This week’s writings come from Cyndi Lloyd, Amy Muscoplat, and Lizbeth Hartz. I hope you enjoy these three and have enjoyed all of those from the past three weeks. Merry Christmas!

Dear Mrs. Claus by Cyndi Lloyd

12 Dec. 2021

Dear Mrs. Claus,

I understand Santa is super busy at this time of the year, and my letter is running a little late. Yes, I do have a motive for writing you – one middle-aged woman to an elder, to a wise woman with magical abilities.

There are so many things I’d like to ask for, such as some trees for our yard, a battery and rear struts for my car, a new door to the upstairs bathroom, and a complete kitchen remodel, but I understand these things are expensive, and the supply chain for such goods is backed up due to the pandemic.

Instead, this year, I’d like to ask you to spread your enchanted red and white cloaks on more than half of my family members who’ve chosen not to get the COVID-19 vaccine. It’s been such a challenging time these past two years because I’ve had to stay away from these loved ones for fear of giving them the virus or contracting it myself. I’ve missed them terribly! And I worry about them. Mom was infected in December 2020 and thankfully recovered. But now, just last week, my youngest sister caught the virus, and she’s sick with body aches that she says feel like a sledgehammer hitting her bones. She’s lost sense of smell and taste, feels light-headed, and has shortness of breath. Would you please watch over her and make her well and don’t let her suffer with long COVID? Would you please keep them all healthy?

And if it’s not too big of an ask, would you also please cover the entire globe with your magical glitter to protect everyone from this highly contagious virus so that each one of us can be safe, so that no one else will die, and so that our incredible, heroic medical frontline workers may receive some respite?

My deepest gratitude for all you do.

Wishing you a joyous season,

Cyndi Lloyd

P.S. Please give Santa a big thank-you hug for me for all those childhood favorite toys I received. They were well-loved and cared for, especially the buckets of wood blocks and the Weeble Wobble Tree that took me to realms outside of my family home where the issue of money didn’t exist.

 

Dear S by Amy Muscoplat

Dear S.,

You were not a part of my childhood, but maybe I’ll tell you some things on my mind when I think about you.

I was the only kid in Mrs. K.’s 4^th Grade class whose mother said, “My daughter needs an alternative art project. She’s not to make the Christmas craft.  We’re not Christian.  We celebrate Hanukkah.”

How come Sari Rosenberg and Jill Rosenbaum, and every other Jewish girl and boy in my suburban Minneapolis public school class didn’t have mothers calling to complain to their teacher?  How embarrassing could you get?  Most of the class was blond-haired, blue-eyed and had last names like Ingebretson, Johnson, Halvorsen, or Carlson.  We already stood out.

So I sat at another table and got to make a candle out of construction paper and glitter. The stenciled template looked like the Christmas candle project everyone else made, but Mrs. K. told me not to use red and green.

My candle was blue and the wick yellow, with thick-cut, chunky silver glitter all along the borders. I brought it home and my mother asked me, “Why’d you make a single candle with this glittered-up paper and not a menorah?”  I didn’t want to explain to her that I only got to decorate what the teacher handed me to work with.  But at least Mom didn’t call to complain.

I had to ask my friend, Jessie, “Who was Kris Kringle, and what was he all about?”  The other kids were busy sneaking around, trying to plop their secret gifts to their friends on their desks or chairs without their friends seeing them…and I was in the dark.

That same year, for the classroom and school fundraiser, we had to buy and sell gimmicky containers of seasonings and the bacon bits in it were not a big hit in our home. We didn’t keep kosher, but still.

Around that age, we went to my piano teacher’s house, and she let us help decorate her tree.  I remember more about the cookies and popcorn balls than the tree.

I’ve never had a tree and it wasn’t missed. No, it’s not my religion, but I studied world religions in college and afterward. I don’t get up in arms about these things the way my mother did or does.  It and you, Mr. Santa, have much meaning, but they’re not mine. I have my own and that works for me.

Never was my picture taken with you, nor did I sit next to you nor on your lap.  But I didn’t miss it. Zayde gave us each a silver dollar when someone found the afikomen at Pesach, even the cousins who didn’t help the finder of that hidden piece of wrapped-up matzah.

We sang every song as a big family group at each of the holidays, and it was a great time to hang out with my handfuls of cousins, aunts, and uncles.

At Hanukkah, we lit our many menorahs every night, got a new, small present nightly and ate delicious latkes with sour cream and applesauce. When I was older, my dad even took part as a professor in the Great Latke Hamentashen Debate at the U of M.

Baubie’s hamantashen recipe and homemade ones beat the temple’s ones in an unbiased taste hands down.  None of this jam business for us.  A real hamentashen had ground-up apricots, prunes, dates, and/or muun (poppyseed.)

In high school, Cristy typed my term paper about the women in Agatha Christie’s novels for me for our College Composition class on her family’s typewriter. The women were loquacious, avaricious and some other “ious” I can no longer remember. Sitting in her bedroom reading her my paper while she typed away, I stared up above her bed and saw a crucifix.  It was the first time I’d seen one in someone’s home.  I must have lived a very sheltered life before that because the Jews and Lutherans I knew didn’t have these, but Cristy’s family was Catholic, and she did.

As a young adult living in Louisiana to attend library science graduate school at LSU, I attended a tree trimming party at my landlord’s house.  My garconierre apartment was behind her home, like a backyard granny flat, but very large.  The place had such character.  Hardwood floors and cathedral ceilings and a washer/dryer and a parking space and a view of the birds from the canal. All for $500 dollars a month.

I remember more about the brownies and the fudge and the drinks than the tree. I’d brought an ornament, only after ferreting out what one brings to these types of events from a fellow library science grad student from the area. She even told me, “There’s a little store near Langenstein’s that sells pretty, handmade ornaments to gift someone, perfect for a tree trimming party.” I dutifully went, bought, wrapped, and handed my gift over. My ornament got lost under Susie’s tree until almost Xmas itself when she came to tell me that she’d found a beautiful ornament from me and was so sorry she hadn’t been able to ask me to hang it on the tree myself that night.  Thankfully I’d been able to remain incognito.

Occasionally, during that time, I’d take the old river road back from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, where I lived. Days before Christmas, I’d see bonfires lit up outside people’s homes. When I asked, the stories would come out that the Old Cajuns and others who lived in the riverbank homes in these parishes were lighting fires for St. Nick to find his way home. I’d drive home on those pre-Christmas weeknights touched to see all the fires lighting the path for St. Nicholas.

Mrs. K. was my nemesis that 4th-grade year. Mom went in to tell her one day that “Amy doesn’t like being teased.” To which Mary Jo K. told my mom, “Well, she’s just going to have to get used to it because that’s how I am.” My mother, who talked and talks nonstop, was apoplectic.  I had Mrs. K. for two miserable years, though I don’t remember 4^th grade being as tough as the year before.

Rosy Johnson remembers me teaching her how to read that 4th-grade year. Mrs. K. told her, “Go have Amy read with you and show you how,” because apparently, she was slower in her reading skills.  I’d forgotten this story, but Rosy told me so herself 40 something years later, at an elementary school reunion, after I’d already become a librarian.

My husband says about one of my stepdaughters, “When M. saw a picture of Santa in the store window, she asked, ‘Abba, what’s Rabbi C. doing up there?’ ”  To be fair, a roly-poly, long white-bearded guy in a suit, albeit a red suit, isn’t such a stretch from the bearded Chassidic Rabbi C. that the toddler M., now a grown young woman with children of her own, was referring to at the time.

So, Dear S., you’re not a part of my life, but you’re in my consciousness and in the culture.  I hope you found your way home.

Please help us all get along.

And please, if she’s still alive, please bring Mrs. K. a kinder, gentler nature for those in her life, for any children she interacts with, both for the holidays and beyond.

Thank you kindly,

Amy

Dear Santa by Lizbeth Hartz

Dear Santa

As a child, on cold starlit Christmas eve nights, I pinched myself awake and peeked through frosty windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of you in all your glory; jolly, white beard, red and white suit, driving your sleigh overflowing with presents, and Rudolph, his red bulb nose lighting the way. Somehow you knew what I wanted and were flying me a special toy or game. Though I never saw you or wrote to you, I mightily believed in your magic.

“How does he know what I want, Mom?” I’d ask. “He’s magical,” she’d say and assure me you knew the wishes of children all over the world whether they wrote letters or not, unlike my relatives, to whom I needed to write thank-you letters for birthday and Christmas presents. So I didn’t write you my usual letter, with block characters and crayon drawings; didn’t warn you we had no chimney or promise I’d unlock the back door, or tell you a glass of milk and cookies awaited you beside shiny wrapped presents tied up with Mom’s artistically homemade bows.

Discovering in first grade that you didn’t really fly through the sky was almost as shocking (but not quite) as discovering where babies came from in the third. However, learning in the sixth grade that you’re called Old Saint Nick because of Saint Nicholas, who saved three sisters from prostitution by paying their dowries, and who gave everything he owned away to help others, softened the blow. I learned that the gifts you bring are the spiritual gifts of giving.

Now in my 70’s, I still see you as magical, Santa, (“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!”) and am grateful for your continued gifts of spiritual treasures. One that especially stands out for me, I witnessed on Christmas Eve ten years ago, when I lived in an apartment complex in Mililani Town. A young mother who couldn’t speak English screamed and screamed and we all ran to her, including an Army enlisted, older man. Her baby had slipped under the water in the tub when she left for a moment to take care of laundry, and wasn’t breathing, and had turned blue. The man did not hesitate; he grabbed the infant and talked to her quietly and authoritatively and nonstop between his CPR breaths and back slaps, urging her back to life, saying over and over, “Come back, baby.” Turning her over and upside down, slapping her tiny back, giving her breaths until she finally cried and coughed up water. Calling that baby’s spirit back.

The example of your life, Saint Nick, is calling me back, too, during these dire earth-destroying, climate-changing, never-ending pandemic days, bringing me hope as I witness the unselfish giving of many Santas like you—Santas feeding people who don’t have enough to eat, buying shoes and building houses for people starving and living on the street, taking plastic waste and transforming it into so many people-helping things, such as 3-D prostheses that only cost a few dollars and help so many so much.

Thanks for all those people giving unselfishly to help others, just like you, Santa. Givers who give the world much to be grateful for. Thank you for friends and family. I’m especially grateful, Santa, for my unfailingly kind and caring Barry, and for allowing us to love each other through this pandemic. Thank you for our two sassy cats, whose antics and personalities make our lives sweet. Thank you for my heartfelt connection to my 98-year-old Aunt Katy, whose wisdom and love and positivity, despite her many ailments, lift me up. Thank you for my writing teachers whose insightful feedback and helpful materials kept me learning and writing when continuing to write was what I most needed to do. Thanks for writer friends who connected with me during phone calls when we could no longer meet in person. Thanks for my friend Gail, who introduced me to blogging for the We Are The World Blogfest (#WATWB). Every month, we search for good news to counteract the bad news in the feeds. How delightful it is to bathe in the sea of generosity populated by youth, young, middle-aged, and seniors who give unselfishly from their hearts and make so many other hearts happy. Reading about and sharing good news reminds me to give more, be grateful, and worry less.

I’m hoping, finally, to give you something back, Santa. This letter’s just for you. Thank you for your many fine presents in the past. As for the present, I leave you with this quote from Alice Morse Earle:

Yesterday’s history,

Tomorrow’s a mystery,

Today is a gift—

That’s why they call it the Present

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas!

Lizbeth Hartz