The Year I Tried to Save Christmas
Three Christmas Stories, One Post
For the past seven years, I’ve spent Christmas Eve rolling out apple-walnut cinnamon rolls from scratch—a ritual that feels as comforting as the season itself. Then, of course, there are the traditional shredded chicken sandwiches with dill pickles that we munch on all day, the vodka slushies we get drunk on, and the weird cheese ball my wife insists on making every year (which we all love, by the way).
These quirks, along with never putting a single gift under the tree until the kids are fast asleep on Christmas Eve—a stark contrast to my own childhood where presents gradually piled up underneath the tree as the December days crept closer and closer to the big day—all of that creates a kind of magic that feels uniquely ours.
And three years ago, I added a new tradition: writing a Christmas-themed essay. I reflect on the season through storytelling—capturing moments of joy, loss, and connection that have stayed with me. These essays have been my way of exploring what Christmas truly means, one story at a time.
Until now, these essays have only been shared with my newsletter subscribers (stevebargdill.com/an-email), but this year, I thought I’d try something new and share them here on Substack.
So, here’s this year’s Christmas story, along with two others I’ve written in years past. From the North Sea’s cold winds to a thirteen-year-old’s determination to become Santa, I hope these stories bring a little light—and maybe a bit of magic—to your own holiday season.
The Silent Distance Between Us
We stood on the beach staring into the darkness of the North Sea. A few cabanas, tethered deep into the sand and knocked around by the wind, remained past their season. Snow sporadically flitted down, sparkling in the glimpses of the last light from the sinking sun behind us. The air carried the tang of wet stone—an undercurrent felt everywhere you went in Germany. But besides that, the salt and brine. I was only a few feet from Judith but felt millions of miles away, wearing her father’s coat, a deep blue Di Lusso, and I had buried my hands into the pockets, hunched my neck deeper into the collar.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I so hoped you could see snow. We’re famous for snow.”
“I’m cold,” I said.
“Ever since I brought you, all you’ve done is complain. This is beautiful, this is real.”
I didn’t feel like I was complaining. Just stating a really stupid, obvious fact for the lack of anything else to say. That was when I really knew—this was the beginning of the end for us.
I never understood Judith like the way I thought I had. When we first met, she was working on an essay about the first time she encountered snow. Her sociology professor had gone ga-ga over that essay and pressured her into publishing. Though having been born in Germany, she’d grown up in the jungles of Papua New Guinea amongst a stone-age tribe barely known to civilization. Her father worked to convert them to Christianity. Her mother put down their language into a dictionary. I remember her essay so vividly. She’d woken from her bed on holiday, saw the snow through the window—draping the trees, bending pine boughs under its weight—and run out barefoot in her pajamas, twirled and danced, and caught fat, heavy, wet flakes spinning softly down upon on her tongue. She never published the essay, but her sister wrote a memoir years later, and I swear the words from her essay found their way into the pages of that book.
Once, in our early days, when we were only friends, she grabbed my hand and pulled me into a late springtime Ohio woods. “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something important.” She navigated the maples and oaks as if she’d memorized every tree, every twist of the forest, every stone, every cluster of fern, every blackberry bramble. The lingering remains of a past autumn’s moldering leaves and new mayapples unfurling underneath our feet. Until the woods opened like an exhale, and I stumbled into a small clearing. “Look,” she whispered, and pointed.
I’d grown up in the lumber business. The woods were always a comfortable place for me. My brother and sister and mother, we’d all follow Dad into the trees. He wielded two spray paint cans—one yellow, one blue. Blue to mark the trees for culling. Yellow for our way out. Mom carried a basket in which we collected whatever we could find—raspberries, elderberries, pawpaws, wild apples, walnuts. Or we’d watch the big men come in with the chainsaws and trucks and loaders, all to pull out the trees for processing. Then, we followed the yellow paint back to the edge of the wood.
But when I looked to where she had pointed, a small white orchid pushed up through the ground trying to bloom. I trembled. We’d been trekking through the woods for a long time. I did not know my way out. No trees had been marked by the yellow paint.
“What is it?” I said.
“An orchid,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful.”
I couldn’t comprehend. What was so important about a single flower? How did she even know the flower was there? How were we going to find our way home? She took up my hand, pulling me through the trees, moving without effort, without doubt, as if the forest whispered its secrets to her alone. And that is how it always felt being with her.
On the North Sea shore, staring into all of that blackness of oncoming night, I reached out to hold her hand. Our fingers grazed for a moment. She took a sideways step, adding another bit of distance between us.
“I wonder how cold the water is,” I said.
“It’s always cold,” she said. “Even in the summer.”
“What do you think it’d be like if I stripped naked and just walked into the ocean like that?”
“Do it,” she said.
“What?”
“Do it.”
“Nooo,” I said, deep-digging my hands into the coat pockets to keep warm.
For a couple years, we’d been talking about me visiting Germany to meet her family. I was never sure how I was going to financially swing the trip. I didn’t make much money at my job, rent seemed phenomenally expensive. But I’d scrimped together enough cash, had gotten my passport, with no idea how I was going to make January’s rent taking so much time off from work. And when I told my mother I was going to Germany over Christmas, she said, “You can’t. You can’t go there. You’ll never come home. Someone will murder you.”
“Who will murder me?”
The Gulf War had just ended a few years ago, a truck bomb had detonated earlier that year just below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, and Mom had ideas. “That Hezbollah group. Germany’s right there, right there next door to the Middle East. It’s so close. There’s that Red Army everyone keeps talking about. People are smuggling nukes out of the USSR! You’ll be murdered. Or kidnapped. Or whatever. I’ll never see you again. You’ll be gone. Gone forever. Then what will I do?”
I left out of the Dayton International Airport, a squat, unassuming structure surrounded by expanses of flat, cracked asphalt parking lots. A handful of weathered taxis and aging sedans idled at the curb, their drivers leaning against the hoods. The glass entrance doors were smudged with fingerprints and scuff marks, leading into a terminal filled with long, bolted-together rows of vinyl chairs with metal armrests. The air carried a faint but persistent smell of burnt coffee and reheated McDonald’s, mingling with the musty scent of worn carpeting stained in patches. I’d never flown before and was absolutely terrified.
I landed at Frankfurt. I’d never seen a building so massive, so looming with long stretches of moving sidewalks and escalators, corridors stretching forever. Soldiers in crips uniforms, passive bored faces, slung guns casually across their bodies. Shawled women hunched against walls, their children clinging to their sides, babies tucked close to their chests, asking for money. I didn’t know if they were Middle Eastern or from somewhere else.
And my German: I could count, eins zwei drei; tell you I was too hot, ich bin hei?; ask for the bathroom, wo ist die Badzimmer. And the one phrase I knew well: “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
I found a bank of phones, reached into my back pocket for the phone number I’d been given to call when I arrived, and with absolute horror realized I’d left that number eight hours across the Atlantic on the kitchen table in my apartment. Every sign I couldn’t read, every word I didn’t understand, added to the feeling that I was woefully unprepared. Maybe, my mother had been right all along.
I waited for hours. I paced near the arrivals, scanned faces, clutched my bag tighter. Then, finally, I saw a man holding a little postcard with my name scrawled on in blocky letters. He put me on a train headed for Hamburg, and gave me curt instructions in German I didn’t understand. As the train rumbled out of the station, I pressed my forehead to the window and watched the landscape blur. Little clusters of tiny houses lined the tracks, each with a nearly tended garden. For the longest time, I thought people lived in those homes, and I thought how small compared to Ohio or anywhere in the U.S. Later, I learned they were just garden sheds, part of allotments where people came to plant vegetables and escape the city. I ordered a water on the train and they brought me a glass bottle with a clear bubbly liquid.
Her father, Klaus, picked me up on the other side of the train. We piled my luggage into a circa 1980 Citroën, a 3-speed gearbox duck that whirred loudly at sixty miles per hour on the Authobahn. “You have a nice coat,” he said.
He watched everything I did. And was tall. A man who I’d only heard impossible stories about. A man who walked into the wild unknown jungles of Papua New Guinea into a stone age culture of cannibals who didn’t have a word for God, blessing, or good but believed in demons and witches and curses. A man who wore a string of crocodile teeth around his neck. A man who healed a village child with only his hands and prayer.
There was no way I’d ever live up to Judith’s expectations within the shadow of this man her father.
My mother, in protest to my travels had phoned international long distance to reach Judith’s mother. “This whole trip, the whole trip, nothing good is going to come from this,” she said. “You know, they’re having relations.”
Yeah, her father watched everything I did.
At dinner, with his elbows firmly on the table, he watched me eat. Laughed at me when I ordered a wasserbier—half 7Up, half beer. “Why’s he laughing?”
“That’s a girl’s drink,” Judith said.
“Amerikaner. Sie essen mit den Händen im Scho? weil sie Angst haben, dass sie ihr Essen Verschutten.
“What’d he say?”
“Judith. Übersetzen,” he commanded.
“He said Americans, they’re afraid to drop food so they eat with their hands in their laps.”
He watched the weather report every evening. “Big snow coming,” he’d mutter. Then he donned my Triple Fat Goose coat, go outside, and pulled down the aluminum window shudders for the night. Of course, the snow never arrived, and so in the mornings, he walked the three miles to a local bakery and brought home fresh brotchen and pastries, still warm.
Judith’s Oma lived in a small, tidy apartment just outside town. We drank some tea and ate a bit of cake which she sliced with surgical precision. We played dice. Oma laughed and clapped her hands every time I rolled something impressive. “Klug,” she said.
“Smart,” Judith said. “She likes you. Says you play like a German.”
Klaus, however, kept trying to slip dice out of turn, rolling them again when he thought no one was looking. The apartment’s heat was up so hot, I was starting to sweat. So. I thought I’d attempt my German. “Ich bin heiß,” I said.
Oma grinned. Klaus turned his head slowly to stare at me. Like he was ready to haul off and punch me in the nose.
“Ach,” Oma said. “Ich kann dir nicht helfen. Frag meine Enkelin.”
“Oma!” Judith shouted, then turned shades of red.
“Varm. Warm. You say varm. Not hot,” said Klaus.
“You just told her you’re horny,” Judith said.
Judith and I stayed the night. Oma showed us where we’d be sleeping—one narrow bed for the both of us. The room smelled faintly of lavender and old wood. The debacle with my mother, having called ahead about having relations, there were strict rules here about what Judith and I could and could not do. I dared not move in that bed. Nor could I sleep, and counted the cracks in the ceiling until the pressure in my bladder became unbearable. Slipping out of bed, I padded downstairs in the dark desperate to find the bathroom. Oma sat in the kitchen sipping more tea, reading a book.
“Was ist los?” she asked. I had no idea what she was trying to say.
“Badezimmer,” I said.
She took my arm, and gently led me down the hall. “Gute Nacht,” she said, smiling as I closed the door behind me.
In the morning, we went everywhere in the little Citroën and made our way north to Lübeck—the Holstentor, the twin towers dark and imposing against the pale winter sky. The Christmas markets brimmed with wooden stalls lining cobblestone streets, their roofs draped in evergreen garlands and strung with soft, white lights. We took up steaming mugs of Glühwein in our hands, , its rich aroma of cloves and cinnamon wafting through the cold air, mingling with the scent of roasted chestnuts and candied almonds. We sipped slowly as the wine's spiced heat worked its way through us, warding off any chill.
At Niederegger, Lübeck’s famed marzipan café, chandeliers hung low, their crystal facets catching the light and scattering it across tables polished to a mirror shine. Glass cases displayed intricately molded marzipan—animals, fruits, and flowers—each a miniature work of art.
We shared a glistening baked apple decorated with nuts and dried fruits, their cores replaced with sweet, soft marzipan. Warm syrup pooled at the bottom of the bowl, mingling with the slowly melting scoop of vanilla ice cream. Lübeck felt like it held onto winter better than anywhere else, as though the season belonged to them alone.
“Do it,” she said, her voice carried by the wind. “Just strip naked and run.”
My boots sank slightly into the shifting sand, and I stared at the dark water, the endless stretch disappearing into the night. Each layer I’d have to shed—her father’s coat, the scarf, the sweater, the shirt underneath, the jeans, the socks, and underwear. It’d leave me bare and exposed to the wind and cold. To stand there naked on that desolate beach, with nothing between me and the sea.
And she was there. Watching. Waiting. I wasn’t the person who could tear off everything and run headlong into the unknown. The thought of it made me shrink deeper into her father’s coat. I stayed where I was. The wind kept pushing at me
“Are you doing it or not?”
And I wasn’t. I wasn’t going to do it.
The next night, Christmas Eve, the Christmas Tree—the Tannenbaum—was put up, and all the men were chased out of the house. Klaus and I stood underneath the pine trees. The was dark with cloud, and it finally began snowing. “The storm is finally here,” he said. “Come on, help me with the windows.” And we went around the house pulling down the shudders. He handed me a red envelope. “Go on,” he said. “Open it.” Inside was a small stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar U.S. bills. “When your mother called to tell us you’d be broke because of this trip, I decided then, if you’d come, I’d make sure you’d still have a place to return to in the U.S.”
We returned inside. Each of us making holes with our hands, and blowing into the hollows, and slapping our palms together to bring back the heat to our extremities. We went into the living room and saw the women lighting real candles perched delicately upon the tree, their flames steady and golden. The smell of pine and wax mingling. Judith’s sister was at the piano. Her mother sang Oh Stille Nacht, Silent Night, Holy Night, Round yon Virgin Mother and Child
Holy infant so tender and mild. Judith played the flute, and I froze for a moment, watching her. I hadn’t even known she played, all the notes rising and weaving fragile and pure through the room.
I felt like I was intruding on something private. It all felt impossibly far from anything I’d ever known. When the song ended, Judith glanced over at me. She didn’t smile, but her eyes softened for a brief second before she looked away. Then the moment passed.
On the train back to Frankfurt, I pressed my forehead to the glass and watched the world blur past in streaks of white and gray. Snow blanketed the fields and rooftops, softening the sharp lines of villages tucked into the countryside. The garden sheds appeared again, except now hidden beneath the snow. I really tried to focus on the view, but my mind kept wandering back—to the Christmas Tree glowing with candlelight, to Judith’s sister at the piano, to the sound of her mother singing and Judith’s flute. And Klaus, standing in the cold with me, handing me the red envelope and somehow knowing, without me even saying a word, what I needed.
“Once,” he told me, “I felt so alone out in the jungle, so abandoned by God, I’d make my way out to the river’s edge and just scream.”
The thought of returning to Ohio felt unbearable. But the train only carried me farther from Judith and her family, and I realized I had no idea how to find my way back. The tickets, the instructions, the landmarks—they had all been handled by someone else, someone who spoke the language, someone who knew the way. When the attendant came by, I ordered a water, though this time, I pointed to the bottle labeled still. The train rattled on, the wheels humming a rhythm I couldn’t place.
I didn’t know how to go back to her, not really. Not to her family, not to that place where everything felt impossibly far from anything I’d ever known. I just stayed on that train, watching the world pass, hoping for something that might whisper the way.
A Hand Milled Glad Tiding
To fix a brain aneurysm you drill a hole into the side of the skull and let everything drain; this is a fact I know.
A week or two ago, I ran a couple clients through a gamut of what seemed like a thousand houses in one day—it was only thirteen properties, but we began early in the morning and ended in absolute darkness of winter.
One of the houses we visited was a striking 1931 classic New Englander nestled against the Cocheco River. Hardwood floors, raised gold foil wallpaper, French pocket doors with hand-milled bullseye rosette with beveled edge moulding. In the living room, the seller had left a TV from the late 1970s, the kind of television that was absolute furniture and not just another piece of plastic tech that hangs around in our homes today.
I love these kinds of houses. They remind me of childhood. And specifically, of my Grandma Dill, where we spent a lot of weekend sleepovers at her house, also a classic New Englander, but firmly snuggled in Ohio. Some of her favorite things were butterflies and red balloons. She taught us grandkids how to make sunny side eggs and grilled cheese. We overnighted on the long couches covered in handmade quilts and afghans. We watched Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker late into the night. Ate pizza from the local party shop which was located at the corner where the town’s only stop light dangled onl oose, sagging wires. Later, when Dad lost his job, we moved into Grandma’s, and my bedroom became the front room, where I’d shut the pocket doors with the bullseye rosette moulding.
Grandma always tried to convert us. She and my mother had a long-standing feud because of how Catholic we were, and Protestants, especially Methodists, should never mix blood with Catholics.
Christmas time is what I remember most. We sat out the nativity and the elf on the shelf. Ceramic plug-in light up trees, some of which my sister plays caretaker for. Snow villages and miniature snowpeople—which if you squint good enough at the photo, at the mirror on the wall, you can see a little snowcouple. And that’s my dad with his big feet, and my mom in dark-colored glasses. My brother beside her. My sister who looks like she belongs in a When Calls the Heart movie. And that flannel, by the way, is Ohio-flannel, which means polyester thin, and not real flannel at all. My cousin Karen—who was the absolute coolest teenager—sneaked into the upstairs bedrooms and called us on the upstairs phone pretending to be Henry the ghost, wishing us a Merry Christmas. That always freaked the bajeebers out of us.
We’d sit at the kitchen table in front of the roaring fire flipping through the Sears and Roebuck circling what we wanted for Christmas.Grandma there, with her coffee and cigarettes, playing solitaire. She taught us how to play solitaire, spades, euchre, pinochle. My wife plays solitaire constantly on her laptop in the chair in front of our 64-thousand-inch screen TV. Sometimes I’ll watch her play over her shoulder, and she gets paranoid that I’m watching her, that I’m trying to figure out what she’s buying next on Amazon, but I’m just reminiscing. I guess I could play the game myself. I do miss though the sound of the flip of cards against the fingers.
On Christmas Eve, my mom and dad dragged us to midnight mass. None of the lights in the church were turned on. The heat was left off. Everyone in their suits and ties, their Christmas dress-up attire, hidden beneath long coats and mittens. The entire congregation held lit candles; we’d remove our mittens and allow the wax drip hot onto our fingertips, and that was the only heat and the light casting more shadows than brightness.
Mom hung crucifixes above doorways and at the back of the house a font with blessed water to make the sign of the cross. This was tame in comparison to her mother’s house, Grandma Frey—rosary beads hung off doorknobs, crucifixes above beds, a World of Wonders Sacred Heart wall sculpture, a velvet last supper. I had great aunt nuns on that side of the family. They terrified me in their tunics, scapulars, and cowls. Their old looks and knobby hands where you could see the blue in their veins.
The whole church during midnight mass smelled of honey from the beeswax altar candles, musty like old moth balls, and dogwood blooms from the myrrh and frankincense that was burnt for Christ’s birth. In a lot of ways, the church smelled like my grandmother’s closets where she stored the decorations for each season.
Years later when I was a newly minted adult with a child of my own, trying to figure out how to write, we moved to Iowa and I enrolled in the University of Iowa and this was when Facebook was just rolling out to the public and Grandma Dill set herself up an account, and called me to ask for help on getting up and running. Somewhere in the middle of figuring out profile pictures, she asked if we were coming home for Christmas and I said no.
“If I have to die to get the whole family back together for Christmas, that’s just what I’m going to have to do.” I never told anybody in the family she said this.
But I’ll never forget those words because a few days later my father called. “Stephen, your grandmother died.” Then. He hung up the phone. I may be remembering that wrong. But it’s my memory, and I can do with it what I want. Besides, it’s more dramatic in the retelling this way. I called back right away of course. Mom relayed to me that Grandma had been wrapping a Christmas gift, lost her balance, fallen, and hit her head on the corner of a cardboard box. The doctors said she suffered a brain aneurysm. Which would have been fine. If she hadn’t also been suffering from thinning blood, a refusal to clot. To fix a brain aneurysm you drill a hole into the side of the skull and let everything drain out—except the doctors had told my dad and aunt they had a choice. She could remain in the coma on complete life support. Or, they could drill the hole, but because she wasn’t clotting, she’d bleed out and die that way.
Or. They could pull the plug.
I’ve never written this story down. I’ve spoke about it in my writing courses; have explained that if something is too close to your heart that sometimes it can be difficult to put into words. That hasn’t been my problem. I’m never without words. There’s just too much magic in this story.Too much unbelievable. Who would believe me?
When we were kids sitting around the kitchen table with Grandma ‘Dill, and the other kids in school had told us Santa wasn’t real, and we asked Grandma if Santa was real, she said Santa was very real.
I never questioned again the circling of toys in the Sears-Roebuck, of wishing for the something that was impossible, that somehow those gifts would appear underneath the tree. That it was all just magic.
When we returned to Ohio for the funeral, Grandma had made her Christmas fudge, her hard tack candy, her summer sausage. The tree was up in her apartment. She had long since given up the house. Everyone showed. My brother and sister. Grandpa ‘Dill even though they had been divorced for years. Great Aunt Carla who was a hairdresser, who said that if she had known what the embalmer was going to do to her sister’s hair like that, she would have broken into the funeral home and done the hair right. Great Uncle Ivan with his half silver dollars he was always handing out. She had in her will that she wanted butterflies released, but the time of the year wasn’t cooperative so we let go dozens of red balloons and watched them float heavenward through the light falling snow. When we returned home to Iowa, a Christmas card awaited us. And on the inside a crisp one-hundred-dollars and a note that read, “Stephen, don’t pay a bill, spend this on something fun, it’ll be the last thing I ever get you for Christmas.”
Sometimes. I’m reminded of my Grandmother when I’m walking an old house with the hand-milled bullseye rosette mouldings, the staircase newels, and everything smells faintly of midnight mass. And that is a glad tiding.
A Middle Schooler’s Guide to Saving Christmas
I have a confession.
But, before you read this, think back to middle school. Think back to your first crush, hair sprouting on your legs, the horrid discovery of acne, and simply the everyday challenge of figuring out who you were and where your place was. Keep that memory in easy reach.
At what point between learning Santa Claus was not real and actively training to become Santa Claus—however I had come to that decision…I only know, I thought the world a very sad place not to have a Santa, and an even sadder place to have the whole world force the farce upon children.
On a chilly March day, the grass and yellow daffodils sprouting out of an early fast melting snow, my thirteenth birthday, my father came home with a bruised, bloody fist. He had been fired and gifted his boss a black eye. He may have been a bit drunk that night too. I remember him coming home late, after my mother, wrapped around the phone’s coiled cord, called everyone she could think of looking for him—the local bar and the cops. There weren’t that many places to go in small town Botkins, Ohio in 1986. I imagine Dad sitting in his brown Gremlin parked somewhere, drinking two three beers, or even, an entire Miller Genuine Draft six pack. He was big and lumbering and utterly defeated coming through the door, my mother asking where he’d been, grandmother sucking down cigarettes in our bathroom, the birthday cake flat on the kitchen countertop. I was told to leave and immersed myself in a game of Pac-Man on the Atari 2600.
We did not own the house. The house was company owned. And the company told us to get out.
With no money for food, all of our belongings packed away in grocery store banana and egg carton boxes, Sharpie scrawled across the cardboard “living room,” “kitchen,” “kids’ bedroom,” Great Aunt Bertha in her blue and white Sisters of Mary Reparatrix habit gathered in her small bird-like arms a gallon jug of homemade crunchy peanut butter and offered the peanut butter up to us in alms. “Me and the other sisters thought you could use some food because of the hard times,” Great Aunt Bertha said. My brother and sister, myself, and my mother licked the peanut butter off the back of teaspoons. Bread would have been useful.
By the time June and the end of the school year arrived, we moved to another smaller town into the apartment above my grandmother’s house. The same room my father slept in as a kid had been converted into a living room. We watched Saturday morning cartoons trying to hold onto our childhood. Dad worked the phone searching for a new job. Mom worked part-time at the gas station. She’d come home beat-tired, smelling of diesel and windshield wiper fluid.
The summer before all this, when Mom mopped the kitchen floor, she lined the kitchen chairs in the living room. I arranged the chairs in pairs in front of the sofa and strung the chairs together with twine. The twine was the reins. The chairs my reindeer. I whipped the reins (the twine) and shouted “On Dasher, and Dancer! Prancer and Vixen! On Comet and Cupid, Donner and Blitzen!” I memorized Jingle Bells and Here Comes Santa Claus. I knew by heart the whole Clement Clarke Moore poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” I had a list and checked it often. And a hand-drawn map of the entire town, marking the different stops I’d make.
The chairs weren’t real reindeer. I knew there was no way, for this first Christmas with an actual real Santa Claus that I would have access to a sled or live reindeer. For this to work, for me to be Santa, I would have to hoof it from house to house.
I planned my escape out the second story window; I’d drop down into the snow with the very same twine I practiced reindeer with. I’d carry the gifts in a pillowcase, but I wasn’t sure where the gifts would come from. And I wasn’t sure how I’d climb onto roofs or squeeze my way through chimneys, and I hadn’t even figured out what to do if someone had an actual fire blazing in their fireplace. Somehow, I figured, everything would just work itself out.
Thinking back on this, I can’t imagine now that I would have ever actually carried out this scheme.
Except, Dad’s bloody fist and he was fired and we had no place to live and no food to eat except for a crappy gallon jug of peanut butter. When we moved into Grandma’s apartment, the lady who already lived there was asked to move into the downstairs front parlor—she porch sat with us kids and spun government black ops conspiracy theories—and the whole world seemed to be ripping apart at the seams.
Chris Lemke beat me up behind the same gas station my mom worked at. We had planned a foot race to see who was the fastest. When we took off, he tackled me to the ground, grabbed me by my feet and swung me around like a sack of potatoes, my eyes coming millimeters close to jagged metal piping. Other kids at school told me what was going to happen. We went to the principal’s office, told the principal who said she couldn’t do anything about the situation because the fight wasn’t going to happen on school grounds. I called Dad, and he said I was making the whole thing up, and besides he didn’t have time to come pick me up from school because he was looking for a job.
Chris died in 2019. He wasn’t even fifty. He played the guitar and sang. Did DJ gigs and was a big football fan (Go Buckeyes! Go Steelers!) And he played Santa Claus every Christmas.
Being Santa is more than a good Ho Ho Ho. You must play the role year-round. You must be the calm amidst the storms.
Here is my confession.
On Christmas morning 1986 at around 2am, all the stockings hung by the chimney with care. My brother and sister nestled all snug in their beds. Mom in her ‘kerchief, dad in his cap asleep in bed for a long winter’s nap. I sneaked out with a red hat and a pillowcase filled with cheap Christmas ornaments and candy canes. Except. I wasn’t that quiet. The conspiracy theorist who lived in the parlor heard a loud clatter. She sprang from her bed to see what was the matter, and saw me out the front door, dashing down the street, the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow. I was gone maybe an hour, hanging the ornaments and candy canes on doorknobs when I heard in the silence of the street my name being called out. My grandmother in her nightgown and cigarettes, my dad and mom all prancing and pawing. I remember it was so cold. My cheeks were like roses, my nose like a cherry, or maybe I was just red with embarrassment. My parents soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread. They spoke not a word, and put me straight back to bed.
~From my home to yours, I wish you a Christmas filled with wonder, a new year brimming with possibilities, and the enduring comfort of a place to call your own. If these stories brought a bit of magic to your holiday season, consider subscribing or sharing with someone who might enjoy them too.