Santa Claus

Read this charming and humorous vignette from William Livingstone Alden's The Adventures of Jimmy Brown, about Victorian-era Christmas antics.

By Sam Moore
Published on December 3, 2021
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from The Adventures of Jimmy Brown (1885)
They Got Harry Out All Safe.

Editor’s note: William Livingstone Alden (1837-1908) was a prominent American journalist, fiction writer, and humorist, who, in 1885, published The Adventures of Jimmy Brown, the hero of which was forever getting into incredible trouble. One of Jimmy’s escapades was titled Santa Claus, and is retold here.

The other day I was at Tom McGinnis’s house, and his bigger cousin said there wasn’t any Santa Claus! Well, I knew for certain that it was a fib, but all the same, it worried me.

If there is a Santa Claus — and of course there is — how could he get up on the roof so he could come down the chimney, unless he carried a big ladder with him; and if he did this, how could he carry presents enough to fill mornahundred stockings? And then how could he help getting things all over soot from the chimney, and how does he manage when the chimney is all full of smoke and fire, as it always is at Christmas!

Tom McGinnis’s cousin’s story kept worrying me, and finally I began to think how awful it would be if there was any truth in it. How the children would feel! There’s going to be no end of children at our house this Christmas, and Aunt Eliza and her two small boys are here already. I heard mother and Aunt Eliza talking about Christmas the other day, and they agreed that all the children should sleep on cots in the back parlor, so that they could open their stockings together, and mother said, “You know, Eliza, there’s a big fireplace in that room, and the children can hang their stockings around the chimney.”

Now I know I did wrong, but it was only because I didn’t want the children to be disappointed. Neither do I blame mother, though if she hadn’t spoken about the fireplace in the way she did, it would never have happened. But I do think that they ought to have made a little allowance for me, since I was only trying to help make Christmas successful.

It all happened yesterday. Tom McGinnis had come to see me, and all the folks had gone out to ride except Aunt Eliza’s little boy Harry. We were talking about Christmas, and I was telling Tom how all the children were to sleep in the back parlor, and how there was a chimney there that was just the thing for Santa Claus. We went and looked at the chimney, and then I said to Tom what fun it would be to dress up and come down the chimney and pretend to be Santa Claus, and how it would amuse the children, and how pleased the grown-ups would be.

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