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Visit better help. Dotcom Tiao. OK, everybody ready? Ready? Lights, camera, Christmas. Oh, well, my parents say that I can't have a dog.

This is preschool age 11.

So I want to like another animal that, like, is like fuzzy and it like walks around.

You know, I'm not really a pet sort of person. I think she knew she couldn't get a dog. Basically, this is Linda.

Her mom is a reporter, WBC public radio station. That's her home.

So a guinea pig was, I think, something she felt she could actually ask for.

You know, this is second place. I guess it's still fuzzy walks around and his husband is Mexican and the kids lived in Mexico when they were smaller. So they don't write to Santa to ask for what they want. The Mexican tradition at Christmas is to write to the Three Kings.

So she wrote this this letter to the Three Kings. And do you want me to read it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could you read it? All right. It says Korydallos Reyes, Magos is better than women. She says, like the Three Kings. I hope you're doing very well.

I hope you're well. I thought that was a nice touch. That is a nice touch.

Yeah. It's the annual stop in San Pedro to heal the India.

She says this year I was thinking of asking for a guinea pig. And then she writes, she has like an arrow. She's like it's like an afterthought.

She wrote a real one. They were.

Then she goes on and asks for some other things. But what she really wanted and she has this whole list of things.

But honestly, I don't ever remember her talking about anything else except the guinea pig.

So that was a big morning. This was two years ago, Peracha was just nine, the three Kings did, in fact, bring her guinea pig and of course, she was thrilled.

She named it one of the guinea pig was like in her arms and it was running around her bed and she was just like in love.

Well, that lasted about an hour. Before, you know, I just noticed she was scratching her forearms a lot and she said that they're like hives, I was like allergic to like anything.

She was completely scared that I would give the guinea pig away immediately. And I think her one goal was to, like, keep the guinea pig. So she definitely did not complain about the hives.

They were big red blotches the size of silver dollars. Paraquat, however, would not be deterred. Like she still held that she tried for a while.

I was like, maybe if you cover yourself up.

So, you know, what she started doing was she would put on this full face mask that she usually used, like on the coldest days in Chicago. It was black. All you could see were her eyes when she showed me a photo of the full get up. You can see it on our website. She basically looks like a Zapatista rebel.

She's got a long sleeved shirt. She's got her winter gloves on. And in the winter gloves is like the little guinea pig peeking out from her. Her hands me my paper towels stick out several inches from the gloves so that there's absolutely no gap between her long sleeved shirt and the gloves.

She looks like like a young terrorist with a cute guinea pig. With a guinea pig. Exactly. It looks like she's taken the guinea pig hostage or something.

Peracha is devoted to going to still lets it run around the room, make sure it's fed. In third grade.

She had a photo of winter that she pasted onto a little hand drawn cardboard frame with a little cardboard wig that she would prop up on her desk at the beginning of every school day facing her.

But it is it just feels a little weird because she can't pick it up or hold it or even really petted.

So it's kind of like all the things, all the reasons you'd want a guinea pig.

She can't have those.

Either parent wants to do this time of year, make a nice Christmas for their kids. Linda does not even like pets, isn't crazy about having animals in the house. But the three kings brought a guinea pig.

The Three Kings is they do test. They have tested me, they test parents, I think, and not just parents. Linda asked Paraquat on tape Did the Three Kings know she was allergic when they brought her that gift? Precatory, she had never even considered the question, but aren't they supposed to be savu like wisemen? Like if they did know that you were going to be allergic to Luna, why do you think they still brought her for you?

Although they would probably also know that I would love her even if I did have allergies and the three wise men made the right call today on my radio program this Christmas holiday weekend, we have stories of parents and others trying to make the holiday incredible for the people that they love, going to great and ridiculous lengths involving live animals, a deer, a sled, ancient reindeer bones which bleed only sometimes to the most magical Christmases.

WBC, Chicago.

It's this American life. Stay with us.

At one Christmas in 3-D, we all learn at some point that our parents make mistakes and that can even and I know this will be a shock, make them when they are trying their hardest at Christmas.

Migrants tells the story a quick warning for people listening with young children. This is a story about one family's Santa Claus traditions, which may not be the same as yours. Also, I should say, today's show is a rerun from a few years back. So everybody who you're hearing in the story is just a bit older now.

Anyway, here's my my friend Colin Mutchler is 36, and to this day he talks about his Christmases as a kid. That's because his parents were determined to make the magic of Christmas come alive for their three kids, Colin, Adam and Erica. But they went further than any parents. I know. They wanted it to be real. Really real. This wasn't an airbrushed ho ho ho Christmas, but a darker, grittier one like that. One year when Colin was seven and his dad sent him to the garage for some firewood.

And I heard some bells and it kind of freaked me out. And so I like ran inside. I was like, oh, my God, you guys like I swear I heard some bells and my mom and my dad was like, no way, really, you know?

And so I went we went back slowly outside and basically we found this older man, Collins.

Younger brother Adam was there, too. This man had fallen in the backyard and slipped on the ice. But I was so young that it was like, who was this crazy man in our backyard? And I sort of. Are you OK? Are you OK? And they brought him inside.

He was wearing a very old, like, rundown weather jacket. He said he had like Winburn. And, you know, could you dim the lights? I've got snow blindness, you know, from the time of the North Pole. And there's a certain amount of glare that I can't deal with. So we dim the lights. He talked in a very soft spoken, you know, not not a whisper, but where he talked quietly enough at the whole room was silent and you had to kind of lean in.

And it was that sort of weird, intimate, sort of you're just like immersed in whatever he was saying.

And he basically said, you know, I'm Kris Kringle.

Adam was four, and he says this is his earliest memory of Christmas, all the Mutchler kids have memories like this, probably because they talked about it all the time when they were little, Colin and Adam didn't think there was just one Santa Claus living at the North Pole.

The Mutchler family had their own mythology with its own logic.

There wasn't just one Santa, but a network of Santas, all working together as Christmas helpers.

Kris Kringle was just one of them, a working man, Santa. And just like a guy on a night shift from hell, he was exhausted. We kind of were like almost helping him. The dynamic was such that it was like he was in a rough place and we were like trying to help him. And so I think we talked with him for a bit and then, you know, put him on his way. Visitors like Chris appeared every couple of years or so in the band of Woods dividing their house in Harrington Park, New Jersey, from a nearby golf course.

Never the same guy, never in exactly the same place. They'd be disheveled, bearded and hoarse voiced, abandoned by their skittish and surprisingly losable reindeer, and searching for the mutchler whose home address they never quite figured out.

The Mutchler also had a family elf, Jepko, who the kids never saw, but who apparently lived in the attic for a few weeks before Christmas.

The kids would hear noises coming from upstairs, hammering, walking, and when Christmas was over, they'd find wood scraps in the attic from the gifts he'd made for them.

Proof the Jepko had been there for both. Their father and grandfather grew up with Jepko. Their grandfather especially loved to tell scary stories about how mean Jepko could be. And so every Christmas, the family spent hours combing over the details of Jepko and their visitors, comparing them to previous Christmases, anticipating the next. When you ask the Mutchler kids which Christmas visitor was the one who outed the rest, there's no question. Christmas Eve, 1984. Colin was eight.

Adam was five. Erica was two. The family was out taking their usual walk. And on this night, they went down to the golf course. It was foggy and dark. Here's Adam.

And then in the distance, we see this silhouette of a shadow scampering from my tree to tree and like it's a golf course, it's an open wide spaces and looking like it doesn't they don't want us to know that they're there.

And my dad says, look, let's go find out who that is.

And so we start walking faster, try to catch up with this guy. When we come upon him, he's in this, you know, very worn dirty Santa Claus suit.

That's kind of this greenish brown tent. And he introduces himself as Claus Hoffer. And he's one of many sort of the Santa Claus incarnations and sort of, you know, he goes into a full explanation, but he definitely sort of explains that.

I think we mentioned that, you know, Kris Kringle and like, oh, yeah, I know Kris. Clough's had a Wawn sack and began pulling out presents, but the presents were very odd.

There was vegetables ahead of broccoli, you know, an onion. And then he also, I think, gave us some bones.

And that sort of comes to the most important thing is he broke out one bone in particular, and he said this is one of the bones from the, you know, the original Rudolph. You know, I use it to call the reindeer. Again, here's Colin and their sister Erica. And literally when he broke out bones and started blowing on them, we were like, oh, my God, you know, this is crazy.

Made no noise. We couldn't hear it, but he said it was a pitch that only the reindeer could hear. And when he talked about Rudolph, it wasn't like Rudolph the red nosed reindeer.

It was like he kind of was honoring the history of Rudolph as like some, you know, reindeer that that they all honored.

And the fact that he had some of these bones of Rudolph and was using them to call to the reindeer, just it made sense to us, you know, like it was like that makes sense.

The details were perfectly calibrated as only people who know you as well as your parents can get just right. Here's Adam.

And that's when it got kind of scary. He offered. All the kids, and he said, I can only invite the kids, but. Do you guys want to come on there on the sly? Do you want to come to the North Pole with me? And we just sat there, you know, frozen.

Wow. I could say yes. The answer is no. The truth is like some old man that you just met in the dark golf course on Christmas Eve actually asks me and my brother or my sister if we want to go with him somewhere that we have no idea.

While that might be the coolest thing of all time, it might also be like the end of life as I know it. Again, Erica, who remember, was two at the time, and I remember screaming and not wanting to go.

I was just terrified actually that invitation to the North Pole, that never happened, at least not the way they remember it.

Oh, wow. Well, this is a recording from that Christmas Eve in 1984. Erica, Adam and Colin had just come back from meeting close on the recording. The kids seem happy and hopped up on adrenaline. They talk about clouds, but in the entire recording, never mentioned any invitation to the North Pole. What you hear instead is the grandfather suggesting how would you like it if he had asked you take the North Pole, then their father, Glen, jumps in, look good and he will take you.

I have a feeling he would be willing to take somebody there. Behold the power of suggestion.

That's how it seemed like a lot of it worked.

The Mutchler parents making suggestions and adding details and then retelling it all year after year. Christmas was a big topic of conversation, and the Mutchler parents encouraged their kids with the most exciting versions of what happened on those nights to the point where the stories gained an unstoppable momentum.

As the Mutchler kids got older things, as they do changed, each of the kids dealt with it differently.

Both Colin and Erica say they knew at a certain point to not talk about Jacko and the others to people outside their closest circles.

But Adam didn't get that at all. Adam loved to tell a good story. He couldn't not tell this one.

And he believed wholeheartedly in his experiences even as a teenager in public school in New Jersey. And it had consequences when Adam was in fifth grade. He defended his stories about class and Chris and the rest in front of his whole class.

It got so confrontational with Adam telling the whole group how wrong they were that the teacher ended up calling Adam's parents, telling them it had almost started a fight and asking them to please tell Adam to stop talking about it.

Adam remembers many arguments like this well into middle school.

People would call him an idiot or weird and he would insist that these events were true. He was there. It was real. You guys are crazy, not me.

The next year, sixth grade, Adam was at his grandparents house at Christmas time when his great aunt Blanche made some offhanded comment about which uncle played what part, what year back when they were kids. Adam walked himself through the logic of what she was saying, and he knew right then that his parents had lied to him, not only did they lie to me.

It was, you know, 13 years old. You know, I had to deal with that is like a social thing that I had done, I had defended myself and told these stories in front of lots of lots of people.

And to know that my parents were sort of responsible for like allowing me to perpetuate something that, like, made me a liar and like a laughingstock.

You were embarrassed.

I was very embarrassed and felt betrayed and was angry about it for years. One year he came home from college and accused his parents for being the reason he couldn't trust anyone enough to have a serious girlfriend, not too different from the sorts of speeches lots of kids make to their parents at that age, except it was about Santa. Even he admits it was pretty extreme.

So this one thing made you feel like you couldn't trust your parents even though they were trustworthy parents?

Well, it was it was the it was the for me, it was the intricacy and the planning of like you spent seven years or ten years perpetrating a lie that was so deep and complex, like whether it was hiring people, vintage suits, you know, hunting people through through the through the golf course and through the woods, like, what are you insane?

Like, this is diabolical for me.

There was a big breakdown in, you know, the way I trusted people in my life that I actually like. I think it carried on into my adult life. And even to this day, I don't 100 percent trust anyone anymore.

Do you feel like it made you cynical? A little bit, yeah, a little bit. Adams, 33, and can laugh about most of the snow, he sees what was great about what his parents did at Christmas, but he won't be doing anything like it, he says, when he has his own kids. And because of the way he reacted as a teenager, these childhood Christmases are still a touchy subject in his family when they talk about it.

Everybody's careful to keep things upbeat.

I wondered if the parents had any regrets for how they handled it, so I went to meet them.

Much laws are, you know, my two boy, Glenn and Lori Mutchler live on a beautiful, quiet street. It's the kind of place where deer wander through the yard.

A giant wreath hangs off the top of the mutchler beige clapboard house. Christmas lights twinkle inside and outside. We sit in the living room where the mantle has been turned into an altar crowded with an assortment of spiritual icons, Buddhas, Vishnu, a ceramic busts of Jesus and two different portraits of Jerry Garcia.

I was a hippie and did the whole nine yards, Glenn told me on the West Coast in the 70s, though he doesn't like the word hippie things, that's come to connote laziness and he's anything but. And we started talking about the elaborate Christmases the Mutchler used to have for their kids. And I asked Laurie, how did you get roped into all of this?

Well, I as we were talking about this, I'm going to tell you, this man that I roped in, I don't know if you caught that, but he called me a cynic.

You know, I'm not a cynic. We're just so excited about how you pulled this off.

There is no pulling off. Something happened. People had an experience and then you have this thought called somebody pulled something off. I wasn't prepared for this decades after these Christmases, Glenn was refusing to admit he had anything to do with creating them.

So, you know, the conjecture and all that stuff would really.

Undermine the magic, in fact, all the details, the as you call the mechanics or or a tuple, had you pull it off, it happened.

That's the magic and that's the secret.

We went back and forth about this for more than ten minutes. Here's my producer, Robyn, having a go at it.

It would help to know if that's just like an impossible thing for us to ask because we have some questions about how it how it works. And I just I'm wondering if we could you could make something up.

You could hypothesize, but that's that's that's you. Because the magic's too powerful and you want to.

And did they have any regrets about when their kids learn the truth? I asked Glenn and Laurie about the time that Adam fought with his fifth grade class about the Mutchler Christmas story.

Seemed like it would have been a perfect moment to come clean, they said, after the school called them. They did talk to Adam, but they didn't tell him he was wrong. They didn't tell him the truth. If anything, they encouraged him to believe the stories were real, saying I was there, you were there. Their only parental advice was the more private about it. Stop talking about it at school. The jury did come to worry that they should have handled it differently, I think for me, I.

I did really start to question whether we should be making such a big deal about it and I wanted to stop doing it. It definitely happened in my mind. I did. And and as you can tell, it's a very powerful force in our family and and it's very powerful. Yeah, he is. And I and even before this interview, it's sort of like, you know, you set up the ground rules about how we were going to have the interview.

They're going to ask us and we're not going to tell. Right.

Both Glenn and Laura say they tried to make it right for Adam. They had no idea how betrayed he felt until later. Laurie says for a while she didn't know what to do.

We talked about it a lot. We talked about. The magic and the wanting it to Adam, can you see can you can you find a place where you see where it all came from?

It all came from good. It didn't come from wine. It didn't come from tricking it. We are not bad parents because we did that.

Finally, Larry tells me this story. It's an important one for her. And before she starts, she says she knows Glen doesn't want her to tell it, but that's not going to stop her. One Christmas Eve when Adam was in junior high school, Lori went to his bedroom and I was giving him a good night kiss and hug and Merry Christmas, and he looked me straight in the eyes and he said, You got to tell me the truth.

Your son is looking you right in the eye saying, you got to tell me the truth.

Did did were those did Santa really visit us? And in the back of my mind, it was Glenn's voice going, you never tell you never tell the magic. The magic and ice spewed all this magic. And that's the magic and it's the spirit.

And I went on and on and he would not let it down. He just said, stop it.

Don't talk about that stuff. Glen talks about that stuff. You'll tell me the truth. Tell me the truth.

And I, I don't even know what I exactly said, but I did let him know that it wasn't real. And and we just cried, the two of us. And. Because then over the years, he would his when he did say later, when he said, I can't believe that that was a parenting decision that you made, that you went to that extreme. He just it just hurt him and it was so weird because Colin and Erica had taken the same wonderful experience and held it as a wonderful experience.

No matter what happened or what was real, they could hold it as a just a magical, wonderful moment. And he somehow couldn't. And it made me really sad. Glenn understands that something went wrong without him. My experience is like this with with kids, you know, you do the best you can and. Sometimes you do the right thing and maybe do the wrong thing when you thought you did the right thing. You know, there's a time when the kids are young and you experience the magic through them.

And it's just so special to be around young kids and to be in that maybe a cheat a little bit. And you sort of become you know, you're living through them. Glenn had been eager from the moment we arrived at his house to take us on a tour of Christmas past, and after our interview, Glenn and Lori head out with us for a walk. We go up the street, passed through some trees and onto the golf course. It was darker than I had imagined.

It would be fairly illuminated by the ambient orange of nearby street lights. Mist clung to the rolling expanse of grass. Then Glenda's. What he's clearly been itching to do all night gives us the play by play from his finest hour the night Hoffer came to visit. Get away, stay away. Who who is it?

And looking for the middle class and then the kids who said no much, Glenn hunches down and reenacts Class Hoffa's disappearance into the distance.

You know how he elopes along. He's happy.

Magic is Glenn's strength and his blind spot that we're all sitting there going like, oh, my God, did that really happen? It was like that. It was perfect, it was. My ignorance, she's the co-host of the culture and Politics podcast, The Source.

Coming up, typecast, typecast, you hear me as a reindeer in a Christmas pageant, the tail twitching injustice of it.

That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. Support for this American life comes from CBS all access the stand is Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world decimated by plague and embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil. The fate of mankind rests on the frail shoulders of the one hundred eight year old mother, Abigail, played by Whoopi Goldberg and a handful of survivors. Their worst nightmares are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers.

Randall Flagg, The Dark Man played by Alexander Skarsgard The Stand, a new limited series streaming now only on CBS All Access. Support for this American life comes from better help online counseling, better help offers licensed counselors who specialize in issues including depression and anxiety, as well as relationships, trauma, anger and more. You can connect privately with a counselor through text chat, phone or video calls, and you'll get help on your own time, at your own pace, and at an affordable rate for a special offer visit.

Better help dotcom longtail. That's better help dotcom sell. This American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme today show for the holidays, lights, camera, Christmas stories of people trying to throw a nice Christmas for those they love. We've arrived at Act two of our program, Act two Deer in the Footlights.

Zakani grew up on this ranch outside of a little town in Utah called Woodroffe and maybe never been to Woodruff.

It's let me tell you about it. You'll have to edit this now, because I'm going to say it. Like I always say, it's OK. You go through town, there's a church on the right, there's an old school on the left. You get down to the crossroads and there's a half assed store on one side and the post office on the other side.

That's a whole town, maybe 250 people, she says, maybe fewer.

And the basic facts of her childhood are the kinds of things that lots of little girls only read about in storybooks.

During the summer, Connie and her two sisters, they would get up, they'd have some food and they would spend the whole day, she says, on their own horses, writing far and wide together.

And when they were little, they got a baby deer, a baby deer of their very own who ended up a part of Christmas at their elementary school in a way that I think probably very rarely happens with deers and elementary schools and Christmases.

So the story that I want you to tell is I want to know how a deer ended up on the stage as part of your school's Christmas pageant when you were a kid.

And I guess you should explain how you even ended up with the deer in the first place. Do you remember when you first saw the deer? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we were all on our horses and there was a dog that had just had just had a baby. It was, I'd say maybe two or three days old. Well, we chased the doe off and took the deer, took the fawn.

Did you run off the mom hoping to get the baby? Oh yeah, you did. Yeah. Oh yeah. And brought it home. Let me tell you what, we never done it again because my dad was really pissed, just livid. He let into us like you can't believe. And what was his argument like?

What was the problem with bringing in this deer? Nature should be left to nature. Why did we want to run that deer off that mother when she was perfectly capable of raising this phone and taking care of it? Why did we what, give us the right to do with it, to take Mother Nature's course away from them?

How how big is a fan when it's that little or is it the size of a big dog I'm trying to picture? Yeah, it would be about the size of a big dog, maybe not a real big dog. And they're light. It couldn't avoid any more than I'm going to say twenty five. Thirty five pounds. And we put it on our horses, put it across the saddle and packed it back to the house. Oh we was tickled.

We really thought we'd done something good.

And so you raised it. How do you feed it.

You put a nipple, a lamb nipple on a pop bottle on the end of a pop bottle and they they suck it. And so we raised in that summer and then he Accorsi lost his spot.

Did you give it a name? Well, we called him Bambi.

Very original. OK, yeah. Are very original.

So is he a good pet? Oh, yeah, yeah, he was a lot of fun, we never had a call or anything on, he never did break delayed. We just put our hands on his what we call the weather, you know, where their neck goes right into their shoulders. And he'd walk by so we could walking damn near any place we wanted to go, he'd go. So that year, the year we got him, that was the year that they done the play.

And they took a balloon and blow it up about the size of a golf ball and put it on his nose, and he stood there with this red thing on his nose all during the play. And if I remember right, the story just more or less centered around Santa Claus being sad because he couldn't get around.

It sounds like Rudolph the red nosed reindeer where his nose is, what guides them. The light from his nose is what guides them to where they need to go. I, I think so.

I think that's what it was. Well, I can remember that the the, the hall was just crowded. Everybody knew that there was going to be in there and so everybody come to watch it. Oh really.

He was he was the star attraction of the show he brought. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. They still talk about that play. I don't think they ever did top that play. How could you.

Was he on stage for most of the show.

Always was on stage for the whole show. He probably stood there for a good two hours. So we spent the whole night standing there by the body.

He'd look out in the crowd and look everybody over, you could see his ears moving back and forth, but we we'd petty, you know, scratch him on the neck. What did he do when they applauded?

I would think that for an animal that must have been so strange, the noise that would come from that, nothing.

He stood there. He kind that's when he wiggly tail and his ears and go back and forth.

Now, your dad, who had been against bringing in a wild animal the whole time, you remember what his reaction was to the play. He I can remember him saying, you know, that it was really a nice play and he was glad that the deer had a part in it, but I remember when we when we started to brand we just Baghdad to let us castrate him and he wouldn't do it. And, you know, as a kid, I just oh, I was upset.

Why did you want your dad castrate him so he'd stay home? It's just like a dog. You take a dog and if you've got a male dog and you don't want that dog to go, I call it tramp. And all over the countryside, you castrati, we know that if dad let us castrati, we would have had him for ever. But now so he wouldn't let us castrati.

Over the next year, Bambi grew up developed antlers kind of. Your sisters like to touch the velvet on his antlers, she says, and Bambi started acting differently.

Sometimes you just wander away for days and when hunting season rolled around, the girls begged their dad to lock up Bambi somewhere on their property. But the dad said, no, that wasn't right, and they didn't ask twice, she says.

Fortunately, because it was a small town, and especially after the Christmas play, everybody in the valley there knew about Bambi.

The girls would take him into town, sometimes in a car, and people would come up to them on the street and pet him. And they took special precautions during hunting season so everybody would recognize them. We had a big red scarf on and then we had a sheep bail, which is just a little smaller than a cow bell, and we'd painted this sheep bale red. And then, of course, when fall, come late fall, we took off and.

About 10 miles away, some guy, I guess they said, I never did ever talk to the guy, but they said he drove right up to him and shouted, Oh, dear, didn't even run away.

No, no, no. He wouldn't run because he was desensitized. You know, he wasn't afraid of people. When the deer was killed, what did your dad say? Just told us that that's just the way it was and that's what we got for bringing him home. He told us they and he said that's what happens when you mess with Mother Nature, huh? So I guess, you know, if there's a moral to the story, if you don't, you don't mess with something that's wild.

You just leave it be a really.

Do you think your dad was right?

I think he was right at the time. I didn't. But looking back on it now. I'm still pissed at that guy, that shoddy. Because you're sure that he knew him? Oh, sure he did. He had to he'd had to have known well, in fact, I heard that he did that, that he knew. I hope you enjoyed evening the son of a bitch. You better edit that out. Now, I'd like to leave that in.

Is that OK?

That's fine. OK. No, that's fine. I just don't understand how he could shoot him knowing that he was your pet, like he knew you guys, right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I thinking back, I would imagine he'd probably put 19 years old. Smart ass teenagers, what he was. I can remember we cried, mother cried, and Dad was pissed, he thought that was pretty, pretty low for somebody to do that to an animal, especially when he knew that it was ours.

Did you blame yourselves? Yes, I did. Yes. The end result would have probably been the same, but he probably would have lived, he'd probably get another year or two, you know, before he'd get shot.

You mean if you left him with his mom? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's funny, I thought we were going to have a sweet little sentimental Christmas story here, but now I feel so sad. What yeah, it did end up said, you know, if I was you and you was doing a story, I think maybe I'd kind of take a little liberty with it and not burden kids with what happened to me. Really.

Well, how would you want it to end? All like it was just a really nice play. And not tell anything that happens afterwards. Yeah, yeah. But then if you do that version of the story, then in the argument between you guys and your dad, you win because everything works out happily ever after.

Well, I think at Christmas time, maybe we should win. All right, well, let's let's let's do take two. So after the play, what happened to the deer? Oh, we took him home.

The play was always put on on Christmas Eve. So we went home because it would have been like 10 o'clock. And, of course, Santa Claus was going to come and we was all excited. And so in this version of the story, you guys live happily ever after, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. And then I vividly remember the next morning after we asked if we could bring him in and that they mother and dad both said yes.

So we put a lot of Christmas bows on him and we let him stay in the house until he wandered into mother's plants. And then he had to go back to. Contracts, talking to me from the ranch where she grew up outside Woodroffe, Utah. That interview was recorded back in 2012. I am really sad to say right here that Connie Rex died last year. Three replacement cause, so we entered a show about people who go above and beyond to make Christmas special with the man who does that more than anybody, the gift giving is person there is.

He operates on a global scale.

I'm talking, of course, about Santa Claus. He is a man who wants for nothing. That is a dozen things change for him, Jonathan Goldstein explains. Each life was a lonely tumble down a cold, dark chimney falling, falling, then blackness. These were Santurce thoughts as he prepared Snicker Doodles in the kitchen, in the other room, the elves performed Christmas tunes and Doce dode carefully.

He carried the tray of sweets into the living room.

His wife Martha had been dead five years now and he was alone, alone in a house full of elves. Jesus had dignity apostle's.

All he had was high blood pressure and a communal toilet the size of a cereal bowl.

He sat down on the couch and watch the elves dance to Feliz Navidad.

Jingles broke from the group of dancing elves and approached him. You're killing yourself with the doodles, Jingle said, slamming down his Gin Rickey. And lately he'd been on Santurce case to stop overeating, to get out of the house and to get himself a girlfriend. Glinda, the good Witch of the North, lived only a few miles away and had just been left by her boyfriend, a walrus hunter who looked somewhat like a walrus himself. Glenda's into the Wilford Brimley type, said Gingles.

So you've totally got a chance, glynda, said Santa. But she's so sparkly. I miss Martha. Santa said quietly he knew this was true, though not the entire truth there was missing, of course, but there was also fear. Look, I miss Martha, too, said Gingles, but it's time to move on. She was the only gal for me, said Santa. Jingles put his tiny hand on Santurce knee, to be Frank, Gengel said, I always thought your relationship a little narcissistic.

Mrs. Claus was like your twin, but with bosoms. Did you plan your outfits together?

We just had the same taste, Santa sobbed. Jingle Bell Rock started up on the squeezebox, and Santa took that as his cue to head to bed, he never could stand rock and roll Christmas songs. He liked Christmas songs and he liked rock and roll. He just didn't like them together.

Martha had felt the exact same way on their first year anniversary. Martha had presented him with a pen, the fancy kind that came in a box oh, for the love of St. Nicholas.

Santa had said, what good is a pen? I'll just end up losing it. Save your money and buy yourself something nice or let me buy for you. That would make me most happy of all. For a man famous for his giving, Santa was terrible at receiving. Martha took the pen back and apologized. And that was the end of the gift. After she had died and Santa was cleaning out her stuff in a jewelry box filled with the old love letters he'd sent during their courtship, he found the pen.

He clutched it on the edge of the bed and wept. Gingles took it upon himself to just go ahead and arrange a date for Santa, unbidden, Glenda's expecting you at 8:00, said Gingles, sidling up to him in the reindeer stable one morning.

And do me a favor, trim your whiskers and put on your Spanx. As instructed, Santa appeared at Glenda's doorstep that evening, a paper bag of roasted chestnuts in his hand. Come on in, Mr Claus, said Glynda with a sweep of her arm.

She was dressed all in white, and the house smelled of fresh gingerbread. Santa observed with a smile that there were several magic wands, gold and sparkly in the umbrella rack. For most of the evening, they sat by the hearse and made clumsy conversation about the loneliness of living at the North Pole, mostly unless I absolutely have to. I don't even bother going outside, said Glynda. And when the cable goes out, it is out, said Santa.

After a bit of silence, Glynda looked at him a smile across her face. Is this a good conversation? She asked. Santa laughed and assured her it was they played cribbage, drank eggnog and watched the snow outside the window fall and in the vestibule before leaving, Glynda placed her hand on Santa's shoulder and kissed him right beneath his eye. As she did, Santa felt as though his chest was a chimney and inside a sleeping dove was stirring away.

They made a date for the following weekend, and just before he left, Glynda gave him a container of cranberry mini muffins she'd baked. Santa told her he could not accept such a gift, at which point she thrust it into his chest with surprising force. Take it, she said.

On the sleigh ride home, Santa realized with mixed feelings that he'd hardly thought of Martha the whole night.

When he showed up the following Saturday, glynda was all apologies, change of plans, she said, stopping him in the vestibule sheilas here flew in this afternoon from Tampa. Sheila asks Santa, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the East, she said quickly, My old college roommate college asked Santa for witches.

She's always showing up like this. Glinda went on. Every time there's trouble in Tampa, I get a knock at the door in the den.

Sheila was lying on the couch in a kittenish tangle, all in black and smoking what smelled like European cigarettes. She studied Santa while playing with her hair.

Hey, Chubb's, she said.

I told you to smoke outside, said Glynda with exasperation. She went into the kitchen to get some fruitcake. A Santa made his way over to the couch. Sheila didn't move, so we squeezed into the corner her black stocking toes touching his thigh. So what do you do?

Fatto Santa began to stammer. Oh, I relaxed. Well, I know who you are. You're famous, she said, taking the last cookie from the serving tray. So how do you know glynda?

Oh, we're neighbors, said Santa. And you buy this good. Which both?

She asked in a whisper, a downward turn in the black arts, and all of a sudden she's moved to the North Pole and rebranded herself a good witch. Whoever heard of a good. Which am I right? It's an oxymoron. Like Baby Grand or Jolly Fat Man. Everyone knows fat men are sad. Look at you. Totally depressed, am I right? I mean, maybe a little Santa said, my wife recently died and what's with his Glynde, it interrupted Sheila.

Her name's Linda. Often when Santa didn't know what else to say, he'd break into a jolly sounding chuckle. He tried it just then, but the chuckle got caught in his throat and came out sounding sweaty and choked. Sheila stared at him. You have this weird crap in your beard, she said. She reached in to pull it out, and as she did, she brought her face in close enough for Santa to smell her.

Whereas Glynda smelled like baby powder and cinnamon, Sheila smelled of something. He couldn't quite put his finger on cigarettes, of course, but something else to it set the chimney in his chest ablaze.

Ashy black doves trying to flap out their flaming wings. As Sheila rummaged through his beard. The look on her face was all little girl concentration. You have nice bone structure, she said. You should try wearing black. He did have a slimming effect.

Withdrawing a tiny, shriveled Raisen from Santurce beard. Sheila crinkled up her face and flicked it onto the carpet.

You gross, she said. Glynda walked back into the room with drinks, and when Santore reached for one, he realized his hand was shaking. He excused himself to use the bathroom, where he thought he might hum a few carols to calm himself down.

Everything inside the bathroom was glittery and white, white, glittery soaps, shampoos, curtains.

But they're hanging from the white shower curtain. Rod was something black strung there for all the world to see where a pair of silky black stockings, sheilas black stockings.

For years, Santa had dealt intimately with stockings, stuffing them with cool or presents and never thought about it twice.

But just then, seeing those black stockings of hers being alone with them, something came over him and suddenly he was on his toes, biting the tips like a playful pop, like a fat, old, playful pop.

Returning to the living room, Santa sat back down on the couch and listened, enraptured as Sheila encouraged him to revise his policy on naughtiness, Santa nodded his head as though giving her suggestions. Some thought. In bed that night, Santa replayed each of Sheila's words and gestures, Sheila said whatever she felt like, touching and smelling everything like an animal she was not afraid to take, avail herself of the world, drinks, cigarettes, hospitality without so much as asking.

She'd even plunged her hand into Santa Shirley Temple, plucking the maraschino cherry right out and using his hat to wipe her hands for Santa one so in love with giving, he could not help but see before him a kind of black hole, a sexy and sublime black hole into which he could deliver forth his greatest gifts. Inshallah, he saw an insatiable hunger for life with such a woman to give to to give himself to it would feel as though every day was Christmas.

When they had made plans for the following weekend, Glynda had asked if Santa could bring along a friend for Shela, and so he showed up with Gingles anything to help a brother out, Gingles had said.

Strolling into Glenda's living room, Gingles did that thing where he jumped onto the couch while crossing his legs in midair. He landed right beside Shela. You are just too cute for words, exclaimed Sheila. Try anyways, said Gingles, snipping the tip of a cigar. It was the length of his forearm. I'd prefer to keep the house smoke free, said Glynda. More like fun free, said Sheila say. What do you call people who live around here anyway?

North Polacks, we call ourselves cold poles, said Gingles. Ever put your tongue on a cold pole? Honey tends to get stuck there. Shela slapped him on the head. Dork, she said, laughing.

Sheila and Gingles had a million things to talk about. All the while, Glynda and Santa just sort of sat there smiling awkwardly and watching the snow fall.

It's an uninhabitable wasteland. Santa heard Sheila say Tampa sounds awesome, said Gingles. If only I could convince El Hefe over there to move the operation south.

Gingles looked over at Santa and seeing his bro struggling with his day, decided to kick things into gear. Come on, y'all, said the elf, addressing the group.

Gather round for a little spin the bottle. I've got just the one, said Sheila Downing, the last of the red wine straight from the bottle spin.

The what? Ask Linda. Sheila rolled her eyes, placed the bottle down on the carpet and spun Santa. Watch the bottle spin with an anxiety that bordered on mania. What if the bottle dictated that he was to kiss Sheila? He would almost certainly die. But he did not have to ponder such a kiss for very long, for soon the bottle slowed to a halt, pointing directly at Gingles.

And when Sheila licked her lips and Lindor face downward, Gingles grabbed her head in his small hands and planted his tiny mouth on hers. Santa felt the chimney fire in his chest snuff out.

He and Glynda watched them kiss. Then after a while, they watched the snow fall. Then they went back to watching them kiss. Eventually, Gingles led Sheila into the vestibule, where he said he wanted to show her the secret to getting the tips of his shoes so curly and.

Left alone and at somewhat of a loss, Linda got up and fished around in a cabinet drawer beside the couch, Santa thought she might be looking for a game of some sort, but then she said, I have something for you. She held out a glistening package, no way, Jose Santa said, I'm the gift giver around here and it's not even Christmas yet.

Santa was about to really kick up a fuss. But then, as a downright witchy look fell across Glenda's face, he trailed off.

It's nothing that big, she insisted, thrusting the present at his chest. Besides, it was fun trying to find the perfect something for you and then to actually find it. There's no greater feeling in the world. But look who I'm telling this to. Hearing her words and seeing the look of excitement on her face, Santa had a puzzling thought. Perhaps he'd somehow misjudged things, perhaps he'd somehow gotten it wrong by refusing the gifts people wish to bestow on him.

He'd consistently failed to give the experience of giving. He'd hug that particular pleasure all to himself.

And so he took the package. It was flat and square, tearing the wrapping paper open. He saw it was a record rockin Christmas Party Songs Vol. one.

He absolutely hated it, not just because the thought of listening to it made him feel like one of those old white haired hippies who had to make everything from getting their prostate checked to celebrating Christmas. Not just a good time, but a rock and good time. But it was also one of those gifts that said something about the recipient, something that was hard to swallow, like the gift of a back scratcher that says you're alone in this world and must fend for yourself or the gift of a warm house coat that says your days of party dresses are over.

The gift of a perfectly awful Christmas album being handed to you by a woman who liked you said loud and clear you must learn to compromise. For after all his years of giving, Santa knew better than anyone that we don't always receive what we want, nor even what we deserve. We receive what life brings us. And when it comes to life, we haven't a choice but to open our arms. I love it, said Santa, with a half smile, unpeeling the plastic.

They placed the album on the record player Santa held out his arms and Glynda entered his embrace.

And together they danced about the room as Chuck Berry belted out Run Rudolph Run.

And it was almost enough to drown out the sounds in the vestibule run run out to make it to town. To make it very tough.

He can take the freeway down town of Goldstein, used to work here at a program and is now the host of the podcast Heavyweight Retail's Amazing True Stories about People. I recommend it. You can hear it on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts back to avoid a human longing for. All I want for Christmas is a rock and roll star and then a willand Rudolph with like a shooting star. Run, run, don't make it in town. The program was produced today by Brian Reed and Jonathan Kivar with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, mechanic Lisa Pollak, Robin Semina was Shipp and Nancy Updike, senior producer for today's program is Julie Snyder, musical from Damian Grey from Rob Geddis.

Additional production help on this rerun from Nora Gilston Nelson, Beth Lake and Matt Tierney. Special. Thanks, Dad. Jon Ronson, Sarah Henderson, Michelle Harris, Richard Stuart and Boutet String. And can our website, This American Life Dog, This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by parks. The Public Radio Exchange Support for this American Life comes from Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, family owned, operated and argued over since 1980. Proud supporter of independent thought, whether that's online, over the air or in a can or bottle more at Sierra Nevada dot com.

Thanks as always. The program's cofounder, Mr Trimethyl, one of the most experienced programmers in public broadcasting. He knows the ingredients you need for any successful radio show. And of course, they are vegetables, a head of broccoli, you know, an onion and one of the bones from the, you know, the original Rudolph.

I'm IRA Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life.

Ron. Had to make him hurry, come, he can take the freeway down. Run, run, Rudolph. I'm reading really like a merry go round. Next week on the podcast, This American Life Kick Off the year, in these dark, combative times, we attempt the most radical counterprogramming we could think of delight.

Guess what I'm waiting for? For my life.

For instance, a five year old who gets to ride the school bus for the very first time. Oh, man.

That's like half an hour of daylight next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.