When Santa Wore Blue

by Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy

"One of our family traditions is to collect special ornaments as keepsakes. One of my first ornaments was also my first doll, gifted to me by my grandmother. The star dates back to my dad's childhood in the 1940's."

He wore a blue mailman’s uniform, not the classic red suit and fur-trimmed hat but my

Uncle Roy filled the shoes of Santa Claus as well as anyone I’ve ever known. In 1972, he made one little girl’s Christmas both bright and memorable with two simple actions, both inspired by love. And because of him, that long-ago Christmas set the scene for some of my favorite holiday memories.

I grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, a weary old river town where the short-lived Pony Express made history and where infamous outlaw Jesse James met his end. St. Joe sits on the banks of the Missouri River and is just enough north of Kansas City to retain a sense of small-town life.

Until the age of ten, my world was located within the boundaries of our neighborhood. We lived around the corner from the hospital where I was born and near enough to the Goetz Brewery to hear the whistles the signaled the beginning or end of a shift. If the wind were right, we could inhale the aroma of cooking hops on the way to becoming beer.

But the beef packing plant where my dad worked before and after his Army service closed and so our family moved so he could begin a new job as a USDA poultry inspector. That move took us from one end of Missouri to the other, putting me in a new school, a very small

town, and a different way of life. My large family had anchored me to life and now they were

several hundred miles away.

Christmas had always been a multi-generational event held at our house, an old brick

Victorian house. We had a big dinner, Santa never failed to deliver, and family gathered.

In 1972, our family lived in a small mobile home and at that time my dad didn’t plan to stay in Neosho. I wrote letters to my cousins and we often recorded messages on cassettes,

mailing those back and forth as well. I struggled to fit into a new school where my maxi-dresses and beaded headbands were the oddity, not the norm.

But my parents decided we would go home for Christmas, to Granny’s house. While I loved that idea, there was one small problem. Old-fashioned to the core, raised by a strict English

born father who’d served in Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s Royal Navy and a midwife who was

the daughter of an Irishman, Granny didn’t put up a Christmas tree. She had when her three boys were small, inspired and cajoled by her German husband. I craved a tree, but my parents said there just wouldn’t be one and to get over it.

I said I would but of course I didn’t. And when we arrived at Granny’s late at night just a few days before the holiday, there was no tree in the window. With a heavy heart, I trudged

upstairs to what had once been my father and uncle’s bedroom to sleep and found a Douglas fir propped against the wall.

I hooted and hollered and laughed with joy, hugging Granny, and thanking her.

“I didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said. “That’s your Uncle Roy’s doing – he

said you kids had to have a tree, so he brought it.”

"On my Granny's last Christmas, she taught me to waltz with our tree that year, a Douglas fir much like the one in my story, in the background."

It wasn’t the prettiest tree. That close to Christmas I suspect it had been passed over many times. It wasn’t very tall or straight. Some of the branches were sparse but it was a genuine Christmas tree, and it wafted the scent of fresh pine into the bedroom.

Our ornaments and lights were in Neosho, decorating the tree there so we managed to come up with a string or two of old lights along with some ornaments bought at the dime store downtown. Two days before Christmas we decorated the tree and it was, at that time, the loveliest tree we’d ever had, bright with dreams realized and sparkling with love.

The tree was the first of two things my uncle did for me that year.

The second helped set me on my path to becoming a writer.

That December had been cold and snowy in my hometown. Granny hadn’t had a chance to head downtown to shop so she asked my uncle if he would do her holiday gift buying. So, in

between his mail route, which he walked daily in all weathers, delivering a soup bone each week to Aunt Sophie and cigarettes to Uncle Clare, Uncle Roy went shopping.

Granny’s standard gifts were an article of clothing, a dress or pretty blouse, or maybe a coat plus a coloring book and a new box of crayons. That year, there was much more and one of the items for me was a paperback Merriam-Webster dictionary. I was delighted and when once again I went to thank Granny, she shook her head.

“Don’t thank me,” she told me. “Your uncle picked that out. He said he could stretch a dollar farther than me.”

At that young age, I already dreamed of becoming a writer. The previous year a small poem I’d written titled “Olden Days” had been published on the Saturday kids page of the local

newspaper along with other poems, brief stories, and drawings from local children. I’d wanted a dictionary, but I’d told no one – not even old St. Nick.

As a book geek in the making would, I carried that small dictionary with me everywhere. I took it to school and read it – the dictionary – in my spare moments. I pored over it, cover to

cover, delighting in gaining knowledge about words, opening new pathways, and learning about a wider world.

A few years later, my other grandmother bought me a college dictionary for a junior high

student, and I embraced that gift as well.

But the wonder is that my uncle knew my heart so well. He somehow divined that I wanted to write, that somewhere beneath my waist-length hair and giggles a writer lurked, waiting to be nurtured into being.

My uncle died less than two years later at the age of fifty-two. He didn’t live to see my early bylines but I like to believe that somewhere, wherever the essence of his spirit remains, he

knows that Christmas, between the tree I never expected and the dictionary I needed to feed my writer’s soul, ranks among the best of my life.

Love is the message of the holiday. In my two latest Christmas themed reads, family and

love are foremost. I’m giving away an eBook copy of the winner’s choice of either The Scarred Santa or Homeward Bound Hearts. To enter, just leave a comment about one of your favorite Christmas gifts or memories.

Raised in the old river town of St. Joseph, Missouri, Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy began writing at an early age. Her first publication, a poem on a children’s page in the local newspaper, came at the age of nine. She wrote her “first” novel in the back of her binder in the fifth grade. Her family later relocated to Southwest Missouri, in the Ozark region, where she graduated with degrees from both Crowder College and Missouri Southern State University. She edited and wrote features for the campus newspaper and literary magazine at Crowder. Her work appeared in the campus magazine at MSSU. She spent almost a decade working in broadcast radio, married and had three children, has written for area and regional publications, been a substitute teacher, and editor of two local newspapers for Gatehouse Media/Gannett. Her first novel was accepted for publication in 2010 and she has published more than fifty novels with publishers including The Wild Rose Press, World Castle Publishing, and Evernight Publishing. Widowed in 2019, her three children are grown and Lee Ann is focused on her writing career. She has taught junior high level students at her parish, English as a second language, and occasionally professionally edits.