Santa’s Dead!
written by: Carmen Baca
“Santa’s dead!” came the cry from my vecina’s house. I’d been dumping trash in the bin behind the garage when narshe came outside, hair in curlers and PJs under her robe to yell again from her porch next door, “Se murió Santo Clos,” and went back inside. Her breath left small vapor clouds, and I shivered with both the chill in the air and in her words.
What the hell, I thought, finishing my chore before going straight inside to the TV to see if there was a national news interruption with some department store Santa dying on the job or some equally disturbing event. But there was no bulletin interrupting the daily programming. I found my dad leaning forward in his recliner, watching Sunday morning wrestling, both feet planted on mom’s orange shag rug, and throwing punches and expletives out in equal measure. He tended to forget my 5-year-old sister, Sally, sat nearby on the couch. She covered her mouth to keep from laughing so he wouldn’t stop. I knew this, too. I’d caught her plenty of times after I’d let out one too many myself.
Some kind of commotion across the street caught my attention, so I went to the door and looked out the window. A screaming ambulance, followed by a police cruiser, stopped right in front of our house amidst the looky-loos gathering by the minute.
“Ándale, dale, dale,” my dad prompted his wrestler. “Come on, hit him, hit him,” he repeated in case his wrestler didn’t speak Spanish. I knew because I did it too. I’d been about to join him for our Sunday morning ritual when the neighbor caught my attention, and now the ambulance held it.
From the house opposite ours came medical attendants wheeling a sheet-covered body. Following was our across-the-street neighbor, Señora Collier, grasping Santa’s red hat in her fists, her back shaking with sobs. Las vecinas rushed to her side, offering hankies, hugs, condolences, and support like women have done for centuries when disaster strikes. Because two black patent leather boots stuck out from the end of the gurney, we knew it was Santa all right. AKA, Mr. Nicholas Collier.
The couple had moved into our neighborhood when I was about Sally’s age, the year after my mother left. I stepped into my mom’s role and did my best to raise Sally in ignorance about the details. Maybe I’d tell her one day. But for now, her childhood would remain blissful if I had anything to do with it.
When the Colliers found out several of us middle and high school kids on the block had taken over for parents absent for one reason or another, they took all of us under their wings. They were old when they arrived and grew ancient among us, adapted to our ways as we took up a few of their Midwest ones, too. They became the abuelos, the grandparents, of our block, a role they took to heart. I remember Mr. C declaring to the little ones from the get-go, “I’m best friends with Santa Claus. I’ll get him to stop by on Christmas Eve, just watch.” To our parents and to us, he said, “My name ain’t Nick for nada. I would be honored to play your Santo Clos.”
He knew our custom was to open presents on Christmas Eve and stay up all night, even the kids, who never made it past midnight and fell asleep where they dropped until someone tucked them in whatever bed was available. Usually, the one with all the coats and hats. Our traditional Spanish Christmases became even more special with the Collier touch. Mrs. C kept the party going with handing Santa the gifts from his bag, which he distributed one at a time to draw out the joy and the gratitude of the time. “Oh, I remember working with the elves on your dolly there, Juanita,” she’d say, or she’d make some other comment about a just-opened present. The authenticity for the kids’ sake brought out tears in more than a few of us because this couple who entered our lives de la nada—from nothing—become the center we didn’t know we needed. Mrs. Claus came to life every Christmas Eve with her husband, and all was well on Calle Primera.
I looked at the gente, mis vecinos from First Street, glad las madres had kept the niños away. They didn’t need to witness Santa Claus’s death. Not when we all had them convinced he could never die.
That afternoon, I met up with my friends at our local youth center after taking Sally to the reading room where volunteers would read them stories for an hour. The rest of the gang sat at a long table upstairs in the game center, for the noise by the time I joined them. We needed to figure out how to deal with Santa’s death without exactly lying to the little ones.
Getting right to the point, as I sat down, Jordan, the oldest of the boys at 15, said, “Too bad about old man Collier. Somebody’s gotta take over his role for the kids. Molly cried her eyes out when mom told her he’d passed.”
“Why’d she tell her anything?” Louie, another lifelong buddy, scoffed. “Thought we were all supposed to hide it from the kids. That’s the rules you girls set.”
He looked at me and my two friends sitting on either side. Lola and Charlie, aka Charlene, and I made up our little club of three. We called ourselves Las Tres Tontas, the Three Fools, when we messed around with the little kids. But amongst ourselves, we were Las Madrinas. The Godmothers. For good reason.
“She happened to be out front when the ambulance got there,” Jordan explained. “Before my mom could grab her and throw her inside, she saw everything.”
“Well, you’re just going to have to explain to her it wasn’t him.” I didn’t leave room for
argument. He knew it too. I saw the way he challenged me with an eye-to-eye duel for a second before he dropped his gaze and muttered, “Yeah, well. Tell me what to say, why don’tcha?”
Lola, popping her gum, offered a solution. “Mistaken identity,” she said between chews. Maybe it was a primo who came to visit and tried on the botas, I don’t know, make it up. Make her believe it.”
“Sometimes white lies serve a purpose,” Louie said with a tilt of his head, his trademark move indicating he’d weighed important thoughts in his mind. “The whole reason behind our keeping Santa alive for the children is the original white lie.”
In the silence while we all mulled our dilemma over, I pictured that first meeting I called
the year the Colliers became part of all our extended families and the reason for it. Charlie and I were the surrogate mothers of our little families, her mom having passed when her little brother was born, and mine gone with the wind and some guy on a Harley, according to my dad. I came home from school one day and didn’t have a mother. Neither did my little sister, Sally.
In Lola’s case, she adopted a widower’s twin toddlers as her mission and became a kind of afternoon and weekend nanny. Las Tres Madrinas took care of everything. The boys of the neighborhood, either related to one of us or pretty much cowed by our strength together, did as we bade. We didn’t know how long the situation would last since we were all between 10 and 16. At what age would the guys rebel and figure out we are master manipulators?
“Wouldn’t it be so easy if it were like the books or the movies?” Lola asked with another loud pop as she leaned into Louie’s ear. “Oops,” she said, taking the pink clump out of her mouth with two fingers and dabbing at the gum that had stuck to his lobe.
“Yuck,” “gross,” “I can’t believe I did that,” and other such remarks had me holding back laughter and disgust.
I cleared my throat, “Come on, guys. We need a solution. Christmas is just days away.”
“Frankenstein comes to mind was where I was going,” Lola said after, popping another bubble. “It’d be cool if we could bring Santa back to life.”
Charlie added, “Remember The Monkey’s Paw from English class last year? I had nightmares for weeks.”
“I’d be more afraid of something like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead,” Jordan added with a shiver and tucked his sneakered feet under him on the hard wooden chair.
I slapped the table lightly to get them back on track. “Wishing isn’t getting us anywhere. We need a plan. Who can replace Mr. C? If any of our dads does it, the kids will know. They’re pretty innocentes, but they’re not estupidos.”
Lola blurted, “We need the Santa suit.”
“And the mask,” I added. “Mr. C always wore that rubbery Santa face that fit a bit crooked, remember?” Under all that beard and mustache, it wasn’t too bad. It had fooled the littles, anyway, until now. “Maybe we can volunteer to help Mrs. C and find a way to borrow it. We girls can clean the house, and you guys can chop wood, fill her wood box, clean the fogones, that kind of thing.”
I expected groans from the boys for my volunteering them to do community service, but
Louie spoke up. “Yeah, and just think how proud our jefitos will be ’cause we came up with the idea on our own.” He beamed at all of us, nodding, arms crossed as if he’d accomplished something.
We Godmothers bore holes into him with our eyes until he mumbled, “Caría. Can’t you girls take a joke, I swear. But, honestly, what’s wrong with being in good graces, like the saying goes. I’d rather the grown-ups look at me with pride than with that look of death for not pitching in. And then there’s you, our fearless Jefa con que ‘borrowing,’ my a—”
“As if you’re doing this out of the goodness of your puny little heart,” Lola shot back, along with her middle finger.
We agreed to meet at ten the next morning at the back door of Mrs. Collier’s house and offer what she would take as help in her time of need.
***
“What do you mean, a séance?” I asked Louie the next morning as we crossed the street to Señora Collier’s. “You think you can talk to Mr. Collier through a medium. You know a medium, do you?”
“Of all the fu—”
“Hey,” Charlie interrupted Lola. “Calla. We said we’d help each other stop cussing, so we don’t do it around the kids.”
“Yeah,” Jordan agreed. “We’re supposed to be role models, but not during wrestling, huh, Blanca?
“I don’t know what you mean,” I replied. “But yeah, Louie. Of all the messed-up ideas…”
“Hear me out, at least,” he put out his hands and took a few steps backward to slow us down as we approached. “What if we don’t need a medium? When I was leaving the youth center last night—I kid you not—I stumbled into this magazine rack. One fell face up. No lie. It was open to an article called something like ‘you can perform your own séance. Here’s how.’ It had step-by-step instructions. I took notes.”
“Talk about perfect timing,” Lola said, wide-eyed. “That’s kinda spooky.”
“I know, right?” he answered. “I took it as a sign, actually.”
We madrinas stared at him speechless at Mrs. C’s back door, and I knocked, stopping the plática. We needed time to think before we talked about it again. Between her initial tears and our hugs, one at a time as we entered her little cocina, Mrs. C offered coffee or a glass of water. Not a lot of older folk without grandchildren kept sodas around. After explaining what we came to do with a good deal of interrupting, I sat the señora down at her kitchen table while Charlie poured her café, and Lola took over cleaning up the cocina.
“I can’t go on without my Nicholas,” she cried.
Of course, none of us knew what to say to that. What does one say that doesn’t sound dumb or trite? Which is worse.
“Remember that year he almost lost his false teeth when he fell over the threshold?” Charlie reminded her and sat down, motioning us to do what we’d come to do.
“Oh, my, yes,” she smiled. “If someone hadn’t kicked them right back into his mouth in the commotion to get him standing again, they might’ve been stepped on. I saw the whole thing,” and her smile turned into a little laugh. Charlie and Lola, as she cleaned, kept her company while I tidied the bedroom, bathroom, and the parlor. It was a breeze since the house was so small. I wondered how the couple didn’t trample each other in passing.
The boys went back outside to chop and bring in wood, and just as the house was ready for the mourners who would visit throughout the day, her vecina Raquel came for her to do mortuary business. She ran into the house while we exited and came back with a large cardboard box. Louie took it from her, and she opened the back door of her car.
“Set it down there, would you, Louie,” she bade. “Gotta get to the thrift store first and drop that Santa suit and mask; Mrs. Collins wants me to donate them for someone else to use.
Instead of putting the box into the car, though, Louie said, “Oh, I was going to the thrift shop for some Christmas gifts, Señora. Why don’t I drop it off for you?”
“Well, aren’t you sweet,” she smiled at Louie and closed her door, rushing to the driver’s side as Lola helped Mrs. Collier into the passenger seat. “Thank you,” she waved and drove off.
Charlie beamed at Louie. “Aww, you’re just too sweet. Quick thinking there, bud.”
“First time for everything,” Lola snorted.
“The timing, though. We needed the Santa suit and mask, and, voila, they drop into your arms,” I said.
“I know. Plus, don’t forget, the directions for the séance. Crazy, huh? C’mon, follow me,” he replied.
“Now, how about you come up with a body to fill the suit, hmmmm?”
Amidst grumbling and threats and more requests to find someone willing to play Santa, all of which he ignored, Louie led the way to his dad’s garage. He set the box on a table in the center of the small space and asked someone to close and lock the door. He’d placed old cloths over the two small windows beforehand, darkening the room. Next, he pulled out a book of matches to light a few strategically placed candles and went to the table. He motioned us over.
“What is this?” I asked as we went to stand around him.
“I told you we could have our own séance. No time like the present. Time is running out.
Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.”
“You have any idea what you’re doing?” Charlie asked.
He took out a folded paper, making a check mark in the air with a finger as he read. “A dark, quiet place—check. Friends of the deceased—check. Now, we make our intention.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Jordan asked.
“Bring Mr. Collier back from the dead?” Lola squeaked.
Louie spoke up, “What if we all just sit quietly and offer up what we want to happen and
let Mr. C decide what to do?”
I hadn’t said anything till now. Louie had a big heart, and I know this séance business was his attempt to help the situation, even though there was no possible way…, but I didn’t scoff or put his idea down. What could it hurt? I thought to myself. “Let’s do this then,” I said. “Everyone, gather your thoughts and send Mr. C your personal request.”
“Let’s place our fingers on the box,” Louie instructed after nodding at me with a look of relief that I’d backed him up. “And then let’s chant, “Ommm, ouch.” Lola’s heel stomped his toes, so he amended, “Let’s bow our heads.”
We did as he asked. After a few minutes, a familiar scent wrapped around us, and a breeze out of nowhere blew out the candles.
“Madre de Dios,” Charlie crossed herself. “What was that?”
“Pe—pe—peppermint…,” Jordan sputtered, stepping back from us. “Peppermint and pipe tobacco, like Mr. C always smelled. Something freaky’s going on…”
Louie groaned. “Mrs. C smells the same, though. The box prolly smells like them, too.”
“Either way, maybe we should pray,” Lola whispered, leaning into my side and shaking so hard I wrapped my arm around her back.
“Yes, let’s,” I replied, and we prayed in silence for a while. We tried to laugh off the
strangeness we’d just experienced and made excuses we all knew were lame, but none of us had a clue. Maybe we were being punished for blasphemy. I’d learned the word in catechism; it applied here, for sure. Maybe our praying had canceled it out, I hoped as we all went home to do what last-minute chores needed doing. Tomorrow night couldn’t come fast enough. And we still had no Santa Claus.
***
“Whaddaya mean, the box is gone?” Jordan screeched.
“Sssh,” Lola jabbed an elbow in his side and whisper-yelled at Louie, “whaddaya mean, the box is gone?”
We’d met that afternoon in the garage again, still hoping we could come up with someone to wear the Santa suit for the kids, and found Louie in hysterics.
“Something strange is going on here,” Charlie said, pacing in a square around the table. First that—that smell and the candles going out and now this. What if that séance opened some kind of door to the dead? What if—”
“ENOUGH,” I whisper-roared. “We don’t need to announce to our parents we’re up to something, or were, anyway. Let’s deal with what we have and, er, don’t have. The costume is gone. We never had an adult to wear it anyway. So this is our first Christmas without a Santa, so what. I’ll bet while we’ve been doing our scheming, the grown-ups already came up with something for the little ones. Have any of you asked your parents what the plan is?”
None of us had. None of us had spoken more than a few words to any of the adults since the incident. “Let’s all go home and get ready for tonight,” I said. “Nothing else we can do.”
“Wait,” Lola piped up. “What if Louie’s dad or someone else decided to be Santa tonight?”
“That’s gotta be it,” Jordan said.
We gave a collective sigh of relief and went home with lighter hearts, but not before placing friendly bets about which dad would take over the role of Santa Claus. The father missing from the gathering would give himself away.
Dusk fell softly over the block of modest houses, smoke from wood stove chiflones and wood-burning fogones rose a darker gray than the incoming fog as frost followed. In the last rays of sun, the falling diamonds with an incandescent, iridescent glow gave the scene a winter wonderland scene worthy of any postcard. But night fell fast and turned the atmosphere cold with an aura of the sepulcher.
***
They gathered at Louie’s house instead of Mrs. C’s to give her time to rest if she chose to leave early. She hadn’t arrived yet. We didn’t know if she was coming at all. And she didn’t know a Santa Claus occupied the place he held every year in the big recliner at the head of the room. We overheard the grown-ups debating whether someone should go warn her or to leave her alone. She might be planning to stay in, after all. They agreed if she showed up, someone would take her aside first.
“Ho, ho, ho,” Santa had boomed in a deep a voice when he arrived, “Felíz navidad.” He held his arms out as if waiting for a group hug and then went over to what he used to call his “throne” and asked the kids to line up. Shock froze everyone but the innocent children who flocked to his side and then stood sniffing, inhaling the aromas they associated with Santa and Christmas.
The grown-ups mumbled about the coincidence that this volunteer Santa knew about Mr. C’s trademark scent, all trying to act normal with dead Santa sitting amongst us. Louie put the idea into his dad’s ear that someone had probably heard we needed Santa tonight more than ever. Whoever it was wanted to remain anonymous. We needed to play along for the kids. From one mouth to one set of ears the suggestion went around the room, and everyone relaxed, suspicions shushed under shots of celebratory whiskey.
***
“It’s none of them,” Louie hissed. “All the dads are accounted for.”
“Moms, too,” Lola added.
“What about primos, extended family, or friends of friends we might not know?” asked Charlie.
That had to be it, we all agreed. This Santa under the mask was just some kind soul who stepped in when they found out we needed help. Surely, it couldn’t be Mr. Collier rising from the funeral home to play Santa one last time. Just then, we caught his attention somehow because he looked up from little Gloria on his lap and winked.
“It’s him,” blurted Lola as she rushed to hide behind Jordan.
We stared at him from a distance, we couldn’t help it, and he stared right back with these peaceful eyes and this expression like the saints and angels wore in pictures. He looked like that sometimes when he looked at Mrs. C. Adoring—that’s the word I used to think when I saw him looking at his esposa. All kinds of deep emotions melded in his expression. I used to marvel. No one I knew before him looked at another person like he did. I didn’t dare tell the others my thoughts. But the comfortable strangeness of the situation gave me the willies.
“Those are his eyes under that mask,” Louis breathed.
“Mind reader,” I whispered.
“It can’t be—” Jordan started.
“Don’t go there,” Charlie whispered.
We backed off into the kitchen, but close enough to the doorway to peek from as we discussed things we never thought possible.
Jordan repeated, “Isn’t not him, right?”
“Did the séance work?” Louis asked. “I feel this, I don’t know, this sense that this is
some kind of trick, but at the same time, I’ve never met a person except Mr. C who holds everyone’s attention like that.”
“I’m not sure I could describe it any better, but I feel it too,” I said. The others agreed.
“What do we do, though? It’s not like he’s doing anything Mr. Collier didn’t do when he was alive. He’s listening to the kids’ wishlists, taking pictures with everyone, passing out gifts,” said Lola.
“And eating and drinking like he’s starving,” Charlie added.
“Three days without food from being dead will do that, I’m sure,” Lola blurted.
Jordon added, “Three days, resurrection, you guys don’t think…”
“Overthinking. That’s what we’re all doing here. Get a grip,” I shook Lola’s arm. “It’s gotta be a family friend.”
“Prove it then,” Louie challenged. “We follow when he leaves and find out for ourselves.”
“Get ready,” I said. “He’s bound to get going pretty soon. Snacks are about gone, and he’s about done with presents. He’ll go to the bathroom any minute, like he always does or did, whatever, and we’ll sneak outside.”
Sure, enough. Within the hour, Santa “ho, ho, hoed” his way out of Louis’s, a bit high on eggnog laced with whiskey, and we followed him. Straight to his house, where he walked right through his front door. Not an open door, mind you, the closed door of the home he shared with
his wife.
I heard Charlie inhale and slammed my palm over her mouth in time. Frozen for only a moment, we all pulled one another and ran until we stopped a block up in a dark callejón with a streetlight nearby.
“Oh my heavens, what did we see?”
“We saw a corpse, a fuc—”
“Don’t you dare!”
“A fricking, fracking, frolicking corpse. The freaking séance worked.”
***
Christmas morning dawned brilliant white with new snowfall overnight. I awoke and remembered the night before. We didn’t tell anyone—who’d believe us? Surely, we’d seen a ghost. No one else can walk through doors. If our séance had brought our dead Santa back for a night, again, who’d believe us? Or if he came on his own, or because he heard his wife say she couldn’t live without him, I didn’t know. I knew only what I’d seen with my own eyes.
I wrapped my new robe around me and slid into my chopos nuevos to walk to the front door. I opened it and then the screen door. Diamonds glittered from every pristine, white surface the sunshine touched. The crisp air filled my lungs at the same time someone else’s lungs let out with a blood-curdling scream.
“Mrs. C is dead,” shouted her friend Raquel, who’d come by to check on the widow. “Está muerta, Señora C,” went from house to house down the block from vecinos on their front porches until the whole neighborhood knew. Santa Claus had come back for Mrs. Claus. Everyone had heard her say she didn’t want to go on without her lifelong love. The heavens heard, too. It was a Christmas miracle, they said.
We Madrinas knew it was. Our little gang rejoiced at their reunion. It was time to teach the niños about death, and resurrection, and the whole shebang that made up the cycle of life, including the uncertainties.
- Santa’s Dead! - December 25, 2025
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