PeonyMagazine

  Crinkle, rustle, tap-tap. The floorboards squeak under small, eager feet. Outside, wind whistles through the bare branches, carrying the faint hum of carols from the neighbors’ houses. Inside, the warm scent of  baked apples  and  cinnamon  curls around every corner, making the air sticky with sweetness. I press my nose to the wooden table, heart racing. The twinkle of lights from a single strand catches in my eyes, bouncing like tiny stars across the walls. It’s  Christmas Eve , and I’m waiting. Waiting for a  magic  I don’t yet know is made by human hands. My mother had given me a small poem that morning, folded neatly into my hand like a secret map. I barely understood it then, but I carried it everywhere, clutching it as if it might whisper the universe’s mysteries into my ear. “May the lights in your heart never dim, Keep the sparkle alive when it’s your turn to give. Carry the joy like a secret gift, And let it remind you what it means to ...

  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...