Santa wouldn’t come in through the front door, I knew that. I would spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to work it out. We didn’t have a fireplace. I barely knew what one was. Fireplaces, like cities, big shopping malls, and murderers were things that existed mostly on TV. We had a gas stove in the kitchen. I would set a towel over it and sit on top of it and read. I read a hundred books on that bum-warming roost.

No, I never really thought Santa would come in that way. I expected Santa could adjust his size. He could make himself small. He could make himself thin. It wasn’t that. Coming through the gas stove was undignified. I never really bothered myself with how dirty a flue might be; and that was easy because I didn’t know what a flue was but I guess I knew that a fireplace was dirty. But a fireplace was still dignified somehow. Stone instead of metal. The smell of burning wood rather than the smell of gas and hot metal.

There was a tiny closet behind that gas stove. I must have seen the closet opened but only once or twice. It was perhaps, once, meant for a broom but it held no broom. I imagined that Santa could walk between all the houses in the world by going through doors. Perhaps this was how he came in, by walking through this door we never used. Why else would we have this closet? Why else would we have this door that was never used?

Or perhaps, yes, perhaps he came through the trap door in the freezer room. I had seen my dad go under the house once or twice by this surprising contrivance. Perhaps he came up from the ground. All things good did come up from the ground. But it was dark under there. And it smelled wet and besides it smelled more than just a little of cat pee. The ground was good for trees and potatoes but there would be none of that for Saint Nick.

Perhaps he might come through the cracks in the paneling. It didn’t matter that the paneling was that fake 1970s paneling. A crack was a good way to come through. Or perhaps, he would come through the mirror. He would send through his reflection first, and then, because his reflection was there, it would follow that he’d have to be looking at, and he would materialize with his sack of toys right there in my bathroom. But I didn’t like that idea either. I didn’t want Santa to see my bathroom.

With no fireplace, we hung our stockings with more or less care on the front door. Maybe he did come through the front door. But no. That would just be stupid. Any passerby outside would catch him. And I understood that adults shouldn’t see Santa, either. Or perhaps it was that adults couldn’t see Santa, they forgot how. They didn’t see him because they didn’t look for him. So the front door made enough sense after all.

SS