SNOW WAS FALLING hard now and blanketed the countryside
like the white wool of a Christmas tree skirt. George stared at the
chimney of white frost. Sven and Yergen waved to him with their
rappelling ropes, hanging off both sides of the chimney like they were
standing on the ground. That he was going to go down a chimney
seemed unbelievable to George, and he blamed it squarely on Francis
Pharcellus Church.
Church was the correspondent who had written back to Virginia
O’Hanlon in 1897 and said there really was a Santa Claus. The
editorial he wrote was on Megan’s wall, and they read it together
every year. George had read it alone this year and wondered what
made a man write such a letter. He had researched Francis Pharcellus
Church and found out he was a Civil War correspondent who had
seen humans at their absolute worse. He had taken that damaged
faith in man and given another view of the world. He had pointed
out that the joy of the world is mostly unseen. His was an extremely
religious age which would soon give away to the modernism of the
twentieth century. But this war-weary man gave a spiritual platform
to the Dutch legend of Sinterklaas brought over in the seventeenth
century and Americanized by Clement Moore’s poem ’Twas the
Night Before Christmas, where reindeer were added and the method
of entry became the chimney.
George could feel Church’s pain as he wrote, “Yes, Virginia, there
is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and devotion exist, and
you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and
joy.” He could see the man in his study by gaslight, with his fountain
pen, giving meaning to a world gone mad. “Virginia, your little friends
are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical
age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing
can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds,
Virginia, whether they be men or children, are little.”
And there was the rub. This is what gave George courage to go
the distance and put his marriage and his financial health on the
line. This man who had seen the absolute worst of human beings had
been able to summon up a belief there was something better in the
universe. And George knew his pain. He had felt the pain when he
lost his son and daughter to the carnage of his first marriage.
And as he sat facing a ramp to a roof behind nine reindeer being
slowly covered with snow, he thought about what Church had wrote:
“There would be not childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to
make tolerable this existence.” That is what he failed to give Jeremy and
Jamie—the childlike faith and poetry every parent should give their
children. He had snatched away their childhood under the guise of
making a buck, and he would not commit this carnage twice. Megan
would have a childhood, and if he fell off the chimney or the roof,
then it was worth the risk.
What had Church said in the end of his editorial, a man who had
seen the hell of our bloodiest war. ”You may tear apart the baby’s rattle
and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the
unseen world which not the strongest man that ever lived could tear
apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that
veil and view and picture that supernal beauty and glory beyond …”
George looked at the monitor showing his sleeping daughter. It
was fifteen minutes to midnight, and he was about to push that veil
aside for her. He only wished Jeremy and Jamie were here. He would
love to push that veil aside for them too.
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