A mystery story about a grown man, an attorney, alone on Christmas Eve, who can’t allow himself to believe in Santa Claus. But someone keeps eating the cookies. Every year. Just like it happened when he was a kid. Maybe Santa Claus really does exist. Or maybe, just maybe, all this skeptic needs to understand is where the jolly fat man lives.
Santa’s Snack
Dean Wesley Smith
Copyright 2010 by Dean Wesley Smith
Published by WMG Publishing
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Santa’s Snack
Dean Wesley Smith
The fat old bastard ate the whole thing. Again.
I was twenty-seven years old, a lawyer in a big downtown firm, and lived alone in my parent’s old Victorian house. I didn’t believe in Santa Claus. Yet again this Christmas morning, every crumb of the dozen sugar cookies I had left on one of Mom’s best plates, every drop of the milk, was gone.
Just like every Christmas Eve for the last twenty years, the cookies and milk had disappeared at some time during the night.
“Got you this time,” I said, staring at the empty plate.
For three years I’d been trying to catch the person eating the cookies, and for three years I had failed. But this Christmas this joke was going to end.
I turned and headed for the hidden cameras I had had installed around the room. Six of them, two behind on the shelves behind the couch, one on each side of the stone fireplace, one over the entrance, and one over the big bay window near where the Christmas tree sat. Nothing could have moved in the living room last night without me knowing about it.
Back when I was a kid I used believe Santa actually ate the snack, but then when I learned that Santa didn’t exist, I figured Dad did it. And I had believed that for years.
One year, when I was home from law school for Christmas, before my parents were both killed by that damned drunk driver, I had asked Mom why she kept putting out the cookies and milk.
“Tradition,” she had said, smiling at me as she slid the dozen sugar cookies onto the coffee table. It was always sugar cookies, with white frosting and some sprinkles. I loved the things, always had, still did. Every year as a kid I ate those cookies from two days before Christmas and a week after. Those cookies had been as much a part of Christmas for me as the presents and the tree.
My mom’s answer of tradition had been enough of an answer for me that year. It sort of made sense in a Christmas fashion. My mom had been big into traditions, and I had to admit, I liked a few of them myself.
The next morning those cookies she had put out for tradition’s sake were gone, just like always. I figured Dad must really enjoy his Christmas Eve midnight snack.
Then, on the Christmas Eve after I moved back in after their deaths, I found myself alone and remembering all the wonderful Christmas’s in the big old house. I really missed my parents, missed my mom’s laugh, my dad’s snoring from down the hall. And tomorrow I was going to miss waking up to the wonderful smells of my mom cooking a Christmas turkey. I knew this first Christmas was going to be rough, but I didn’t expect it to be this hard.
Twice during the evening I put on my coat to leave and find a bar, and twice I stopped before going out the door. I think the problem was that I had made the house look a little too much like they were still here. I had put up a tree, in the same spot they always did, using the same decorations Mom used. Traditions died hard in my family, of that there was no doubt.
I was sitting, staring at the tree when it suddenly dawned on me I had missed one tradition. The cookies. The coffee table looked empty without Mom’s offering for Santa. Without the cookies there, it sort of made the room seem even emptier that it felt.
So being in a sentimental and sad mood, and wanting to not break any traditions of my parents so soon after their deaths, and wanting any excuse to get out of the house for even a few minutes, I went out and got some store-bought sugar cookies and some milk. Then on the same plate as she always used, I put out her offering.
It made me laugh at myself for going to such lengths to do such a silly thing, but for a while the room felt right, felt like a Christmas Eve like the old days.