Reason to Believe

The snow of Daria Gale’s childhood was neither festive nor kind. When she looks back, the past swells upon her like tides of darkness, pushing light, nearly forgotten now, just beyond reach. When it snowed, she recalls, it seemed only cold and cruel.

But no matter how chilled her life became, Christmas brought a flicker of warmth. Even when she ran away, she came home for the holidays. Perhaps it was hope. She couldn’t really tell.

It wasn’t until she married in 1994 and started a family of her own that light filtered through to her life. She started anew and had a baby, Samantha, in 1995.

But 1997 was a tough year.

Daria suffered a miscarriage early last February, a month into her pregnancy. During an ultrasound to ensure that the miscarriage was complete, she was startled to hear the beating of another tiny heart. She didn’t know she had been carrying twins.

It was a difficult pregnancy, and Daria was bedridden during much of her first trimester. She took time off from her part-time job processing checks for a Los Angeles bank, and the lost income hurled the family into financial turmoil. They signed up for food stamps, and Daria received small disability payments, but they depended mostly on her husband, Mike, who works as a security guard.

On Sept. 24, when the second baby arrived, money didn’t seem very important. Half an hour after she was born, baby Elizabeth stopped breathing. Doctors revived her, but she remains attached to a home monitor, which beeps loudly when the apnea (the time between breaths) lasts too long. It hardly beeps at all now.

In time, the Gales hope Elizabeth’s breathing will grow strong and steady. That she survived at all gave them cause for a festive Christmas. But when December arrived, Daria looked at the calendar and her checkbook.

Even though she would be returning to work, her first paycheck would not arrive until the end of the month. Mike’s check would have to go toward bills and their $225 mortgage payment, leaving no money for a Christmas tree or gifts.

There are more important things in life than what money will buy. Daria knows that. Still, her heart ached. Samantha, now 2, is old enough to know about Christmas, about Santa Claus and gifts for children who have been good.

As Christmas approached, the Gales put up lights on the porch of their Altadena home. Paper rings from last year were strung from the ceiling, and stockings were hung next to the front door for Mom and Dad, little Samantha and baby Elizabeth.

Since becoming a parent, Daria, 34, has set herself one goal: that her children’s lives will be without the darkness of her own. On Valentine’s Day, they set out a huge heart on the front lawn. On Easter, there is an egg, and come October there is a massive Halloween display.

So it weighed heavily on her that there would be no Christmas tree. She could have asked her sister or brother or even friends for help, but doing so is not in her nature.

Even now, she doesn’t know why she did it. Perhaps she needed someone to confide in, or maybe she was thinking of a movie she had seen about people in need sharing secrets of the heart in letters to God.

But on Dec. 3, she went to a neighbor’s house and borrowed paper. She sat down at her small kitchen table, beneath a framed print of the Last Supper, and wrote those once-magical words:

Dear Santa . . .

*

For 63 years now, the letters have arrived. Some of the envelopes are adorned with the artistic endeavors of young, unsteady hands: lopsided Christmas trees decorated with tiny, red blobs--two-legged reindeer with bright, bulbous noses.

They are written in different languages at all times of the year. Philip enclosed a photograph of himself, framed in Popsicle sticks.

“I hope you had a good year,” he wrote. “I can’t wait until Christmas.” The letter was postmarked Aug. 28.

They are written by believers of all ages. Some are plain silly. Others will break your heart.

“It looks like this christmas there will be no preasants under our tree,” wrote a boy named @Jesus. “My mom just got fired from her job. Me and my little sister do not have warm clothes for Christmas . . . My mom needs a new living room because the one we had got taken away because we could not pay it.”

Crystal writes hoping for “a table for us to eat on and do our homework in the kitchen . . . .”

The letters are among those forwarded by the U.S. Postal Service to the Pasadena Jaycees, whose Operation Santa will hit the streets tonight. Last year, teams of Santas, Mrs. Clauses and elves delivered gifts to 1,574 homes throughout Altadena, Arcadia, La Canada, Pasadena, San Marino, Sierra Madre and South Pasadena.

Priority is given to those in poorer neighborhoods, like the one where Todd Vradenburg grew up in northwest Pasadena. When Vradenburg, 30, was 8 years old, his mother lost her job as a secretary for an insurance company just before the holidays.

As was their tradition, Vradenburg, an only child, and his mother, a single parent, went to his aunt’s house on Christmas Eve. There, he and a house filled with cousins anxiously awaited Santa.

More important than the gifts he brought--although the gifts were pretty cool--was the magic that Santa delivered, Vradenburg says. It made all things seem possible.

There was no tree that year in his mother’s apartment, but on Christmas morning he awakened to two gifts awaiting him on the dining table. One was a portable radio, the other an album of Stevie Wonder’s greatest hits.

“I come from a family that always said, ‘We’ll be all right. We’ll get back on our feet. We’ll do what we have to do, and we’ll be fine.’ ”

His family was right. Vradenburg now works as executive director of the Will Rogers Memorial Fund. In 1991, he joined the Pasadena Jaycees upon learning they were behind those childhood visits from Santa. Tonight, he will return to his old neighborhood, now claimed by gangs, scarred by graffiti, to deliver presents and fill the eyes of children with the same sparkle he remembers from his own early years.

Barry Franklin, who heads Operation Santa, describes the importance of the effort by one defining moment: when the door swings open and Santa bellows a “Ho! Ho! Ho!,” examines the letter written to him and reaches into his bag.

“For that magical moment, you’re Santa Claus. Anything that might be happening in that child’s life, whether it’s tough times or whatever the case might be, it all disappears for that moment. . . . We deliver more than just toys. We deliver a sense of hope to a lot of kids who maybe don’t have a heck of a lot to believe in.”

It’s a massive undertaking. Fifty-five teams of Santas, Mrs. Clauses and elves will be out on the streets of the San Gabriel Valley tonight. They will deliver gifts that have been donated or purchased from contributions and money raised by the Jaycees foundation.

One of those delivering gifts will be Kirkland Ogawa.

Ogawa, in his fourth year of Operation Santa, was reading letters in early December when he came across one that especially touched him:

“Dear Santa:

“Imagine me--a grown woman writing to you. I still believe in you and the wondrous miracles of Christmas. I’m not sure why I’m writing this letter. Maybe because I’m hoping for a helping hand this year. I’ve never asked for much before, and it’s been like 25 years since I wrote to you last.

“All I’m asking for this year is a Christmas tree and two toys for my daughters.

“Over the years we’ve accumulated Christmas decorations, but what good are they if you can’t even afford a tree this year? I just started back to work after maternity leave, so you see our finances have reached an all-time low . . . .

“We’re blessed--my husband, daughters and I do still have a roof over our heads, and we’re doing the best with the new medical bills . . . .”

Ogawa couldn’t get the letter--simply addressed to “Santa Claus, North Pole”--out of his mind.

He went home and told his wife, Carrie, about it. When darkness fell the following night, they embarked on a furtive mission--purchasing a tree, driving to the Gale residence and parking well down the street. They quietly carried the tree onto the front porch, rang the doorbell and ran.

Daria was at work. By the time Mike got to the door, all that was there was the tree. He looked around but saw no one.

When Daria arrived home, she saw the wooden stand next to the back door. She walked into the house and saw the tree. “Oh, my God,” she thought. “He got the letter.”

*

For five years beginning in the mid-1960s, Daria’s parents were separated. The three children stayed with their father, who moved them around wherever he could find work as a bricklayer.

She doesn’t recall where they were living, but at one point she remembers that it snowed.

“It was Presidents’ Day, and I told the woman who was taking care of us at the time that we had no school, but she didn’t believe me,” Daria says. “She made me walk to school and it was snowing. I walked to school and just stayed there for a while, not knowing what to do. Then I walked back home, and she made me rake the leaves in the snow.”

In 1971, her parents got back together and in 1972 the family moved into this house, where Daria’s handprints remain etched into the concrete on the corner of the driveway.

In 1973, their mother died. Her body simply wore out, Daria says. After that, men would sometimes come to the house with her father, and that’s when she was molested. She ran away. She stayed with a woman she called her second mother. But on Christmas, she always came home.

“I’ve had a hard life, I guess,” she says, “but then I met Mike. I didn’t know life was this good.”

Her father died in 1992. Two years later, she and Mike moved into the old house and began filling it with new memories.

With the mysterious Christmas tree to decorate, this was turning out to be a wonderful Christmas. Daria found out from a friend that sometimes mortgage companies will defer a payment and tack it onto the end of the payment schedule.

She called, and the mortgage company agreed to defer the January payment, meaning there would be money for a couple of gifts for the girls.

Two days after the tree arrived, Daria sat down again at the small dining table, next to the tree, and wrote another letter.

“Because of this unselfish gift, this might be--will be--our best Christmas yet,” she wrote to thank Santa. “May your blessings be sevenfold. God bless and thank you! The Gale Family.”

Tonight, the Gales’ doorbell will ring again, and Samantha will see a jolly, old man dressed in red. Perhaps, like her mother, she will come to believe in Christmas and, for years to come, feel its warmth.

* Thursday schoolkids treattheir hard-working mom’s to life’s luxuries this Christmas.