Embracing the Spirit

There is, in the mountain town of Blue Jay, a Santa Claus suit that David Johnson hasn’t worn since 1988, the year of his divorce. He bought it 17 years ago and wore it for his daughter and, eventually, his son, so that they might find in Christmas a joy that eluded him in his own childhood.

In those years, friends started asking him to be Santa for their children, and in time it became a holiday tradition. The suit, now kept in a closet, changed him, he says. Christmas changed him. He found the spirit of the season in the faces of children. As he peered at them through antique glasses, the joy he saw became his own.

“I didn’t have a real happy childhood,” he says. “Christmas wasn’t a happy time. I remember one year when Christmas dinner was fried bologna and eggs, but when I put on that Santa outfit and I [went] to someone’s house and [saw] their eyes light up, it’s something special.”

As a youngster and then as a young man, he blamed himself for his parents’ divorce. The Christmas gift he always wanted but never received was for his parents to get back together, so they could be a family again.

Perhaps his own children wanted the same.

But after he and his first wife divorced, Christmas was never the same. For 10 years, the Santa suit, elaborate with its attention to detail, went unworn.

He and Linda married in 1991. It was a second marriage for both, a new beginning, new family. Earlier this year, they moved from Las Vegas to the San Bernardino mountains in search of a quieter, simpler life. Linda, who works for Bank of America, transferred to Lake Arrowhead. David quit his job as general superintendent for a construction firm and sold his remodeling business, vowing to slow down. No more working night and day for weeks on end trying to get ahead.

“To the people out there who want to be millionaires, I wish them the best of luck,” he says. “I’ve learned that you can’t live for money.”

He has started his own small construction business and has learned to be happier with less.

A few weeks ago, Linda heard that the bank had adopted a local family, the Murillos, for the holiday season through a nonprofit organization called Operation Provider. David suggested they donate a used refrigerator and washer and dryer they had no use for, and also buy the family a tree.

It was Linda who suggested he dig out his Santa outfit.

Maybe, he thought, it was time. And, so this Christmas Eve, he will climb into the costume for the first time in 10 years, fill his bag with gifts donated by the bank’s 16 employees and deliver them to a family trying to remember the goodness and joy of Christmas.

*

There is a white alder on the shore of Lake Gregory that Adrian Murillo visits from time to time. It stands between patches of snow in the shadow of the woods. He remembers last March when he came here with his two brothers, his sister, his mother and her boyfriend.

His mother, Julie Marie Gonzalez, was 30 years old, struggling to patch together a life threadbare and ripped by alcoholism. She barely knew most of her children, who had lived most of their lives with her mother, Helen Murillo.

It was Adrian who had spent the most time with Julie. Of all the children, he was the one who knew her best, who forgave her the most, who believed in her, defended her and wanted them all to be together as a family.

His mother had come to Crestline to ask Adrian, 12, and Marty, 14, if they would consider living with her in Phoenix. The kids hadn’t seen their mother for six months. Her goal was to reclaim all four children as her life became more stable. They decided to wait until summer. When school was out, Marty and Adrian would go with her to Phoenix.

It was a quick visit, lasting only one day. Julie didn’t want to take too much time off from her job as a waitress at Denny’s. They spent most of the day at the lake, where they carved their names into the alder.

She looked good, her family says, healthy, happy. Before leaving, Julie’s boyfriend knelt on one knee and proposed marriage. For Adrian, it had never felt so much like family.

“He’ll be good to her,” Adrian thought, “he won’t beat her.”

The children wanted them to stay another night, but Julie and her boyfriend left. They were minutes away from home the following morning when their vehicle crashed into a cement truck and burst into flames. It is unclear who was driving. Julie’s boyfriend, who survived and tried to rescue her from the burning vehicle, initially said he was the driver. Later, his story changed.

It was Adrian who took his mother’s death the hardest.

“Sometimes my friends tell me that they hate their mothers,” he says. “I tell them they don’t know how lucky they are to have their mothers alive.”

At school when he sees mothers visiting or picking their children up from school, it makes him want to cry. He tries to hold it inside. Since her death, he says, he has been getting into more trouble. He gets into fights and was arrested for shoplifting.

“If she hadn’t died, I probably wouldn’t have turned bad,” he says. “It builds up inside, then I start to explode.”

Helen fears for him. She raised three children, and now she is raising four grandchildren. Disabled by a 1972 car accident, she lives on Social Security.

“When my daughter died,” she says, “I told God, ‘You took the wrong one.’ She was young, active, wanted to start her life with her children, and here I am, 55, handicapped. I still tell him, ‘You took the wrong one.’ ”

It’s difficult to focus on Christmas, she says.

She bought a few gifts at the thrift store, where she is a volunteer and gets half off her purchases. She went to a pawn shop to see about bicycles for the two youngest grandchildren, but they were all too big.

There are days when it takes all of her will to get out of bed.

“I stopped going to church,” she says. “I was going every Sunday until August. Then I just stopped going for one reason or another, and I don’t even know what that reason is. . . . I give up sometimes. I get so tired, but then these kids remind me that I can’t give up.”

What she wants this Christmas is peace in her home. “The kids need socks and shoes,” she says. Then, a bit embarrassed, she adds, “And we always seem to need toilet paper.”

But it is peace, more than anything, that they need.

If Adrian could have anything, he would want his mother back.

Santa understands that. He knows what it’s like to want something you can’t have, and he understands how the spirit of Christmas can become buried beneath layers of anger and pain.

But, also, he knows that Christmas is about miracles. It is about believing that reindeer can fly and snowmen can sing. It is about caring for each other. And it’s about faith.

*

It is a beautiful tree, Helen says.

It fills the house with Christmas fragrance, a welcome reminder of better days. If only, now, she could smell her mother’s tamales, menudo, if she could hear the Mexican music her father played in their East L.A. home.

Christmases past warm her heart, even those in Phoenix, where she lived for a few years in a shack with dirt floors, patio furniture in the living room, an air conditioner that didn’t work. She and another daughter and seven grandchildren shared that shack.

“Dirt poor,” she says. Literally, dirt poor. But happy.

This year is different.

“We’ll just stay home and just do the best we can, one day at a time like we’ve been doing,” she says.

The tree boosts her spirits.

Linda and David Johnson deliver it three weeks before Christmas along with food donated by bank employees. David says he will bring the washer and dryer soon and also a refrigerator to replace the loaner she has been using.

“What I would like to offer you is that if you ever need anything done around the house, I’d like to do it free of charge,” he says. “I’d be honored if you would let me do that.”

Helen is overwhelmed with the offer. It is such kindness that she appreciates most about living in these mountains. When Julie was killed and she had no money to bring her home, Operation Provider and a local funeral home came to her assistance.

With Christmas nearly here, she is glad that the children have a tree.

Emily, 9, woke up at 5:30 a.m. in anticipation of its arrival. Brendin, 6, helps attach the base, and later David holds Emily up so she can place an ornament atop the tree. Besides the gifts, she says, the tree is her favorite part of Christmas.

Adrian seems not to notice. He’s wrestling on the couch with friends. But maybe in time he will see a memory in this tree the way he sees memories in the white alder at the lake.

Or perhaps he will recall another tree, another Christmas when his mother flipped a coin to decide whether he or Marty would be the one to put in place the final star.

And maybe this Christmas Eve, when there comes a knock on the door, he will look into Brendin’s face and Emily’s face and see what Santa sees, feel what Santa feels, and remember words that his mother spoke to him time and again.

“Mijo,” she would say, “everything’s going to be OK.”

And maybe he will see that the most important gift Santa brings is not in his bag. It’s in his heart.