Santa’s Blunder

December 2017

The Christmas Grammie Beat Santa

December 2017

Earlier this month, my daughter and I stole a few quiet minutes for one of our mother-daughter talks, the kind I have learned not to take for granted.

With seven children filling her days, Leslie’s life moves at a pace that would leave most people breathless. There are meals to cook, laundry to fold, little fires to put out, stories to listen to, places to be, and always someone needing something. Her house, I imagine, rings with footsteps, questions, laughter, sibling squabbles, and the constant hum of family life in full swing. Even so through the years, we have held on to our weekly calls as faithfully as we could with Facebook messages, and photos passed back and forth to bridge the miles between us. Though she moved back to Colorado, more than two hundred miles still stretch between our homes, and so our conversations have become their own kind of front porch, one of the places we meet and linger in each other’s lives.

That day, I was settled in at home, phone to my ear, listening to the familiar sound of my daughter’s voice, when she told me about my grandson, Jaxon’s recent visit with Santa.

He was three years old, that tender age when wonder comes easily and disappointment arrives with equal force. Leslie said he had approached Santa with all the solemn hope a little boy can gather in his small body. In his mind, Santa was not merely a man in a red suit seated in a decorated corner somewhere beneath fluorescent lights. He was the keeper of wishes, the one person in all the world who ought to understand exactly what a child most desired.

And yet, somehow, Santa had failed him.

After the visit, Leslie noticed the shift immediately. Jaxon came away from Santa not glowing with excitement, but dragging his disappointment behind him like a heavy little shadow.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” she asked.

She told me she could see his shoulders droop before he answered. Then with a sigh full of heartbreak and disbelief, he said, “Santa said he’s bringing me candy for Christmas.”

Leslie, trying to make sense of the problem, replied, “But you love candy!”

Jaxon shook his head, clearly frustrated that the adults were missing the point. “If I want candy, you can get it for me,” he said. “I really just wanted a Santa Spiderman hat.”

That was the true tragedy. Not candy but misunderstanding.

His beloved Santa hat had lost its furry white pom-pom, and what he wanted most in the world was a new one, specifically a Santa Spiderman hat. In his three-year-old mind, this was not a frivolous wish. It was the wish. And Santa, who ought to have known better, had somehow offered him something ordinary in place of something magical.

As I listened, I laughed the way only a grandmother can laugh at a child’s perfectly sincere sorrow. But just as quickly, the story carried me backward through time, to another three-year-old, another visit with Santa, and another Christmas in which the man in red failed to understand exactly what was at stake.

That child was Leslie.

And the one who saved the day was my mother.

It was 1984, the year of the Cabbage Patch frenzy.

Anyone who lived through that season remembers the madness. Stores were overrun. Shelves stood empty. Parents searched with the kind of desperation usually reserved for emergencies. Those dolls had become more than toys. They were treasures, status symbols, objects of longing, and every child seemed to want one. Leslie was no exception. At three-years-old, she had fixed her heart completely on a Cabbage Patch Doll, and no other gift would do.

That December, I took her to see Santa at a store in Cañon City, Colorado. She was dressed in a red velvet dress trimmed with delicate white lace, white tights, and shiny black Mary Janes. Her blonde curls framed her face, and she looked for all the world like a child who had stepped straight out of a Christmas memory before it had even been made.

The store glowed with all the usual holiday magic. Lights twinkled. Christmas music drifted overhead. Parents juggled packages and children, trying to manage coats, excitement, and impatience all at once. There was the faint scent of something sweet in the air, and everywhere the noise of the season—bells, voices, laughter, requests. I stood watching Leslie in line, taking in the sight of her in that little dress, her whole face bright with anticipation, and I felt the deep, quiet joy of being a young mother at Christmas.

When her turn came, she marched right up to Santa with complete confidence. There was no shyness, no hesitation. He lifted her onto his lap, smiling in that practiced, jolly way, and asked, “And what would you like for Christmas, little one?”

Without pausing, Leslie answered, “I want a Cabbage Patch Doll!”

It should have been simple. Santa should have nodded. He should have smiled knowingly. He should have said something reassuring and merry.

Instead, he faltered.

“Well…” he began. “Um… the elves at the North Pole have been very busy this year, and… uh… we’re not sure if there will be enough dolls for every little girl and boy.”

I watched the change wash over her face.

Her smile disappeared. Her body stiffened. Even at three, she understood what uncertainty sounded like, and she was having none of it.

With a dramatic sigh worthy of a much older child, she slid off Santa’s lap, planted her little hands firmly on her hips, and said, “Well, never mind. I already told my Grammie what I wanted for Christmas.”

Then she turned and marched away.

Santa sat there stunned, and the line of waiting parents behind us broke into laughter. As I moved to follow Leslie, Santa leaned toward me and whispered, “I sure hope her grandma has one.”

I smiled, but privately, I had my doubts. Cabbage Patch Dolls were nearly impossible to find that year. Grown adults were practically tackling one another in store aisles for them. The odds did not seem to be in anyone’s favor, not even my mother’s.

But later that day, Leslie and I stopped by Grammie’s house.

The moment we walked through the door, Leslie launched into the story of Santa’s failure with all the righteous indignation of someone who had been deeply wronged. My mother listened, eyes twinkling, saying very little, though I could tell she was enjoying every minute of it. Leslie huffed about Santa’s uncertainty, about his lack of confidence, about the obvious fact that he had not properly understood his job.

Then, after Leslie ran off to play with her uncles, my mother motioned for me to follow her.

She led me into her bedroom, closed the door, and crossed to the closet with a look on her face I would come to recognize over the years, a look that said she knew something the rest of us did not. Then she reached inside and pulled out a large shopping bag.

From it, she lifted a blonde-haired Cabbage Patch Doll.

For a moment I just stared.

She had found one.

Not just any doll, but one that looked exactly like the doll Leslie had dreamed of. My mother stood there grinning, utterly pleased with herself, and honestly, she had every right to be. She had done what Santa could not. She had delivered certainty where he had offered hesitation. She had secured the impossible.

By Christmas Eve, the doll was wrapped and waiting under the tree. Leslie opened her present with the kind of joy that lights up a child from the inside out. She named the doll Sarah and loved her fiercely, completely unaware of the searching, planning, and triumph that had brought her there.

The next year, when I asked if she wanted to go see Santa again, she shook her head and said, with calm certainty, “No thanks. I already told my Grammie what I want.”

And just like that, my mother became, in our family lore, the woman who beat Santa.

She never let him forget it either.

From then on, whenever the story surfaced, as beloved family stories always do, my mother told it with unmistakable satisfaction. Santa may have worn the suit and carried the title, but she had been the one who came through. In her version, and maybe in mine too, Christmas magic did not always arrive from the North Pole. Sometimes it came from a determined grandmother who knew exactly what her grandchild wanted and refused to come up short.

As for Sarah, that doll survived the rough-and-tumble devotion of childhood. She endured moves, years, outfits, adventures, and all the wear that comes from being truly loved. Somewhere in Leslie’s house, she remains, even now, tucked away but still part of the family story, a small, soft-bodied relic of the Christmas when Santa failed, and Grammie triumphed.

And now, listening to Leslie tell me about Jaxon and his heartbreak over a Santa Spider-Man hat, I hear the echo of it all. Children know what they want with a clarity adults often lose. They do not ask for what is reasonable. They ask for what matters. And the people who love them best learn to listen carefully.

Maybe that is why, in our family, the real Christmas magic never lived at the North Pole.

It lived in my mother’s closet.