Santa can always use helpers

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

We added our granddaughter, Lucy, to the collage this year. But not sitting on Santa's knee. It snowed. She has a cold. So we sat her under the tree and clicked away making funny noises and funnier faces until she rewarded us with one of her blink-and-you'll-miss-it smiles. It's her first Christmas and Santa or no Santa, it was a Kodak moment.

The collage, which hangs in my living room, is full of pictures of smiling children. The one of my husband and his sister on their grandmother's lap is the oldest, a grainy black and white. The one of me on Santa's knee is the biggest and came from Jordan Marsh in Boston where my mother said the real Santa was and where every year we trekked until the year I no longer believed. That must have been a hard Christmas for my mother, though I don't remember it. Who remembers when childhood ends and the rest of life begins? All the remaining photos are in color, the ones taken with Santa small, Polaroid squares that have scratched and faded over the years but have lost none of their magic.

You look at these pictures laid out next to one another, not in any order, the children in them mixed up and grown, and it's hard to tell who is who and where the years went. My husband, our kids, me? All our faces are the same. There's only one that's different, and it's of my youngest with her eyes scrunched and her fists balled and her mouth open so wide you can almost hear her scream. But in every other photograph there is the wonderment, trust, joy and shyness that define Christmas.

You see these same expressions on kids even today as they sit on Santa's lap. You see their shy smiles and their big eyes and their trembling lips. They are what make us stop and watch children we don't even know. They are what make our eyes tear and our throat hurt and our heart ache, because they bring back not a memory of how things used to be, but a knowing.

I always asked Santa for a baby for my mother. It was the wish I made on every birthday and on every star and to Santa every year. I'd stand in line, my wool coat hot and itchy, and finally when it was my turn to see Santa, I'd make my mother look away and whisper that all I wanted was a baby brother or sister. "I don't care which," I said.

Santa brought me lots of babies, but they were plastic. He brought me a high chair and a carriage, but they were for a doll. I thought I wasn't asking right. Maybe there were words I didn't know.

When I was older and my children were small, I waited in a line that stretched into the parking lot of Bradlees in Walpole. It was the year Julie asked for a Teddy Ruxpin and only Bradlees had him. When Lauren asked for a kitten, at the last minute, in a scribbled note to Santa, I called everywhere until I found one. You always want to make your children's wishes come true.

But sometimes you can't. And that's the hard part. And that's why you choke up when you see all the little kids in line at all the stores. Because when they're asking for a Barbie or a truck, you can buy these things. But when they ask for their mother to get well or their father to come home or for their older brother to be able to talk, all you can do is hold them and tell them things will be all right.

Santa is just the front man, I told my kids when I had to tell them something. He is real, but he doesn't work alone. He has lots of helpers.

And he does. But they're not in photos on the wall. They're out in the world, making the world better, not with magic or fantasy but with hard work and persistence. Not every wish is granted at Christmas. Not every wish can be. But, oh, how so many people try.