tramp purposefully down the
length of the driveway, the elves ten paces behind, until they reached the gaudily
lit displays of plastic mangers and fake reindeer that lined our street and
disappeared into the inky night.
Late that night, long after Sammy
had been tucked into bed and Santa’s load had been delivered to our tree and
all that remained of the cookies and milk left on the mantel was a plateful of
crumbs, as I lay awake pondering the mystery of our visitors, I couldn’t help
but marvel at what Santa Claus had been teaching those teenagers, even if they
weren’t quite ready to learn it, a life lesson in the feel-good power of selfless
service.
And when I considered the serendipity of his timing—the fact that he magically
appeared at our door not only in the five minutes that we happened to be at
home, but in the year that we needed him most, to restore our faith and pay
hope forward—I could come to only one conclusion.
Our
Santa was the real deal.