Now I lay me down to sleep.
Pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
Pray the Lord my soul to take....

he had added with great earnestness: “And let Santa bring me a Golden Flyer sled, please, Lord. Amen.”

But Sandy knew very well that there wasn’t really any Santa Claus! He knew in his heart that Hager and his mother were Santa Claus—and that they didn’t have any money. They were poor people. He was wearing his mama’s shoes, as Jimmy Lane had once done. And his father and Harriett, who used to make the house gay, laughing and singing, were far away somewhere.... There wasn’t any Santa Claus.

“I don’t care,” he said, tramping over the snow in the twilight on his way from the Reinharts’.

Christmas Eve. Candles and poinsettia flowers. Wreaths of evergreen. Baby trees hung with long strands of tinsel and fragile ornaments of colored glass. Sandy passed the windows of many white folks’ houses where the curtains were up and warm floods of electric light made bright the cozy rooms. In Negro shacks, too, there was the dim warmth of oil-lamps and Christmas candles glowing. But at home there wasn’t even a holly wreath. And the snow was whiter and harder than ever on the ground.

Tonight, though, there were no clothes drying in the kitchen when he went in. The ironing-board had been put away behind the door, and the whole place was made tidy and clean. The fire blazed and crackled in the little range; but nothing else said Christmas—no laughter, no tinsel, no tree.

Annjee had been about all day, still weak, but this afternoon she had made a trip to the store for a quarter’s worth of mixed candies and nuts and a single orange, which she had hidden away until the morning. Hager had baked a little cake, but there was no frosting on it such as there had been in other years, and there were no strange tissue-wrapped packages stuck away in the corners of trunks and drawers days ahead of time.

Although the little kitchen was warm enough, the two bedrooms were chilly, and the front room was freezing-cold because they kept the door there closed all the time. It was hard to afford a fire in one stove, let alone two, Aunt Hager kept saying, with nobody working but herself.

“I’s thinking about Harriett,” she remarked after their Christmas Eve supper as she rocked before the fire, “and how I’s always tried to raise her right.”

“And I’m thinking about—well, there ain’t no use mentionin’ him,” Annjee said.

A sleigh slid by with jingling bells and shouts of laughter from the occupants, and a band of young people passed on their way to church singing carols. After a while another sleigh came along with a jolly sound.

“Santa Claus!” said Annjee, smiling at her serious little son. “You better hurry and go to bed, because he’ll be coming soon. And be sure to hang up your stocking.”