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The Present
Christmas Eve.
I glanced at the clock. Almost midnight. That meant he’d be arriving any second. Butterflies rampaged through my stomach, and my hands were clammy.
What do I say to him? What if I say yes, and he’s changed his mind?
CanI say yes?
I’d thought of nothing else for a whole year. No, longer than that, if I was honest. The idea had first come to me back in 2014, when I’d finally learned his secret, and I’d dwelt on it since then.
Dwelt on it alot.
Eight years was a long time. Eight years of dancing around the subject, but never coming right out and speaking it into existence. And this past year had been tough.
No man alive has ever been faced with a choice like this.
I knew he wanted an answer. My problem was I still hadn’t decided which one to give him.
Let me look him in the eye first. Maybe that will help.
I gazed at my reflection. I’d spent ages deciding what I would wear for this night. In the end, it had come down to jeans, a white shirt, and my favorite shawl collar brown sweater.
My hair was that color once. Not anymore. My beard was mostly gray, with a little darkness lingering in my mustache and below my bottom lip. My eyes still held some of the twinkle of my youth, thank God. But I had to be honest. The man I saw in the mirror bore little resemblance to the twelve-year-old boy who’d walked into the living room back in 1979, to discover he’d been wrong.
So,sowrong.
That morning I’d told my little brother Ben that Santa wasn’t real, that it was just Mom and Dad.
That first encounter had rocked my world to its core.
The following encounters had woven themselves into the pattern of my life.
Forty-three encounters, to be precise. And while all of them had been wonderful, some stuck in my mind more than others.
Some of them had been nothing short of magical.
I took two glasses from the cabinet, along with a bottle of whiskey. His favorite.How many people can say they know what Santa’s favorite drink is?I poured a generous measure into each then settled in the armchair, waiting for him to appear.
1979 seemed like a lifetime ago, but I could remember it as if it were yesterday.
I sipped the fiery liquor, hoping to get the overactive butterflies in my belly drunk enough to quit their fluttering and leave me alone.
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it.
Instead, I let my mind drift back to some of those memorable nights, dipping into the decades as though I were leafing through a book.
The only place to begin was at the start.
When I was twelve
1979
I couldn’t sleep. But then, I never could the night before Christmas. Some of my friends at school had saidtheirparents opened gifts on Christmas Eve, but where was the fun in that? The anticipation? The excitement, going to bed, longing to discover what lay in those enticing packages beneath the deep green boughs of the tree?
Okay, so I was always bleary-eyed by the time morning arrived, but that wasn’t going to stop me getting up at the crack of dawn to bounce on my parents’ bed, demanding that they get upright that second.
