Secret Santa’s parting gifts spark a very festive mystery

Ron

told me the story of his father’s last year. The older man had always been very regimented, unspontaneous, not a big one for showing emotion.

Then cancer got a grip on him. When he wasn’t undergoing treatment, he seemed to withdraw from life.

And then the gifts began appearing. They were a strange assortment, always things that were needed, and often to the most unlikely people. Speculation in the village as to who was doing it was rife. No one thought Ron’s dad a likely culprit, and he himself dismissed the notion that he knew anything about it. But the gifts stopped when he died.

It warms Ron’s heart that his very proper father might have found the Santa Claus spirit in his last few months. And, from the way he was talking, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were a few more anonymous presents on people’s steps this year.