PeonyMagazine

  The first year I became  Santa , the oven clock glowed 2:17 a.m., and the house had that deep, winter hush—the kind of silence that makes you whisper even to yourself. A bicycle frame that said it was “easy assembly” in a language I didn’t understand, a drift of tape tabs adhered to my forearm like scales, and rolls of paper with little reindeer that wouldn’t lie flat were all on the table. A child’s gentle snore rose and fell like the tide somewhere down the corridor. I thought of my own childhood then, how presents had appeared fully formed, bows crisp, batteries somehow always included. Back then, I believed in Santa; that night, with an Allen wrench between my teeth, I felt in my mother. No one warns you that healing can look like this—making magic for someone else in the very place where you once waited to be dazzled. It happens gradually, then all at once: a throw pillow tossed over a shopping bag; a receipt hidden at the back of a drawer; a practiced “Ho ho ho” you tr...

  When I think about Christmas, I don’t first remember the gifts, or the food, or even the tree.  I remember a window, old, wooden, slightly chipped on the corners, and the sock I used to hang there every December. It was one of my father’s long white socks, the kind he wore to work. But in my childhood eyes, that sock was a beacon. A signal. An invitation for magic to stop by.  That window faced the street, just above a small patch of garden my mother kept alive with more hope than gardening skills. Every night leading up to Christmas, I would stare at the window as if it were a portal. That was where Santa would pause, just for a moment, long enough to drop something inside the sock before flying off to someone else’s home. My mother never corrected the geography of my fantasy. She never told me Santa came through chimneys or that stockings were supposed to hang by the fireplace. We had no chimney, and our small home wasn’t built for the traditions I saw in storybooks. ...