Grandparent Project Example #2

Yes, Marilyn and Derrell, There is a Santa Claus
-For Marilyn and Derrell, who are wonderful neighbors

Well over 100 years ago – December of 1897, to be exact – a little girl wrote a letter to the now defunct New York Sun, inquiring whether or not Santa Claus was real:
Dear Editor-
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth,
is there a Santa Claus?
-Virginia O’Hanlon

Fortunately, The Sun reported the truth that Santa Claus is in fact real. And though The Sun is no longer around, today little Virginia could have asked Marilyn and Derrell Morgan her question and received the same answer, for their Christmases are proof. Take their first Christmas together as a married couple in 1969. It was a hectic year for them. They had begun training to run an Artic Circle franchise on Marilyn’s birthday, December 11, and worked for 12 hours a day learning the ins and outs of the new business they had bought so that Derrell could get out of the car business.
This left precious little time for shopping. Fortunately, Santa Claus (in the form of their sisters) saved the day. Derrell and Marilyn gave their sisters some money and the sisters did their shopping. And, as usual, Santa hit a homerun: Marilyn said they liked the gifts from one another they “hadn’t chosen.”
Their sisters that year were just one of the various forms Santa Claus took throughout their lives. They always had good Christmases as children. Marilyn described her childhood home, on Vine Street, as a “winter wonderland.” She recounted how their large property was lined with trees, and remembered that around Christmas time, a man who worked for her father at the gravel pit – Henry, his name was – would come down to their home with a loaf of bread his wife had baked. He arrived atop his horse, pulling a sleigh, and with his long beard reminded them of Santa Claus. He took Marilyn’s family for a sleigh ride each year, and that remains one of her most cherished Christmas memories.
There were other wonderful things about Marilyn’s childhood Christmases, too. She said that her favorite thing as a girl was coming out and seeing all the presents arranged in the room where they kept the tree. Christmas day meant the family would come over, “13 or 14 of us,” she said. “Not large, but large enough. I came from quite a good family.” She recalled winters spent skating on the pond as well as the year her brother got a toboggan. The best gift she received as a girl was a ballerina. Christmas evenings were spent with her cousins at her house, playing, while the grown-ups went next door to her aunt and uncle’s for a glass of wine. “We didn’t tear the house apart, or anything,” she said. “You know, we just played with whatever Santa brought us.”
Derrell, too, had a beloved Santa in his childhood, his Uncle Barney. Derrell’s favorite Christmas as a young boy was the one when his Uncle Barney gave him a stack of model airplanes. This began a lifetime love of airplanes for the self-described “airplane fanatic” who nearly got his pilot’s license and served his country in World War II by repairing damaged planes. In fact, it seemed that Derrell got a model airplane every year. “And I loved every one of them,” he said. It is a love that persists to this day, and probably is due in part to the love Uncle Barney showed Derrell that Christmas, as well as on many other occasions.
For while Uncle Barney was there for Derrell that best Christmas, he was also there on one of the worst ones, following the divorce of Derrell’s parents. “Divorces are hard on families,” Derrell said. “You don’t want to remember them sometimes, but you do... There’s a lot of things in life you just don’t care to remember.”
While Derrell might still reluctantly remember how hard it was to have his parents split up and his mother depressed, he gratefully remembers Uncle Barney bringing him gifts and doing what he could to make that Christmas a good one.
That wasn’t the only hard Christmas Derrell had to make the best of, either. He had to spend three Christmases away from his family while serving his country during World War II. He spent two Christmases in San Francisco, and one in Norman, Oklahoma. He said it was often lonely in his apartment during these times, and that he “shed a lot of tears in a lot of different places. You just don’t go through something like that with a smile on your face.” However, Derrell dealt with it with pride and dignity, as he has any time he has faced a difficulty, and it has made him appreciate the good Christmases he’s had since even more.
One Christmas that stood out after that hard time as especially wonderful was their first Christmas with Nicky. Marilyn said they lived in “a neat-looking apartment – The Willows,” and were able to have at thirty-foot tall Christmas tree. She remembered how Nicky was almost a year old at that point, and on Christmas Eve, Derrell lay on the bed with her and read her “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” – a tradition they have continued the rest of their lives, and it hasn’t mattered who the audience was – children, grandchildren, or pets.
Marilyn said, “At Christmas, you remember what your kids were like when they were little.” And like most of us, the Morgans see Christmas as a measuring stick that marks how their children and their lives changed from year to year. “It is mostly reflected in the presents they wanted,” she said. She recalled the year Nicky only wanted books, for example.
Certain gifts have also become a part of the traditions they celebrate each year as Marilyn and Derrell take up Santa’s mantel. For example, Derrell always gives his grandson George something special each year. One year, as George was moving up the ranks as a Boy Scout, Derrell gave him his old pocketknife. This was particularly meaningful because it was the same knife Derrell’s grandfather gave to him. He also gives George a plane every year – one he either buys or builds – and they also recalled the year he gave George a train similar to the one he gave George’s mother when she was little.
Marilyn does the same, giving the kids things that were hers, or crocheting them little things. It’s these kinds of traditions that help make Christmas special for the Morgans. Which, of course, brings us back to Santa Claus.
Nicky, Marilyn recalled, was always up early on Christmas morning, checking to see what Santa brought. “Sammy was harder to wake, so we had to stall Nicky,” she said – a problem compounded by the fact Sammy wouldn’t come out until her hair was perfect (even as a four year old). They recalled the big thrill of one year giving the girls a table Derrell had made, painted with little lions by Marilyn. When Nicky was three, Marilyn bought her many different lions, and bought her lion ornaments whenever she could. Both Marilyn and Derrell recalled their girls’ childhood Christmases fondly, and Derrell remarked that they kept quite a few things around that held memories for them, and that “you get a tear in your eye when you remember all this.”
These tears and these memories of love and generosity and devotion are as wonderful as Santa himself, and prove his existence. To again quote from The Sun’s response to little Virginia,
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and
generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to
your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if
there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginia.
There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable
this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The
eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished…

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years
from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will
continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

And it is my hope that these memories will continue to make glad the hearts of the Morgans, and that they can feel each other’s love and the Christmas spirit for many, many years to come.