“Then he laid a finger aside his
nose . . .” Mandy told the wide-eyed four-year-old boy.
From her crouched position, she
glanced past the brown-haired boy’s shoulder for just a moment. His
mother, standing behind him in the little shop, was smiling with a
touch of the Christmas glimmer in her eyes, even though it was the
middle of August.
“. . . and, whoosh!
He went right up the
chimney.”
“Did he drop anything?” About
half of the children asked her that.
“Nope. He was very careful.”
“Did he bring you what you wanted
for Christmas?”
A lot of them asked her that, too.
“There were a lot of presents
under the tree,” Mandy said carefully, glancing past the boy at his
mother again. “But after he left, I couldn’t even remember what I
wanted that year. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because seeing Santa was the best
Christmas present I ever got.”
Mandy straightened, smiling at them
both. She didn’t often have the chance to tell the story in the
heart of summer; this visit was a treat. One of the nearby store
owners must have sent them over.
“Did you ever see—?”
“Robbie.” The little boy’s
mother patted his shoulder. “We’ve taken up enough of this lady’s
time.” She met Mandy’s eyes. “Thank you. We’ll take these.”
The woman handed Mandy a pair of
peppermint-striped salt and pepper shakers, and Mandy took them
behind the counter to the cash register. “I love these. I have a
set at home.”
As Mandy wrapped the shakers in
tissue paper, Robbie’s mother fished in her purse for her wallet,
still glancing over the necklaces, key chains and other Christmas
knickknacks displayed on the countertop. “It must be hard not to
take the whole store home with you.”
“Oh, I think I already have.”
Mandy grinned as she rang up the sale.
The North Pole was the kind of store
that wouldn’t stand much of a chance outside of a mountain town:
ninety percent Christmas merchandise. But when visitors to Tall Pine
wandered the shops on Evergreen Lane, most of them stepped inside for
a quick look, and many left with a knickknack or two. Mandy thought
it might be something about the mountain air and the scent of pine
that helped people catch the Christmas spirit, even in the
off-season.
As Mandy handed the customer her
bag, Robbie said, “Hey, that’s you! Are you famous?” He was
pointing at the two framed newspaper clippings on the south wall. One
was the original story the paper had run the year Mandy told the
television reporter about Santa Claus. The other was from six years
back: SANTA SIGHTER GOES
TO WORK
AT CHRISTMAS STORE. The
photo showed an eighteen-year-old Mandy standing in nearly the same
spot she was right now, smiling behind the counter. She didn’t know
if anyone else could see the slight discomfort beneath the smile.
“No, I’m not famous,” she
said, feeling a trace of a blush warm her cheeks. “They just wrote
a couple of stories about me. Because not everyone gets to see
Santa.”
The framed clippings were the only
part of the job Mandy didn’t care for, but it was the reason Mrs.
Swanson had hired her. And Mandy had wanted, with all her heart, to
work at The North Pole. It was filled with the things she loved, and
she loved telling her story to the kids who occasionally came in to
hear it. The clippings reminded her of the hard part, the kidding
she’d taken all through school. But if it meant being here every
day to share the magic, then so be it.
Robbie took his mother’s hand as
she led him toward the door.
“Hey.” Mandy reached into the
crystal bowl on the countertop. “Want a candy cane for the road?”
“A candy cane? In the summer?”
“Sure, why not? They’re still
fresh, I promise.” Mandy winked at him. “I had one earlier this
morning.”
Mother and son stepped forward, and
each of them took one of the short, cellophane-wrapped candies.
“Merry Christmas,” she said.
The little boy waved, and the sleigh
bells hanging from the door jingled behind them as they left.
Jake Wyndham strolled the sidewalk
of Evergreen Lane, peering in the occasional window. He’d already
checked out a T-shirt store and a sporting goods shop. He’d looked
over the menu posted in the window of a sandwich shop, but it was too
early for lunch. The street had a lot of foot traffic, a healthy sign
on a Saturday morning. So far, everything he saw supported his
company’s research: Tall Pine looked like a town that drew a fair
number of weekend visitors.
Up ahead, two red-and-white-striped
poles supported the awning over the entrance to another store. It
didn’t quite look like a barber shop. . . . No, wait, those were
supposed to be big peppermint sticks.
Jake got close enough to see the
display in the nearest of the two windows flanking the entrance to
the store. The large sill was decked in cotton that passed for snow,
with a miniature Christmas village laid out on top. Tiny children on
little toboggans pretended to slide down an improvised hill.
The red letters on the shop window
read THE NORTH POLE.
Okay, this could be interesting.
He pulled open the door, to be
greeted by the jingling of the bells that hung on it. From speakers
overhead, Jake recognized a voice that he never heard any time of
year but December: Bing Crosby.
“May your days be merry and
bright. . . .”
They weren’t kidding around about
this. Reindeer, snowmen and nutcrackers filled the shop: figurines on
shelves, pictures and plaques on the walls, jewelry and key chains
hanging from display hooks in front of the counter. Artificial
Christmas trees, large and small, poked up from corners and alongside
rows of shelves, decorated with price-tagged ornaments. It was a
world of red and green, peppermint and pine. Jake had never seen
anything like it back home in Scranton, that was for sure.
He stepped slowly forward, the old
tenet of “you break it, you bought it” echoing in his head.
Thankfully, the rows of shelves weren’t so close together that
bumping into them was a hazard. What had felt like a manic clutter at
first glance was actually arranged rather nicely. A cluster of mugs
here, candleholders there . . . and, Jake was astonished to see, a
whole shelf devoted to salt and pepper shakers. Did people really—
“Hi.”
Jake turned to see a pretty,
dark-haired woman step from behind one of the Christmas trees a few
feet to his left. “Can I help you find anything?” she added.
“Not at the moment.”
She had a warm, ready smile, and her
eyes were a deep blue. She held an ornament that looked like a little
wooden rowboat. Jake’s eyes went from the ornament to the tree, and
he saw it was decorated with other outdoorsy items: elk, geese,
pinecones, even a snowman with a fishing pole.
“I see you’re going with a
theme,” he said.
“It’s fun.” The girl hung the
boat on a branch and reached into a box resting on a nearby stool.
She fished out another ornament—appropriately enough, a fish. “I
could never stick to one thing on my tree at home. There are so many
personal memories that go with Christmas decorations. But it’s fun
to do it here.”
Jake watched deft fingers with
unpainted nails hang up a dark-furred grizzly bear. “How does your
store do when it’s not Christmastime? Is it pretty slow?”
“Oh, it’s quieter, for sure.”
She gestured around the store, empty of any other customers, with a
little shrug. “But people trickle in. And when they do, they
usually buy something.”
“Locals? Or tourists?”
“I guess you’d say local
tourists. People from maybe an hour or two away. During the summer
they like to come up for the day because it’s cooler up here in the
mountains. And in the winter it gets pretty crazy. We’re the first
town people hit when they drive up to go to the snow.”
“‘Go to the snow’?”
“Sure. Down the hill, it never
snows. You usually have to be at least four thousand feet up to get
snow in Southern California.” She studied him with a quizzical
frown.
He stepped back, feeling as if he’d
been found out. “Sorry, I’m from Pennsylvania. The idea of
driving somewhere to visit
snow never occurred to
me.”
She grinned. “I guess so. If you
never get snow, it’s a novelty. Up here we have to dig our way out
of it sometimes. But it’s so beautiful.”
She looked almost starry-eyed.
Clearly, she hadn’t gotten over the novelty of snow. “Have you
lived here long?” he asked.
“All my life.” She picked up the
box and stepped back to view her handiwork. It brought her one step
closer to Jake, and he sneaked a look at her contemplative profile.
Her blue eyes had a soulful look he couldn’t remember seeing on any
adult.
He took his eyes from her face
before she caught him staring, and noticed a silver bell earring
dangling from her earlobe.
Silver bells . . . Oh. Right. Got
it.
Apparently satisfied with the tree,
she walked past him with a smile, taking the box behind the counter
and setting it down. “So,” she said, “what brings you here from
Pennsylvania?”
“Do you have anything for a
seven-year-old girl? My niece,” he added, not sure why he felt the
urge to clarify.
Her eyes went ceilingward as she
contemplated the problem.
The reason he’d come to town
wouldn’t be a secret for long, but Jake found he usually got better
answers to his questions if people didn’t know why he was asking.
Regal Hotels had sent him to set up their next location, and the
demographics of Tall Pine looked great. But getting the perspective
of locals often came in handy.
The woman’s eyes roamed over the
store. “Really, just about anything, except maybe for the glass
breakables,” she said. “Are you looking for something a little
less seasonal? For a souvenir?”
Jake nodded. “Exactly.”
“Does she like jewelry?”
He hesitated.
“Oh, I don’t mean diamonds and
rubies.” That smile reached her eyes every time. “Just a little
bauble.”
Bauble?
She reached over to a display rack
of necklaces on the countertop, turning it to show the different
designs. Bears, Santa hats, Christmas trees . . . Her fingers came to
rest, cupping a tiny pinecone about the size of a thimble. His niece,
Emily, would like
that.
“We sell a lot of these,” she
said. “They’re real pinecones, but they’re treated with lacquer
so they’ll last. Pinecone . . . Tall Pine?”
Got it. Jake
eyed the price tag on the chain: ten dollars. “That’s perfect.
Thanks.”
She wrapped the necklace in tissue
paper as gently as if it were a crystal vase. Meanwhile, Jake became
aware of the music from the speakers again. It had left Bing Crosby
and moved on to Nat King Cole. “Do you ever get tired of Christmas
music?”
“You’d be surprised how often
people ask me that.” Not
really. “But I never
do. There’s so much good Christmas music. I bring a lot of it from
home.”
She rang up the necklace and handed
him the bag, silver bells glinting below her ears. “Merry
Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” he said
before he thought. With Nat King Cole in the background, it came as a
reflex.
He walked out the door, bells
jingling behind him. The warm summer day came as a shock after being
surrounded by mistletoe and holly.
An unexpected voice piped up in his
head, as if it were chiming in with the bells: You
should have asked
her out.
The multipaned door swung shut. Too
late.
Besides, he had work to do, and he
knew where to find her.
Resisting the urge to look back
through the glass, Jake set off to continue his fact-finding foray up
the street.
This is a cute and sweet Christmas themed story set in the
Californian mountains.
As an eight year old, Mandy Reece saw Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
A year later she becomes a local celebrity after her experience is
shared with the local press. She knows it wasn't her imagination,
but not-one in the town really believes her. So, it's fitting that
as an adult, she begins working in the local theme store The North
Pole, which sells Christmas goods, picking up the nickname Mandy
Claus from the town folk who now see her has a local treasure.
Jake
Wyndham is on a fact finding mission to the small town of Tall Pine
on behalf of his employer Regal Hotels. Once
he's gotten rid of his preconceived ideas, Jake falls under the spell
of the charming mountain town after meeting the intriguing, beautiful
woman at the Christmas store. Now he needs
to convince the town that they need a chain hotel, so he has a reason
to stay.
This is a sweet, slow burn romance, which may not suit everyone, but
is perfect for the tempo of the book, akin to an old-fashioned
courtship. Mandy is a rather naive twenty-four year old and Jake
recognises and respects that. He's determined not to take their
tentative relationship beyond it's current level until he has more
concrete confirmation about the prospective hotel plans. The
protagonists interaction with each other is interesting...Mandy who
believes in what she saw-Santa Claus and Jake, who's scientifically
minded and tries to find a logical theory and formula to explain and
understand Mandy's phenomenon. In the end, the proof is in the
seeing!
The writing style is jarring at times as we flit from one point of
view to another without any clear indication. But then there are
other times when the scene setting and descriptions are beautifully
written, making it easy to visualise the town of Tall Pine and The
North Pole store.
Overall Do You Believe In Santa is an enchanting, heart-warming story
that gets you into the festive spirit.
3.5 stars
***arc received courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley***
Sierra Donovan is a wife, a mother of two and a writer, though not always in that order. Her greatest joy is helping people find true love on the printed page. She is a firm believer in Christmas, classic movies, happy endings and the healing power of chocolate. Sierra’s first novel, Love On The Air, was a Holt Medallion finalist. Her 2014 Kensington debut, No Christmas Like The Present, won the Golden Quill Award for Sweet Traditional Romance. Her 2015 novel, Do You Believe In Santa? marks the beginning of Sierra's new Evergreen Lane series. You can email Sierra at sierra_donovan@yahoo.com, or visit her website at www.sierradonovan.com.
