“Just remember, the true spirit of Christmas lies in your heart.”
— Santa Claus, “The Polar Express” 2004 movie
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A five-year-old was feeling Christmas magic at his grandparent’s house in Northeast Texas some years ago.
Home for his family back then was somewhere in West Texas. Maybe it was Ballinger, or Muleshoe. Might have been Pampa. One of those places where he made childhood memories before his father decided the family would stop moving after settling in Mount Pleasant.
Visions of St. Nick swirled in his mind as he snuggled close to his grandmother while she read a bedtime story that early 1950s Christmas Eve. “You better go to sleep before ‘ol Santy comes,” she said. “If he sees you’re awake, he’ll just keep on going.”
Suddenly, he heard something. Was that the “ding-ding” of a bicycle bell coming from the vicinity of the living room? “Oh no,” he thought, “Santa can’t see me awake.”
“He’s here,” Granny said. In a flash, she turned off the bedside lamp. The child 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 youngster had learned the secret of how Santa managed to know where to deliver Christmas gifts. And always to the right house. 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 gray with the Christmas dawn, No one was stirring when he was awakened by a small voice at his bedroom door. “You think Santa has come yet,” his baby sister whispered?
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s go sneak a peek and see.”
All three siblings looked as he quietly opened the living room door just enough for a glimpse of Christmas splendor. His sisters oohed and awed at colors sparkling like shiny magic on the aluminum tree around which were neatly placed gifts from Santa.
He smiled. It was Christmas magic in the early morning dawn.
“I think he has been here,” he whispered to his sisters. “We better get back in bed until Mom and Dad wake up.”
Another twenty 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 bed earlier, using the same line on them that 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 in the closet. Hot chocolate in one hand and tools in the other, he was ready for “Some Assembly Required” duty.
“Just 9:00 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 #6 bolt and one #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,” he thought. Before experiencing the magic of another early Christmas morning in a child’s eye.
In the decades of Christmas Eves following that all-nighter, he saw a variety of Christmas 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 Day. So many friends and family from his 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 every 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 throughout the year.
Wherever you are. Merry Christmas.
—Leon Aldridge
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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2024. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.
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