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By Nick Aucoin
It was a cold December years ago when I decided that I had to bring out the big guns. I’d attended Sunday school at my parents’ church every week and prayed every night. That didn’t stop my mother from getting sick, though. It didn’t stop my father from being out of the house so much. It didn’t stop my parents from fighting. It didn’t stop any of it.
Thus I, Millie, at age eight, decided that I wasn’t sure that God was the right route to go. I needed something easier. More straight-forward.
I needed the magic of Santa Claus.
The timing was perfect. It was December and I knew I had been good all year. I’d made sandwiches for my mother when she wasn’t feeling good enough to cook. I had gotten good grades on all my homework assignments, aside from English and Spelling. I always helped clean up after those Sunday school lessons. I felt, with absolute certainty, that I had made the nice list.
If I was on the nice list, then I decided that meant that I should be able to get whatever I wanted. My mother had been getting better in recent months, so I didn’t need to ask for that. My parents were still unhappy though. Surely Santa could help them to love each other again. After all, he was able to travel the world in a night and had flying reindeer. Helping a young girl’s mother not to cry anymore and for her father to not spend such late nights at work had to be easy in comparison.
The letter to Santa was short and written with a pink glitter gel pen. It asked him to help my mother to feel less sad and to solve the problem of my father needing to be outside of the house so much. Right before I put the letter in the envelope, I decided to add just one more request. While I wanted the other things more, I figured that it couldn’t hurt to ask Santa for a kitty too.
After mailing the letter, I felt much better. Santa could handle it. Then we’d all be happy.
It took a couple of weeks before I heard a solid thud one night. The noise was followed by little clopping thuds across the roof of my house... I had thought that it must be a reindeer. I wanted so badly to go racing downstairs or outside to see it, but my parents had taught me that part of Santa Claus’s magic required belief and that I shouldn’t try to see him. It could weaken him.
For that reason, I kept my eyes closed when the clopping noises could be lightly heard going down the hall, when the door opened slightly, and when Santa spoke to me. His voice wasn’t what I had been expecting. It was calming though. The best part was that Santa told me that I would be getting my Christmas wishes. I just needed to do a few things for him first.
I couldn’t do anything until Christmas Eve. It was early morning. My mother was upset and talking to Aunt Becky quietly on the phone, but she went upstairs when she noticed I was trying to listen in. I didn’t hear much. Meanwhile, my father was distracted by a rewatch of one of his favorite childhood Christmas films.
I absolutely loved to bake, so leaving the desserts to me was not uncommon. My parents preferred it when one of them was there to supervise, but my father had deemed himself to be close enough on the couch for him to be ‘supervising’ his daughter’s baking skills. The cookie mix I was using was one of the easy ones from the grocery store anyways - a good old bag of Sunny Day’s Bakery Cookie Mix. It included powdered items ready for eggs and water. Simple. Then I just needed to add in the special ingredients that Santa had told me about, and the frosting.
It was helpful that most of the special ingredients were kept in bottles under the kitchen sink to begin with. I easily poured in the chemicals and powders. Afterwards, I made sure to use enough frosting that the sugar would be the main thing that people tasted. Santa had warned me that the cookies might not get eaten otherwise. I added some sprinkles for the final touch.
Perfect.
The Christmas Eve party consisted of fancy clothes for the kids and more comfortable ones for the adults. I never understood why I needed so many frills when my parents just had Christmas sweaters on. My Aunt Becky told me that it was for the photos.
My mother wasn’t thrilled about me talking to Aunt Becky, so I waited until my mother excused herself to go upstairs. Santa had already explained this some to me. He had told me how Aunt Becky had been mean to my mom by taking something that meant a lot to her. That Aunt Becky hadn’t had proper sympathy for her sister when she was sick. That Millie’s father hadn’t either and that, perhaps, they’d understand better once they had their own experiences. They just needed to learn.
Around 4:00 p.m., I brought my father a plate of cookies and a mug of hot chocolate. At around 4:15 p.m., I watched as Aunt Becky went out on the back porch for a smoke break. All I had to do was give her a little push. The ice and the stairs did the rest.
Dinner was good. I enjoyed the glazed ham, mashed potatoes, fresh baked rolls, and gingerbread cookies. I had already made sure that the cookies I had baked wouldn’t end up with anyone else. They were Daddy’s cookies.
My father ended up upstairs, vomiting uncontrollably. Blood mixed with the residual of cookies and beer and eggs from that morning. He was too weak to move much. The music downstairs was too loud for anyone to hear his heaving.
The music was not loud enough to cover the sounds of screams though, when someone had stepped outside and found Aunt Becky. The woman was on the ground at the bottom of the tall porch deck. She had hit the concrete section of the ground below. Her head was cracked open and her neck looked wrong. So did her hands and one of her legs. There was blood around her and she looked very, very still. A cat was licking at a white fragment that was sticking out of one of her wrists. It made the cat’s muzzle a dark brownish red.
My uncle rushed towards his crumpled wife. My grandma was calling for an ambulance on the phone. My older cousin was trying to shield my eyes from the sight.
The cat darted away as others approached. He padded right by me and into the open door of the house. After a moment, I followed after him with a smile on my face.
I had done everything that Santa wanted and now my life was about to get better.
I even got my new pet kitty.
Years later, when I was moving out, I found my letter again. I have no idea how it turned up in that box in the attic despite me having slipped it into the mailbox three streets away. The stickers I had placed on the envelope were peeling. In contrast, the pink writing from the glitter gel pen still sparkled slightly when I held it under a light.
My handwriting was messy and I was amused to find that my younger self had misspelled some sections. I had used a “W” in the word “house” and forgot to capitalize the letter “I” when referring to myself. Most amusingly, though, is that I had messed up on writing “Santa.” My letter had actually begun with “Dear Satan.”
