Uncle Christmas

My oldest boy, Finn, comes up to me, glancing at my knee. I lift him up onto it, putting my arm around him. I've never seen him look so severe. "What's on your mind?" I ask, giving him a bounce he doesn't appreciate, so I know how serious this matter must be to him.

"I..." he begins, but he hesitates. He doesn't want this to be about him. That much is plain. "Santa isn't real," he says all at once, breaking eye contact for this blasphemy.

I laugh, giving him a squeeze. "He isn't? So then who leaves presents on Christmas morning?"

"You do," he says, though his voice shakes. "You and mom. I saw them in the attic. You... you've been lying to us."

I grip him a little more tightly. "You went into the attic?"

He winces as though pushing back a sob. Under the best of circumstances, I wouldn't want my son in there, surrounded by cotton candy fiberglass insulation and the unfinished floor.

"You could have startled Kringle," I say, composing myself. There will be time to remind him about what parts of the house are off-limits to him, how he needs to be careful and not take unnecessary risks. I feel the guilt for his sin anyway, for having let him out of my sight long enough for him to undertake such an expedition.

"He isn't real either!" says my son, his voice almost a growl in his frustration. "None of it is."

"Kringle hides when you try to look for him. You know that, buddy. But he watches you through the knotholes and cracks, making sure you are being good." I see that this reassurance isn't penetrating his funk. "Come on now, you've heard Kringle."

"I heard something," he concedes. "Something in the attic, but I don't think it is an elf Santa sent to watch us after Thanksgiving, reporting back. No one is in the attic, making us toys. I told my friends about him at school, and they all laughed at me, Dad!"

That accounts for the phone call a week ago. His teacher said only that he was crying and had punched his best friend in the arm. Finn would not say what had caused it all, but he had seemed downright annoyed when reminded that Santa would not look too kindly on boys who got into fights at school.

"You've touched his wood shavings after Christmas," I say. "Just because some boys at school don't know something, it doesn't mean it isn't true. Isn't that the whole point of school, to learn things you didn't know before? Kringle worked in your grandparents' attic when I was your age. Now he works here with Uncle Christmas."

My son says a curse word under his breath. I restrain myself from reminding him that Kringle has excellent hearing.

"Uncle Christmas isn't real either," he says, arms crossed over his chest, refusing to look at me in his torrent of childhood doubts.

I set him into the easy chair. My boy seems so much smaller now, as though these wounding words have deflated him, as though he were no bigger than Kringle himself. Finn doesn't resist me, but he doesn't help either.

When he deigns to look up at me, to engage in this conversation with his father, I ask, "Have you said these things to your sister?"

He shakes his head, his bottom lip in his mouth as a sort of reverse pout. "But I might want to."

"Let me tell you the story of Uncle Christmas. If you still don't believe I am telling you the truth, we'll tell Lisa together, okay?"

Now, it's been a while since I had to tell this, so a few of the finer points may not connect as well as they should, but the story will bear the weight. That's the beauty of the truth: put all together, it makes sense even if the parts might not.

Growing up, it was your aunt Tracey, your uncle, and me. The rest of the year, we got along as well as you do with Lisa. We bickered, but we loved one another when you came right down to it. That is until Thanksgiving hit. We'd come home from the big dinner, and your grandparents would go to take a deserved nap after all that food. It was like the atmosphere of the house changed because we knew there was something magical about it. The preamble to Christmas, that united us like nothing else.

We knew we weren't supposed to, of course, but we spent our every spare moment trying to find evidence that Kringle was about. We heard him, his tiny feet scampering in the attic. Sometimes, we would wake up to the sound of sawing, but it usually stopped before we could wake one another. We knew we weren't to go in the attic. We knew that would happen if we did.

Your uncle, he reminded me a lot of you: the same hair, that willful streak. You couldn't tell him to do something without outlining exactly why he came up with the idea in the first place. And, like you, he got into a few fights in school around this time of year because... well, because not everyone is as fortunate as we were. In middle school, I remember him coming home with a black eye once because he told some boys in his class about Kringle and some of Santa's helpers. They didn't believe him because they must have tried peeking at their family's elves one too many times, and he must not have come after Thanksgiving anymore.

Your uncle gave better than he got in that fight, but don't tell your mother I said so. Fists are not how we solve things.

Your uncle believed. He had four more Christmases under his belt than I did, so he had more reason to be convinced. He was the witness to more of Santa's helpers than Tracey or me. He had heard the sleigh bells more.

We didn't hear the bells every Christmas growing up. Maybe it wasn't even most of them, but I can't be sure now. That's the way of memory. We memorialize the exceptional and forget the commonplace.

When we heard the bells, we would run outside quick as could be. You know how you are when you think you hear the ice cream truck? You'd be a snail beside the three of us when we heard the jingle bells. I once ran so fast I swear I almost slid all the way down the hill.

You remember the field behind grandma and grandpa's house? You know how it slopes down? How, if you're not careful, you could slide almost into the river? That's where we'd find them, Santa's helpers.

They weren't Santa, of course. He is a manager these days. If you are especially lucky, the actual Santa Claus might visit your house maybe once in your lifetime. Otherwise, you get a helper fulfilling the duties.

The first one I remember meeting was Klaus Nickelson. He said he got lost looking for our house. Santa, he doesn't need a map. It's all up here, part of the magic. The helpers, though, they don't have that talent. They need to survey their routes in advance to make sure they can make all the deliveries in time on Christmas night. Poor Klaus had gotten turned around, so he landed by the stream to try to reorient himself. Once he was on the ground to get his bearing, his reindeer shot off in the sky. You know how reindeer are very flighty, especially this time of year.

Klaus was thrilled to find us, of course, but he needed to call the North Pole and get them to send out a loaner reindeer.

We brought him back up the hill. He explained that a phone just wouldn't do the trick, but didn't we have an elf he could talk to? Tracey was thrilled because maybe she could catch a glimpse of Kringle while they talked. She was a little girl then, younger than even your sister now, so you can't really blame her for trying to break the rules.

You have a particular image of the helpers now that they mostly stay in malls. They need to be presentable in a way that the more nomadic helpers of my time never did. Klaus was downright ratty in the house light. He stood about as tall as your grandfather. His beard was yellowed, his hair matted with sweat and snow, his coat and pants torn and dirty, but what could we expect? He was dressed to map out houses, not impress children.

Once inside, he seemed to know exactly how to get up to the attic. We stood at the bottom of the ladder, daring each other to climb it and see Kringle, but none of us moved. You know, if you see an elf, he never comes back. We listened to their one-sided conversation about reindeer, the cost of flying a new one out here, how long it would take to walk back without one. Then Klaus climbed down, ignoring the three of us standing there slack-jawed, and made himself some cookies and milk.

Nowadays, the helpers seem to listen to you when they ask you what you want and if you've been good. I remember Klaus just scarfing down the cookies and humming at us, as though our goodness and want couldn't have less to do with him, like he was just making conversation. But, when you have the ear of an adult with some pull, you put your doubts aside. I swear, we must have talked to him nonstop for the better part of half an hour, just making sure that he understood our every virtue. I know what you are thinking, but we didn't tattle on one another. Santa doesn't give extra presents to little boys who tell tales.

He left after he cleared our pantry out of cookies. Your grandma and grandpa showed up a little while later and seemed skeptical about our story, but they listened. They said it was good that we had not tried in earnest to see Kringle, as our elf could have a mean streak when it came to disobedient children, and we were still on probation for the last time your uncle pulled down the ladder to the attic when he thought no one was around.

Klaus wasn't the last helper I met, of course. A few years later, there was Nick Klausen, who needed to bring Kringle a package of gold nails, then Sam Sled, who needed to check that our Christmas tree was a regulation size before Santa could sign off on leaving three particularly big presents. Those turned out to be bicycles and not, as your aunt Tracey supposed, a fleet of ponies.

Tracey, your grandmother, and I were out getting food for a Christmas party. Your uncle thought he was too big to have to come. Maybe he was. You couldn't tell him anything he didn't beg you to hear. He stayed home that night while your grandpa was at work.

He wasn't there when we got home, wasn't anywhere. The back door was ajar. They've gotten it fixed since, but the lock used to stick something awful in the winter. Even if you had a key - and he didn't - you weren't getting back in that way until spring.

You could see all our footprints and his brave sled track, powdered over with yesterday's snow. In the midst of this coated, childhood pandemonium, a fresh set of tracks marred the snow. The waffle ribbing of the prints were his boots, no question, growing longer and wider as the hill sped toward its bottom. There, beside heavy deer tracks on the edge of the river, lay tarnished silver bells.

Your grandmother, she called the police, who brought dogs to sniff at the hill. It seemed a great spectacle to Tracey and me since we both loved dogs. We had no worry in our hearts since what must have happened was obvious to us. Your uncle had heard the tinkling of the helper's bell and ran out to see him, to find what adventure lay before him. He was braver and bolder than I ever could be. If I had been home alone, I have no doubt in my mind I would have left the helper out in the cold. Not your uncle.

I remember that Christmas was quiet. I don't recall now what I got, what I even wanted. All that sticks out in my mind are your uncle's presents, all in a pile, wrapped and untouched, even unmentioned. The way your grandparents looked, the way they frowned when they thought we weren't paying attention, I knew it was something big.

After Christmas without your uncle, I snuck up to the attic to talk to Kringle to see if he might know when the helper would be bringing my brother home. I don't know why I thought he would be there since we both know elves return to the North Pole on Christmas Eve. Your uncle's presents were there, still wrapped. I listened for Kringle and thought I heard him, a sort of whimpering beneath the floorboards. When I called out to him, he went silent again.

That was the last time Kringle came around until you were born. I broke the rules, and I accepted the punishment without complaint. My next Christmas was quiet again. Your uncle's presents reappeared by the tree, but I could smell on them the mustiness of the attic.

The Christmas after, your uncle returned. Not in person, of course, but each of us had a present from him and, on the tree, a letter explaining that he was now one of Santa's helpers and would be sure to slip us a little something extra each year from Santa's sack. I knew it was true because his presents had disappeared from our home. Every year, I would leave your uncle a present out back. Every year, it would vanish on Christmas Eve when I wasn't looking.

Christmas was never the same once he was recruited to be a helper, but they certainly had no more trouble finding our house afterward.

To this day, your uncle is at the North Pole, making sure we have the best Christmas possible, even if he has to pull a few strings to make it happen.

I finish my story, surprised that my eyes feel wet. It had been years since I told it in full, and I silently wonder if I might not have left something out.

"So, Uncle Christmas is real?" asks Finn.

I knuckle my eyes and answer resolutely, "Yes." I take my brother's picture from the mantle and hold it out to Finn. He looks it over, but he does not take it. My brother even has his same half-cocked grin behind the sepia of the aged photo.

"And Santa took him?"

I look long and hard at my son, letting the picture fall to my side. "What story does your heart tell you is true?"

"I..." he begins, but falters. He looks up at me, his face holding neither a smile nor a frown. "Uncle Christmas is with Santa."

"So he is."