Jen's Dream Santa

My Dream Santa

(A Christmas romance)

My Dream Santa

(A Christmas romance)

by Tony Spencer

Copyright © 2017 Tony Spencer

Cover design by Tony Spencer

Electronic edition published 2017 by around Yateley at Smashwords

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely unintentional.

Chapter 1

Jen opened her tiny eyes, it was very early Christmas morning and it was quite dark in her cool bedroom that the three-year-old shared with her toddler sister. There was just a narrow ray of moonbeam peeping through the gap in the curtains which revealed to her a silent movement, a momentary flash of white.

There, she thought she could see someone in dark clothing trimmed with white, a hat pulled over a moon white face. He was placing a tiny wrapped present at the foot of her bed. The figure moved through the moonlight beam again to move towards the chimney. He was a young man and didn't have a beard, but it was, it had to be, she knew with certainty, that he was Santa!

Santa, is that you? she asked, in her tiny voice hovering between fear and wonder.

Hush, Jennifer, go to sleep, now, Santa said quietly in a deep but reassuring, comforting voice, that wasn't frightening at all. Anyone else in that bedroom at that time of night and three-year-old Jen would have merrily screamed her head off. But no, this was Santa and, after all, he had every right to be there, the whole family had invited him to come. Jen had even signed a card she had made at pre-school, with glitter stuck on the front of it. Besides, his voice assured her there was nothing at all to be afraid of, so she wasn't afraid. After all, Jen reasoned, he always came every Christmas and brought only joy and pleasure into her world, nothing bad had ever happened with Santa. He continued in his calm manner, It's not quite Christmas morning yet, Jennifer, so you be a very good little girl and go right back to sleep.

OK, Santa, Jen said, and so she settled down easily and instantly fell back to sleep.

It was only when she woke up, bright and refreshed that she realised that she remembered every single detail, and that Santa didn't look at all like she had expected from all the pictures she had been shown at school and in the library. He looked nothing at all like Old St Nicholas, although some things were exactly as she imagined. Like the red coat lined with white fur, and big black boots, and the red hat, and, and, and - she had to take a deep breath - and the big red sack. Those things she expected and that was why she hadn't been afraid that he was there in her and her sister's bedroom in the middle of the night.

But what she had noticed that was so different, was that this Santa was a young man, with no whiskers. Jennifer imagined he was younger even than her Daddy. She told her Mummy and Daddy about the dream and they only thought it was a funny dream, and told her that it was nothing at all to worry about. All little girls became obsessed with the build up to Christmas and for three-year-olds like her, this was the first Christmas that she could appreciate as something special. So she didn't worry and neither did Mummy and Daddy.

There was one little present that year, however, that nobody noticed, or claimed to have sent it. The gift was packed in a box, and beautifully wrapped, but without a label. It was a tiny bracelet of wooden beads, that she wore every day for several years until the string broke, and she lost too many beads to salvage it.

And every year after, she had that self same dream, sometimes twice a year on or near Christmas Eve.

Every year for the next 26 years.

***

In her 29th year she had the same dream again, almost exactly as the usual one, but this time there was one significant and immediately apparent difference.

Jennifer sat bolt upright and groaned as soon as she realised 'where' she was and, more importantly, exactly 'when' it was.

The 'where' was her tiny city one-bedroom studio flat of course. Where else would she be on a Thursday night? At home of course. She did nothing in the evenings during midweek, and not a lot more during the weekends. Her life was currently in limbo, so where else would she be on the 30th of November?

And that was the second reason for the groan, the 'when'. She occasionally had this annual dream twice, once on Christmas Eve, plus a dry run a week or few days earlier, but before it had always happened deep into the second half of the month of December. It was hard to pinpoint, but she often ended up with a small but special present among the rest of her gifts, one which she could not identify the sender. Last year's was a silk bookmark, which she now used all the time.

This year the dream had put in its first appearance, manifestation, infection, call it what you will, the earliest ever.

For crying out loud, her thoughts screamed, it wasn't even December yet!

You expect this seasonal marketing creep, earlier and earlier every year, from the big retailers. You know, as soon as the returning students go back to school after the summer holidays, ignoring the minor hiccoughs of Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes in between, all the shops seem hell-bent on the Christmas festivities, and they seem to get earlier and earlier each year. The Christmas displays in markets and shopping malls springing up in October and November could be ignored as the height of tackiness, but what about her dreams? Weren’t they sacrosanct? No, that annual Christmas dream should have stayed firmly where it belonged, during the festive season!

This recurring dream was now beginning to impinge on her life. Not that she had a life, she mournfully lamented, but even so, this Santa dream was becoming personal!

And Jennifer never remembers any of her other dreams, her normal everyday dreams, like she does this one singular dream. Well, hardly any, other than little snatches sometimes of sandy beaches and romantic sunsets or moonlight dinners. Now those were dreams that were worthwhile remembering and repeating. In the Santa dream she appears to wake up and Young Santa is there, reassuring her that all is well and so she goes back to sleep again. Time after time, she just dreamily answers OK before slipping into the land of nod again.

But the Christmas Morning Santa dream was always so vivid and so memorable that it seemed like every detail of the full dream was etched into her subconscious. Fortunately, she reminded herself, the dream never put in more than a single appearance before her Christmas Eve dream. She hoped that this year would be the same. In fact, her current schedule at work was so insane it was any wonder she was dreaming about anything other than frantic panic about her workload.

There were possible explanations for the extraordinary earliness of the Santa dream, as her best friend Satish had already pointed out. Maybe that was why the dream had surfaced so early in the festive season.

Jenna, Satish had said after Jennifer had told her why she was so in the dumps. This slipped out before she realised it, as they shared their first coffee and tea respectively, before starting work. Everyone called her Jenna in the city, ever since she moved there almost a decade earlier. Jennifer liked Jenna as a substitute name, she thought she sounded somehow more sophisticated and less provincial than plain Jennifer, Jenny or Jen.

Satish continued speaking as they sat rubbing and warming their hands in the freezing cold office rest room, This is going to be the first Christmas that your whole family aren't going back to your family home, so it is perfectly understandable that you are feeling a lot less secure and a bit more emotional than usual.

She was right, of course, Satish always was right.

Chapter 2

Jennifer's life wasn't the same as it was and never would be again. In fact it was nothing at all like it used to be. For a start, that damned internal clock inside her was ticking away furiously. She would be thirty years old next birthday and was still a single woman, living alone, a salient fact that her mother never failed to remind her about at every single opportunity that presented itself. Only her mother could make her marital status, or spinsterhood, appear to be a failure, akin to being late to be potty trained, learn to walk or talk when she was a baby or becoming a toddler.

Even though she loved the little tykes, she was not looking forward to seeing her younger sister's three angelic children. She knew that her mother would use their presence as a means to make her feel more inadequate, even more a failure in her personal life.

Jennifer was unattached and unmarried because it was only in the past year that she had been forced into leaving her boyfriend of eight years. That break-up still made her so angry. She had lost eight years to that loser. Eight of what were supposed to have been the best years of her life. Not only had Scott failed to commit himself fully to their relationship, by proposing marriage to Jennifer, the bastard had proved that he simply couldn't keep his ... his bloody thingy in his bloody pants! He had always disrespected her, making her feel insecure by ogling every other woman around, and flirting outrageously. In the end she had no choice but to give him up as a lost cause.

Jen's self confidence had never been so low as it