Santa Claus arrives with the first hard freeze, and in the valley above Lunn the day is kept as carefully as a harvest. Brigit Hale, who has baked for the village for forty winters, hangs a wreath on her door the morning the millpond will bear a skater, and by the end of that week every house on the green has lights along its eaves. I came to Lunn on the first of December to watch him arrive, and I kept notes until Christmas morning.
For the first ten days he is felt more than seen. Plates of walnut cookies left on hearths are empty by dawn. Snow melts off certain roofs in a neat oval the size of a hearth rug, and the children report a laugh somewhere over the stove, deep and round and very pleased with itself. By the second week he is seen: a stout, white-bearded man in a cranberry velvet coat with white fur at the cuffs, five foot nine and nearly as wide, with cheeks the color of ripe apples and a gold-buckled belt. He waves at everyone on the green, the dogs included. In four sightings I never saw him hurry, and I never saw him late.
No one in Lunn sells anything on the twenty-third. The bakers, the candlemakers and the cheese-wives all keep back their best and carry it to a plate by their own hearths, and the last cookie on every plate is his. A neighbor who forgets is not scolded; someone hands over a cookie for the plate. Walnut is the practical matter, because he will eat nothing else along the route, so the whole valley bakes Brigit's recipe. She insists he visits every house in the valley, and the next valley too, in a single night. I cannot check this, having slept through the twenty-fourth in two different winters, but the milk glasses nine miles on in Kolm were as empty as hers.
Between my first winter and my third, the village widened every flue to thirty inches, after the chimney sweep, Bo Strand, held a tape against the coat on its peg and announced that the old flues had been an insult. Santa has not been stuck since. He has also started leaving a small pile of tangerines on each sill, which the children have not stopped discussing. On Christmas morning I weighed his sack, which a farmer's boy had propped against the gate. It weighed forty-one pounds. By evening, emptied, it weighed forty-one pounds.
- Classification
- Winter hearth-visiting humanoid
- Habitat
- Village chimneys, snowy rooftops, warm kitchens
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5 ft 9 in, nearly as wide as tall
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Snowbound villages of the north
- Binomial
- Gerulus focalis
- Diet
- Walnut cookies, milk, tangerines
- Temperament
- Jolly, generous, unhurried