The Santa Who Came by Sleigh

There were nine of us around two folding tables pushed together. Brittany sat at the head with a binder and a laptop and a stack of printed agendas, and the agendas had a little clip-art Christmas tree on them.

She went down the list. Ham from the locker in town, ordered. Lefse from the Lutheran ladies, confirmed. Tickets at $30 apiece, same as last year, kids under four free. Then she got to item seven.

“Santa,” she said, and she did not look at me. “I’ve booked a professional this year. His name is Gus, he does events all over Rochester, malls and corporate parties. He’s $400 for two hours, and that includes his own suit and a digital photo setup so parents get a picture emailed to them the same day. I think it’s going to really bring the party up a level.”

Nobody said anything. Then a younger mother at the end of the table said, “Oh, that’s smart. The pictures are always so dark in here.”

Darlene put her pen down. “What about Leon?”

Brittany looked at her binder. “I let him know. I thanked him for his service.”

“His service,” Darlene said.

“Darlene,” Brittany said, and her voice was polite and tight. “With respect. He’s 80. He has a medical condition. Last year a little girl asked her mom why Santa was sick. I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I’m trying to give the kids a Santa they’re not going to worry about.”

Every eye at that table went to me. I could feel it, nine people waiting to see if Leon Haas’s daughter was going to stand up out of a basement folding chair and take her son’s wife apart.

I wanted to. I am not going to pretend I did not. I had my hand flat on the table and I could feel my pulse in it.

But I looked at Brittany, and she was gripping that binder so hard her knuckles were white, and she was 29 years old and running her first committee in a town where she was still the girl from forty miles west.

And she was my grandson’s mother.

You do not fight your son’s wife at her first committee meeting. Not in front of nine people.

Not if you want to have Christmas with your grandchildren for the rest of your life. Whatever you win in that basement, you lose at every family supper after.

And there was something else, a thought that came to me right there with my hand on the table. This was not my decision and it was not Brittany’s either. It was the town’s.

Thirty-one years of kids had sat on my father’s knee. If the town did not want him anymore, the town could say so. And if it did want him, I figured the town ought to get the chance to say that too.

“Item seven’s fine,” I said. “Go on to eight.”

Darlene looked at me like I had grown a second head. Brittany let her breath out, and she gave me a small nod, a grateful one. I felt a little bad about that nod for the next two weeks.

I drove out to Vern Kobs’s place the next afternoon after my last appointment. It was the first of December and the light was already going thin and yellow over the stubble fields by half past three.