While I have many wonderful Christmas memories, the one that stands out the most is my fifth Christmas. My mother, who was raising me as a single parent, had joined the Air Force to try to provide a better life for us. She was away at basic training camp and had left me in the loving care of my great-grandparents. I was captured by the magic of Christmas as any other five year old and was anxiously awaiting the arrival of Santa, but I was also sad that I would be spending Christmas without my mother.
On Christmas Eve, I helped my great-grandmother make cookies for Santa and we watched old Christmas movies. We sampled just a few of the cookies that we had made, much to the delight of my great-grandfather who looked a lot like Santa minus the beard! Grandma suddenly remembered that she had promised to take some cookies to her friend who lived next door. She piled some cookies on a plate and left. Grandpa and I continued to watch the Christmas movies and after a while, I wondered what was taking so long. Grandpa assured me that “the old hens were busy clucking” and he was sure she would be home soon. It wasn’t much later when I heard a strange noise. “Did you hear that, Grandpa? What is it?” I asked. He listened carefully and said “Well, it sounds like some kind of bells jingling. What could it be?”
He got up to investigate the mysterious noise with me right behind him. It seemed that the noise was coming from our front porch! Grandpa opened the door and there was Santa in all of his magical glory, complete with sleigh bells and a sack of gifts slung over his shoulder! I was so excited I couldn’t speak. Santa! At MY house! Santa admonished me for still being awake, but said that since I had been such a good girl he would leave my presents anyway. With that, he went over to our Christmas tree and unloaded his sack of presents and left, but not before drinking some milk and eating a cookie. Grandma returned home about a half an hour later and didn’t believe us when we said that Santa had been there and she had missed it until she looked under the tree and saw the gifts there. She scolded my grandpa and said that he should have called her at the neighbor’s house so that she could have seen Santa too.
It wasn’t until many, many years later when I was telling this story to my own daughter that I realized something. “Santa” had the same style of eyeglasses and bore the same birth-mark on his right cheek as my great-grandmother. My great-grandparents had engineered a perfect surprise. Surely, if my grandpa had donned a Santa costume I would have figured it out immediately as he looked a great deal like Santa already! My great-grandmother was quite petite and not at all the type of person that one would imagine as a Santa impersonator. I wish that they had still been living when I figured out their secret so that I could have thanked them for turning what would have been a sad Christmas into a joyous memory that would stay with me for a lifetime!