Once, when I was a little girl, I awoke in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and got up to see if Santa had visited our house yet. Sneaking down the stairs as quietly as I could, I peeked around the corner of the entrance to our living room and my eyes went wide. I saw my mother standing with Santa Claus by our Christmas tree!
Mom wore a pale pink nightie that I'd never seen before. It showed off her long legs and she looked beautiful to my young eyes, but I wondered how she didn't get cold wearing so little. As I watched from the hall, my mother stepped closer to Santa and placed her palms on his shoulders as she gazed up into his piercing blue eyes.
They spoke to each other in whispers that I couldn't make out, but my mom looked utterly blissful. I watched in awe as Santa's gloved hands slipped under the flimsy little skirt of my mother's negligee and pulled her into him. Mom wrapped her arms around his neck and they kissed deeply.
The cat chose that moment to startle me by affectionately brushing up against my leg. A little squeak escaped my lips, and I quickly pulled back from the living room entrance. Not wanting my mom or Santa to catch me out of bed on Christmas eve, I ran back upstairs to my room and dove under the covers.
The next day, I asked my mom how long she'd known Santa. At five, I wasn't old enough to know that she shouldn't be kissing anyone other than my father, at least not like she'd been doing the night before. She acted upset when I admitted that I'd seen her talking to him in the middle of the night, and she insisted that I'd just been dreaming.
I started to argue, but I dropped it when I saw Mom getting angry. My father appeared amused by the whole thing. By the time he presented me with my Christmas tree shaped pancakes, my mother had cooled off and sat down with us to eat. I didn't bring it up again, but it just seemed too real to have been a dream.
Around age ten, I learned the actual meaning of the song 'I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus'. That's when I came to believe that it had been my father dressed as Santa. It was only as a teenager that the image still frozen in my memory grossed me out as I realized it must've been some sort of kinky, sexual roleplay not intended for my young eyes.
I became grateful to the cat for interrupting before I saw anything that might scar me for life. Eventually, I put that memory aside as I met a great guy, got married, and had my own children. In fact, I forgot all about the whole thing until last Christmas Eve.
Everything started out normal enough. After attending the family Christmas party at my parents' house, my husband and I drove home and tucked our kids in with promises that if they went right to sleep, Santa would bring them all sorts of presents. Dave had had too much to drink at the party, a common occurrence when dealing with my stepdad, and he went right to bed. My husband probably passed out before our daughters did.
I didn't have that luxury. Things had gotten a little away from me, and I still had over a dozen presents to wrap. Changing into my flannel pajama pants and a red hoodie around midnight, I began hauling the gifts I'd already wrapped from their hiding place in the basement.
After arranging them under the tree, I went to my bedroom and retrieved the bags of unwrapped presents in my closet. Once I had everything I needed spread out on the family room floor, I flipped the switch that lights our gas fireplace. The warm glow of the fire and the lights on the tree provided plenty of light to work by, so I didn't bother with a lamp.
I hadn't even finished cutting the wrapping paper for the first present when I heard a strange buzzing in my ears. The tree's lights glowed a little brighter as if from a power surge, except they didn't dim again. I stood up and tried to figure out what was happening, and my heart raced as the fear of the unknown gripped me in my dimly lit, deathly quiet home in the middle of the night.
My body froze in shock as the fireplace abruptly transformed. The glass seemed to evaporate, and the opening expanded by several feet to the sides and toward the ceiling. As the fire died down, a pair of black boots descended into view.
I stood there transfixed as a man dressed in red bent over and climbed out of the fireplace. Standing on the tile hearth, he idly brushed soot from the white fur trim of his jacket. Taking off his pointed red hat, he beat it against his thigh to clean that as well.
When he finally looked at me, I lost the ability to breathe. I'd seen images of Santa Claus all my life. The rosy cheeks, the enormous belly, the long white hair, the fatherly smile... the advertisers had it all wrong. This was the Santa I'd seen with my mother thirty years before.
"Hello, Beth," he said in a deep baritone that reverberated in my chest just like the bass at a rock concert. He spoke just above a whisper, but it felt as if he' blared the words at me with a pair of thousand watt amplifiers. I'd lost the ability to speak, so I remained mute as the impossible played out in front of me.
Rather than a big belly that shook like jelly, this Santa had a barrel chest like an old time wrestler. Well over six feet tall, he towered over me as I gazed into his intense, icy blue eyes. Everything about him practically screamed power, confidence, and goodness.
His neatly trimmed beard and closely cropped hair appeared more grey than white. Frankly, he looked more like a Navy SEAL in his forties or fifties than the image of the elderly Santa we all grew up with. This guy wasn't jolly grandpa so much as he was all man.
His dazzling eyes twinkling, Santa pulled a few wrapped gifts from his enormous sack. After placing them around the tree, he took a bite from one of the cookies my eldest daughter had left out. Setting his sack by a roaring log fire in the now transformed fireplace, he turned to me again.
"Why don't you come warm yourself by the fire?" he asked kindly.
It wasn't until that moment that I realized how cold the room had become. Taking a step toward him, I nearly fell off my heel. Confused, I looked down and discovered a pair of white, five-inch stilettos on my feet.
My head swam in confusion as I also saw that I no longer wore my comfy flannel pajama pants and hoodie. In their place, only a white babydoll nightie covered my body. Gooseflesh broke out on my exposed skin, and I swallowed hard as I carefully teetered over to the fireplace on those impossibly high heels. In the mirror over the mantel, I noticed that my hair had been inexplicably put up in pig tails like a little girl.
