Santa Claus' mother and the Nick of Time

I’ve met Santa Claus’ mother twice, once for real. Really. The first Santa Claus’ mother was my own mom. She loved to have a little fun with children who happened to answer the phone by asking, “Who is this?” Children did that back then, in the early sixties, way before ring tones and caller ID. “This is Santa Claus’s mother.” She’d reply. There would be a long pause as the kid thought out the implications, trying to get a hold on who they were speaking to, the implications being huge, if they laughed at the idea, if they doubted and turned out to be wrong…. “??Who?!?” they'd ask just to make sure. “Santa Claus’s mother.” She’d say evenly, “ I need to speak to your mother.” They’d put the phone down and run to go call their own mom, all excited even if it was mid-July. The moms would then have a good chuckle over the sweet beliefs of children.

The second time was the second Christmas after my wife left. It was also the second time she had left so I pretty much knew she was gone for good. The boys were little, T was just past three and the baby was sixteen months, both too little to ask many questions which was good because I had few answers. But this was 1973, the end of the sixties, and a single man with two children seemed to fit the revolutionary spirit floating about. We sailed through that first Christmas surrounded by my friends from school. They threw us a party at our apartment a couple of nights before Christmas. People brought food and toys for the boys. There was a tree given to us by a woman whose work gave out vouchers for Christmas trees instead of bonuses, not much of a bonus for a Jewish girl she said, and there were little gifts from classmates and two of the secretaries in the Dean of Journalism’s office. I had spent a lot of time in the Dean of Journalism’s office trying to work out additional scholarship money or grant money or loans. My family was twelve hundred miles away in Connecticut and I laughed when my mom suggested that I come home for the holidays. I didn’t want to tell her that I probably couldn’t afford the gas to get there and back. I had no money except my monthly GI Bill check, which covered the rent, bought gas and groceries and not much else. By the time the daycare lady was paid we were on loose change till the next check.

We were a happy bunch though, I have to tell you. I got out of class most days by three and had the boys picked up and brought home by four. We played on the living room floor while dinner cooked. We built some very serious wooden block towers and zoomed trucks back and forth. The baby, B, went from just barely walking to holy-cow-where’d-he-go? We sang a lot of songs. We sang a lot of the same songs over. The same with books, I could, until a few years ago, recite ‘Hop on Pop’ verbatim.

The days swam by. That next August she tried to hire a lawyer but no one would take her case, a lawyer friend on mine handled the divorce paperwork and, against his advice, I had the words ‘incompetent mother’ removed from the decree. I don’t believe I thought such a thing existed, an example of the sweet beliefs of grownups. Meanwhile, the boys were turning into little people. By the time October appeared on the kitchen wall calendar they had become an inseparable pair of madcap comics, laughing and finding joy in the littlest of things. Was that an empty box and a laundry basket? No, two boats on the ocean. No no, two trucks full of dirt. Flapping the sides of a book made it into the back of a giant bird, taking you anywhere you wanted to go and we had graduated to animal books and dinosaur books with even the baby being able to tell daddy he was being silly when he said the brontosaurus was a T-rex.

We had less time together by then. I had taken an internship with a local politician, which meant I had to work until after four most days and I had landed a job with a television station working weekends. B had gotten pneumonia the previous February and I was trying to pay off the four hospital days of care by making $1.75 an hour. I would park the boys in the film room with a reel of Popeye cartoons and a box of toys while I did hourly station IDs and monitored the on-air audio of the Saturday Afternoon Movie or ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

I had no days off. There were no parties. Not being at school meant that I had lost touch with my classmates and teachers, the internship was mostly writing reply letters to constituents and suddenly, it was mid-December. I bought a little tree and strung the lights on it. I went to Sears on my lunch hour and bought three toys and a new shirt and pants for each of the boys on the credit card and volunteered to work Christmas Day to earn the double time pay.

I don’t remember what day it was that T asked when we were going to go see Santa Claus, but it was really close to the 25th, maybe the 22nd. These things sneak up on you, not the days, the changes in your children. Where did all this come from? Here was T, now fully four, very informed about the whole Santa Claus thing. His daycare mates apparently swapped hugely detailed descriptions of their own visits to the jolly old man and it had become very important that he and B go too. B was up for it, oh yeah. We had never gone to see a Santa. I didn’t have a clue where to take them. Was there one at Sears? I hadn’t seen one. How about Target? I was a little panicked. The next day at the Congressman’s office I asked around if anyone knew of where I could take the boys to see Santa. The staff seemed shocked that I hadn’t already done so and I felt the panic grow, that I had really screwed up. One woman said she knew and wrote down the address of The Santa House. “It’s a Designer Society fund-raiser. Every year they find an old house, different designers decorate rooms and they have a Santa talk to the kids, but I don’t know if it’s still open this close to Christmas.”

It wasn’t. Of course, I didn’t know that when I told the boys where we were going. They were ecstatic. We sang “Jingle Bells” in the car on the way over and T was reciting all the things he was going to ask for and B was saying he wanted all the same stuff as T and we were actually laughing all the way, ha ha ha. Until we pulled up to the address and saw the mostly dark house with only one car parked out front. I had a bad feeling. There were some lights on and there was a Santa’s House sign on the porch, but we were the only people walking up the long sidewalk. T wondered out loud if Santa was home and I said we should see, B held my hand. It was the perfect Santa House by the way, it was a dark green color and had a peaky, narrow, odd look about it. The porch and stair rails were wrapped in pine garland and the door had a giant wreath with a huge red bow. There were candlelights in every window, even in the little ones way up at the top. Hanging from the porch ceiling were big tree ornament balls, blue ones and translucent crystal snowflakes. We knocked on the door. There was no answer.

My boys had learned a few things about waiting in their young lives. They waited for me to come pick them up at daycare, they waited for the potatoes to bake or the rice and beans and ham to cook, they waited until it was time to go home from the station and they waited in the car while I ran into the Git-and-Go to get the bread, bananas and peanut butter. They were experienced at waiting. They waited at the door of the Santa House. I said I think you were right, T, I don’t think he’s home. He said we should wait. We waited. The door opened a little. The boys said "Hello, is Santa here?" and I said "Sorry, are you closed?" And T gave me a look like I would if I was telling him to hush so I hushed. The door opened more. There was a woman standing there, mid-fifties I would guess now, graying, but not gray, hair fluffed up in the kind of hairdo Jackie Kennedy used to wear. She had on a long blue skirt that had plaid bows tied on it in wavy lines from the hemline to her waist and a red and white blouse with a ruffled front and she was carrying her overcoat. She was just leaving she said. Sorry, the Santa House was closed and today was the last day it was to be open. So sorry she said and she started to put on her overcoat, getting ready to leave.

There are times when your soul speaks instead of your brain, my head was spinning and was of very little use, but from somewhere came the words “Aren’t you Santa Claus’s mother?” She looked at me a little sharply, I’m sure she had had a long day and just wanted to be on her way home. She looked at the boys. I don’t know if mothers can see when children don’t have mothers but this one might have been able to do that. “Yes,” she said, “he’s all grown up now, but Santa Claus was once a little boy just like you boys are. Just like you.” The boys were frozen, fixated. Santa Claus was one thing, this, this was something else, something bigger. She buttoned her coat. She would see Santa tonight before he headed for the North Pole to get everything ready, was there anything she could tell him for them? They were silent, thinking out the implications, trying to get a hold on who they were speaking to, the implications being huge, if they laughed at the idea, if they doubted … .

“Legos.” said T, “ I was going to ask for legos and my brother wants a dumper truck.” “Yes,” said B,” a dumper truck”. The woman pulled out of her pocket one of those little address books everyone used to carry before Palm Pilots were thought of and carefully wrote in it for a moment. “I’ll be sure to tell him”, she touched both boys on their faces. “Y’all have a Merry Christmas, boys, a Merry Christmas” and she stepped back inside the door. “Thank you, I said,” Thank you Mrs. Claus, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Santa Claus’ mother!”

We walked back to the car. No, we didn’t. We danced back to the car. We hopped. We jigged. We jiggled and jingled belled all the way. We went to the Pizza Hut on Fifteenth Street for a major celebration that night and, sure enough, on Christmas morning Santa Claus was smart enough to have a big box of Legos and a Tyco Dump Truck all wrapped up and waiting in the film room at the station.

Years later, the boys were long grown up, I was wandering through the various neighborhoods looking for a good route for a Tuesday night bicycle club beginner ride when I spotted the odd little green house and it’s long sidewalk. All those days came sweeping back to me in a single moment, when, just when I needed her most, a mother had arrived in the nick of time.