Recalling visions of Santa from a time long ago
I was working in my yard when a car turned the corner and slowly rolled by my house. It was going so slow that I put down my rake and walked to the curb, assuming someone was looking for directions. Inside the car was a woman and her adult son. She apologized for looking so intently at my house but explained she had lived there when she was 5 years old in 1965. They were in OKC from Georgia on business, and she wanted to show her son the house. She did not intend to meet the current owner and get inside.
When I heard her story, I immediately said, “Please come inside. Walk through your old house and look around. Go in every room.” As we walked up the driveway to the house, she said, “I saw Santa Claus here on Christmas morning.”
I said, “I believe you,” because when I was 5 years old, I saw him from my window in Philadelphia.”
Inside, she paused momentarily at the living room window, looking up at the sky.
“Did you see him?” I asked. She turned with a silent smile but spoke not a word. In that instant, we both were kids again, remembering a Christmas when we believed in Santa Claus so much that time could not erase seeing him in his sleigh flying through the Christmas Eve sky.
There was a time in our young lives when Christmas burst with anticipation. What would Santa bring? The days before Christmas were extralong. We counted them down. There seemed to be more candy in the house. People had secrets. Kids guessed.
A little girl living in her house, which is my house now, saw Santa Claus from her window that is my window now. Somewhere in Philadelphia, there is a window that is somebody else’s window now. Maybe someday, another 5-year-old will look out of my old window and see Santa Claus.
Standing silently together at “our” living room window in Bethany, without saying anything, we two grownups shared in the twinkling of an eye the wonder of Christmas in the mind of a little child.
Before she left our house, I took the guestbook from the rack on my grandmother’s old pump organ and asked her to sign it. When they drove away, I read what she wrote, “We used to live here. I see Santa.”
C. Dale German of Bethany is a retired pastor, Vietnam war veteran, and former Bricktown canal boat captain.