The Santa Who Came by Sleigh

My father was sitting in my salon chair with a gray cape snapped around his neck when his phone buzzed against the armrest, and he picked it up before I could tell him to hold still.

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, three weeks before the town Christmas party. I had the clippers in one hand and a comb in the other, and I was halfway around his left ear.

He held the phone out at arm’s length, the way he does, and squinted at it through his glasses. The phone shook. His hand has shaken for six years now, more on the right than the left.

“Read it to me, Joanie,” he said. “The letters are small.”

I set the clippers down on the counter and took the phone. It was a flip phone, the same one he has had since 2014, and the text was from Brittany, my son’s wife.

I read it to myself first. Then I wished I had not been the one holding it.

“Read it,” Dad said again.

So I did. “Grandpa Leon, we’re going a different direction with Santa this year. Kids don’t want a Santa who shakes. I’ve hired a professional from Rochester. Thank you for all your years. Brittany.”

The salon was quiet except for the dryer running at the back station where Darlene was sitting under it with her rollers in, reading a magazine she could not possibly hear over the fan.

Dad did not say anything for a long time. He looked at himself in my mirror, at the cape and the half-cut hair and the white beard he had already started growing out for December, the way he had every fall since 1994.

“Well,” he said finally. “She’s right, you know. I spill the cocoa now.”

“You don’t spill the cocoa,” I said.

“I spilled it on a little boy last year. Little bit. On his mitten.” He held out his hand for the phone. “Give that here.”

I gave it back. He folded it shut with both hands, slowly, and he held onto it in his lap the way you hold a letter you mean to keep, not the way you hold a phone.

I finished his haircut. I did not know what else to do.

I went around the right ear and squared the back of his neck and brushed the little hairs off his collar, and I did a careful job, maybe the most careful job I have ever done on him.

My father is Leon Haas. He was 80 last December. He farmed corn and beans on two hundred acres northeast of Decorah until he was 72.

He played Santa at our town Christmas party for 31 years straight.

The party is the second Saturday of December at the community hall at the end of Main Street.

There is a ham dinner and lefse, a craft table for the kids, a raffle for a quilt, and at three o’clock Santa comes in from the side door and sits in the big chair by the tree for two hours.

When I was a girl the Santa was a feed salesman who wore a rented suit and smelled like cigarettes. When he moved to Arizona in 1993, the committee asked around, and my mother volunteered Dad without asking him.

Dad was furious for about a day. Then my mother bought nine yards of red velvet at the fabric store in Decorah, cleared off the kitchen table, and started sewing.