Lost Words Redux

 TALKING TO MYSELF: 23 Dec 2011 The words that got lost from our Christmas Card (see Wednesday's post) were plucked from this story written 4 years ago. I re-tell it here to encourage each of you recall the wonder of your own childhood Christmases as we stumble forward into the last hours of our frantic holiday preparations.  

The Night Santa Lost His Robe

“Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist …”   

 I don’t remember how old I was on that Christmas Eve Santa stopped by Great-Uncle Dick’s to hand-deliver my gifts. So many years have folded one into another that I’m no longer sure I even remember his coming, and I surely don’t remember what he gave me.  However, I do recall my alarm when I discovered he’d left his bathrobe behind in Uncle Dick’s bedroom.

The world of my childhood was a curious place where children were as scarce as hen’s teeth, and many of the adults in my extended family were old enough to be my great-grandparents. I was my parents’ only child and my elderly grandfather’s only grandchild, and we all lived together on an out-of-the-way farm. 

My grandfather’s brothers, Dick and Bert, were regular visitors in our home, but to my dismay neither of them had any children at all, much less children my age.  Gran’s third and youngest brother, Uncle Murf, however, did have a boy, James, a few years older than me. 

My cousin James and I were novelties to the old people. They adored us, but were wary of the world of television sets and box cake mixes that we’d been born to.  We were like a strange new race being bred to colonize a distant, foreign place they would never glimpse.

And so they filled us with stories of their 19th century childhoods to carry to a future world. While they didn’t let us want for anything we needed, they were careful to explain to us how Spartan growing up had been for them.  Oranges, for example, had been the only gifts in their Christmas stockings, and cracking open a fresh, hairy coconut and drinking its watery milk straight from the shell had been the highlight of their holiday.

In comparison, my Christmases were decadent in their abundance, they implied, though it never occurred to me to inquire why. Oranges, I presumed, must have been a great big deal in the 19th century, as wonderful as a toy kitchen with a sink that dripped real water from its faucet or the BB gun my grandfather once impulsively bought my cousin James.

Yet despite the old people’s constant re-telling of their simple Yuletides Past, they all went overboard in their own way to “make Christmas” for James and me.  Uncle Bert did his magic act pulling handfuls of nickels from our ears.  My grandfather would carry in carloads of brown paper sacks stuffed with loose, bulk candy and nuts in the shell, and my favorite, packs and packs of Wrigley’s chewing gum. And Uncle Dick – well, that brings me to Santa Claus.

On Christmas Eve, the family would gather at Uncle Dick and Aunt Elizabeth’s house for supper.  She began preparing this annual feast right after Thanksgiving.  There would be homemade brown sugar fudge and chocolate too.  Blackberry jam cake and Angel Food.  Turkey and dressing, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, corn, green beans and mashed potatoes,  cranberries, Waldorf salad, red and green Jell-O – the huge, black table covered in oilcloth could barely hold all the food. 

Then, sometime after dessert was finished, one of the adults would happen to walk outside and discover that Santa Claus had left gifts for James and me on the back porch or out at the barn. I didn’t understand why Santa Claus just didn’t come on in and hand my gifts to me.  Gran said he might some year when he wasn’t in a hurry.  Some year he might just do that.

If Santa could have felt at home anywhere other than the North Pole, it would have been at Uncle Dick’s house, isolated on a fine high hill.  Frigid even in summer, it was a giant two story log dwelling spacious enough to accommodate Santa and his reindeer too.  Its huge, ancient core had been modified over time with satellite rooms connected to the main house by dogwalks.  My aged uncle and aunt lived in only three or four of the oversized rooms, and I never dared venture across the wide center hall to their never used parlor or up the winding steps that led to the undefined “upstairs.”  I also never ventured into the dark cellar riddled with secret tunnels used by the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War.  Indeed, it was a huge and mysterious house where elves could have easily hidden away making toys eleven months out of the year.                          

James was a couple years older than me and always had a sharper eye. He remembers the Christmas Eve Santa came inside to chat more clearly than I do.  He insists that Uncle Dick slipped out of the house that night before Santa Claus burst in, but I don’t remember that.  He says that Santa’s beard looked exactly like the tail of Uncle Dick’s workhorse, Old Nell, but I don’t remember that either.

 I do, however, recall that we both spotted Santa’s robe – a red terry cloth affair quite unlike what I’d seen Santa wearing in photographs – lying behind Uncle Dick’s bed a little while after Santa left.  We were frantic that Santa would freeze without it because it had begun to snow.

            “Santa won’t freeze,” Gran assured me.  “He has other coats to wear.” 

            “No, Santa won’t miss his robe,” the others chimed in. 

             Then Uncle Dick said, “Look out the window.  Maybe you will see him as he leaves.” 

We ran to the tall window that stretched near to the floor and leaned into its deep, wide sill.  James spotted him first, just a bit of light streaking the winter sky.  I peered through the falling snowflakes and began to cry because I couldn’t make him out. 

             “Look there,” James said, pointing.  “See?” 

And then – oh, it was wondrous - I saw him too, Santa for sure, flying with his reindeer across the night.         

Copyright by Georgia Green Stamper

The Night Santa Lost His Robe was originally published in The News-Herald and was included in my anthology

YOU CAN GO ANYWHERE from the crossroads of the world (Wind Pub 2008)