“Just remember, the true spirit of Christmas lies in your heart.”
— Santa Claus, “The Polar Express”
A 5-year-old lad was feeling Christmas magic at his grandparent’s house in Northeast Texas some years ago.
Home for him back then was somewhere in West Texas, one of those childhood-memory places before Mount Pleasant was where his father decided the family would stay for good. Visions of St. Nick swirled in the child’s mind that early 1950s Christmas Eve as he snuggled close to his grandmother while she read bedtime stories.
“You better go to sleep before ‘ol Santy comes,” she said. “If he sees you’re awake, he’ll just keep on going.”
Suddenly, the boy heard something. Was that the “ding-ding” of a bicycle bell coming from the living room?
“Oh no,” he thought.
“Santa can’t catch me awake.”
“He’s here,” the grandmother said.
In a flash, she turned off the bedside lamp. He clinched his eyes tightly shut hoping that if Santa did peep into the bedroom, he would surely appear to be fast asleep.
A few years later in Mount Pleasant, the child matured to learn the secret of how Santa manages to know where to deliver Christmas gifts and always to the right house in one night.
But as the oldest sibling, his duty was to help preserve the legend of Santa for his younger sisters.
The night sky was fading to a gray dawn.
No one was stirring when a small voice at his bedroom door woke him.
“You think Santa has come yet?” his baby sister whispered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s go see.”
All three siblings looked as he slowly opened the living room door just enough for them to view the splendor of Christmas. His sisters “oohed” and “awwed.”
He smiled.
Colors sparkled like shiny magic on the aluminum tree. Santa’s neatly placed gifts waited.
It was Christmas magic in the early morning darkness.
“I think he has been here,” he said in a low voice to his sisters. “We better get back in bed until Mom and Dad wake up.”
Another 20 years later on a Christmas Eve in Center, he sat in front of the fireplace waiting to make sure both of his children were sound asleep. He had tucked them in earlier, using the same line his grandmother had used on him when he was their age.
“You better go to sleep so Santa will come.”
Hoping they had asked for their last drink of water and quizzed him for the last time about mailing their letters to the North Pole, he pulled Santa’s gifts from their hiding place high in the closet.
Hot chocolate in one hand and tools in the other, he was ready for “Some Assembly Required” duty.
“Just nine o’clock,” he noted with a smile.
“This won’t take long.”
About midnight, the Little Suzy Homemaker play kitchen lacked only one “insert tab A into slot 4 and secure with one No. 6 bolt and one No. 9 nut.”
“That wasn’t bad,” he thought. “Only had to take it apart and start over twice.”
All that remained was a tricycle, a doll stroller and half-a-dozen small items to wrap. “Just enough time to make a pot of coffee before experiencing the magic of another early Christmas morning in a child’s eye,” he thought.
In the decades of Christmas Eves following that all-nighter, he enjoyed a variety of magic, like the snowy Yule spent with his family in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. And the Christmas morning he and his teenage kids rode new bicycles around county roads on Lake Murvaul.
This Christmas, even as he commits words to digital bits and bytes, he’s not sure where he’ll be Christmas Eve.
So many friends and family from Christmas past are gone now and his children live away with families of their own.
But one thing’s for sure. Wherever he is and whatever he is doing, the seasonal magic from decades of Christmas joy will fill his heart for Christmas present.
So, I wish … I mean, he wishes for you as well that the magical blessings of Christmas fill your heart. Not just at Christmas, but during the year.
Wherever you are, merry Christmas.
— Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com
