THE LAST SANTA NOTE
“The Christmas this note was written, we suspected it would be our father’s last.”
Starting when we could first take crayon to paper, my sisters and I always wrote Christmas Eve notes to Santa. And we always got a short note back, thanking us for the cookies and milk we’d left—or, later, for the shots of Scotch and the dollar or two to grease the runners on his sleigh, so to speak. Our notes were tinged with jokes about Santa’s girth or ability to get down the chimney. Santa’s responses were equally teasing and witty. Even after we grew up and moved away, coming home for the holidays still meant Santa notes.
The Christmas this note was written, we suspected it would be our father’s last. Five years prior, he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Though they’d given him less than six months to live, he’d defied the odds, absorbing radiation, chemotherapy and the very worst the disease could throw at him. But we could see the toll it was taking on him and prayed for a miracle.
It had been a good year. One of my sisters had had her first baby, the first grandchild, who sat on our father’s bed staring at him with wondering eyes while he gazed back and fiddled with her tiny hands. My other sister had settled in with the man she’d eventually marry.
And I—after years of struggle and sadness that included several broken relationships and a divorce from a man whose addictions finally overwhelmed my ability to care for myself—had recently gotten engaged to someone wonderful. We’d flown up to Seattle to be with my family for Christmas.
On Christmas Eve, I wrote Santa his note, telling him he didn’t have to stop at our house for very long that year, as we had been much blessed. We had a beautiful new baby to fuss over, our father was continuing to win his battle with cancer, and I’d found that “special something in a 6’2”” I’d long been looking for.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought my fiancé was a keeper. On Christmas morning, the note I found in response to mine said simply, “There’s no return on this one! Love, Santa.”
My father died six months later, just two weeks after my husband and I married. I don’t have a picture of him at the wedding—he was too sick to attend. But I have this piece of paper that, 32 years later, still reminds me how much he supported me and loved me and how much my happiness meant to him. And that feels like a little miracle of its own. —Nancy Franklin
Nancy Franklin is a retired marketing executive who has been published in The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Daily Breeze, Crow's Feet and elsewhere.