My father always disappeared on Christmas Eve.
Mom would spend the afternoon preparing a special meal — usually chicken and noodles. At supper time (only snooty people called it dinner), we shared the feast around our oblong table with the chrome legs and yellow Formica surface, in a kitchen small enough for us to reach the stove, the refrigerator or the silverware drawer without getting up.
Dad sat at the head of the table with Mom seated to his left — at least when she had a few minutes to eat between refilling dishes and wiping up spilled milk. My older sister got the spacious far end of the table and my younger-older sister and I shared the space along the remaining side.
Christmas Eve was the time when the five of us opened our presents. And, wherever Dad went, he always made it back in time to take part. Yet, from the time we finished supper about 6 p.m. until the rest of us were huddled around the Christmas tree anxiously waiting to rip off the wrappings around 7 p.m., Dad was nowhere to be found.
The worst part for me was that he always missed the arrival of Santa Claus.
Santa Claus doesn’t often make house calls these days, but back in the late 1940s he didn’t keep himself holed-up in one of those little fenced off areas in the mall as his elves hawked pictures for $20 each to help subsidize the annual sleigh ride from the North Pole.
In my little town, he showed up some time in early December on the back of a firetruck over on the town square. He ho-ho-hoed and passed out candy to all the kids for two or three hours then went back north (apparently on the same firetruck) and got ready to load the sleigh.
We never saw him again — until Christmas Eve, when he would appear at our door with a bag of gifts to supplement the ones we had already bought each other and placed under the tree.
Oddly, these out-in-the-open visits didn’t take place all over town — just at a couple of houses in my neighborhood. My next day reconnaissance verified that he had appeared on the porches of Kenny next door and Georgie around the corner, but no one else had seen him.
My assumption was that homes with bigger chimneys were visited secretly in the middle of the night. Our house had a cramped chimney that funneled down to a coal-fired furnace in a sooty old basement — a logistics nightmare. Evidently, on that basis, we got a porch delivery.
In any case, even after Santa Claus departed, our family had to wait for Dad to return from “wherever” before we could open our presents. Each time I told Dad he had missed Santa again, he was sad.
One year, the younger of my two sisters made the ridiculous claim that Santa Claus was a fraud, entangled in an adult conspiracy. She went so far as to say Dad was just dressing up and fooling us every year — that she had found his glasses and clothes in the basement after he disappeared one year — that he was just putting on a Santa suit to trick us.
I never believed her. Still don’t. And I eventually would have proven my case if our family hadn’t moved from that house when I was 6 years old — to a home out in the country with no brick chimney, no basement and no neighborhood kids with whom to compare notes.
As for Santa, he never came to the front door again on Christmas Eve. By that time, he was a television star all through December with a show that ran for an hour each afternoon from some Indianapolis TV station as children sat on his lap and told him their Christmas wishes. Like our doctor, the Omar bread man, the Meadow Gold milkman and the Fuller Brush man, Santa evidently had decided house calls were now too old-fashioned.
I have always regretted this modernization by Santa, but not because I get fewer presents. He still delivers all those packages some mysterious way.
What I regret is that Dad never got to see him.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page each Sunday. Contact him at editorial@therepublic.com. Send comments to editorial@therepublic.com.
