Catching Santa: A Christmas Story

Every Porch. Every Christmas Morning. No One Ever Sees a Thing.

Every Christmas morning for three years, Nick Heron's family—and everyone else on Parkside Court—wakes up to presents on their porch. Perfect gifts. Exactly what everyone wanted, down to the smallest detail no one remembers saying out loud.

Everyone else finds it charming. Nick finds it unsettling.

So this Christmas Eve, with a storm bearing down on Lakewood, Colorado, he sets up cameras, motion sensors, and a suspect list eleven names long. A blizzard for the record books won't stop him. Neither will his wife's exasperation, his kids' bewilderment, or his own common sense.

He's determined to catch Santa. He has no idea what—or who—he's actually about to find.

Catching Santa is a warm, funny, unexpectedly moving Christmas story about the difference between watching people and truly seeing them. Some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. This one was meant to be understood.

Chapter 1

Christmas Eve, 7:16 p.m.

Nick Heron watched through his front window as nine inches of snow and counting buried everything in sight. Parkside Court, the street he had lived on for four years, had vanished. The sidewalks, lawns, and property lines had become an endless field of white, broken only by the dark shapes of houses, parked cars, and the occasional mailbox standing at attention.

Nick’s neighbor, Craig Donnelly, from two houses down, was attempting to retrieve his trash can from the sidewalk. But the wind had other ideas. A gust caught it and sent it tumbling end over end down the street like a plastic tumbleweed. Donnelly stumbled after it in nothing but jeans, a sweatshirt, and Crocs—Crocs, in a blizzard—his arms windmilling as he fought to stay upright.

The trash can landed hard against the tree in front of Nick’s house. Snow fell from the branches above, burying it in several more inches of powder. By the time Donnelly reached it, he looked like a walking snowman. He grabbed the can and, one heavy step at a time, dragged it back home, leaving a trench in his wake.

Nick smiled. If Craig Donnelly—the neighborhood fitness buff who ran five miles every morning and did push-ups on his deck in January—struggled in this weather, nobody would be sneaking around the neighborhood tonight. Nobody except the one person Nick had spent two years trying to catch: Santa Claus.

“Okay,” Nick muttered to himself, settling deeper into the leather armchair he'd dragged from the living room to the front window. At five-eleven and naturally lean, the result of nervous energy more than any real fitness regimen, he should have fit comfortably in the chair, but the broken spring didn't care about his build. It jabbed into his left kidney as if it had a personal vendetta. He shifted position, running a hand through his sandy hair. His eyes were fixed on the street, the storm, and his mission.

“Let's see you pull off your delivery magic in this weather,” he said to the empty room.

His phone sat on the chair arm, split-screen displaying camera feeds from both the front and back of his house. With the push of a button, he could switch to night-vision mode. There was no way Santa could approach his house unnoticed. The laptop balanced on his knees showed weather radar—the massive storm system sitting directly over Denver, pulsing red and purple like an angry bruise. On the side table sat two unopened Red Bulls, a can of honey-roasted peanuts, and a bottle of water.

Two Christmases ago, “just three minutes” had been enough time for Santa to come and go while Nick was upstairs helping his wife, Claire, carry gifts to the tree. Last year, a “quick nap” had cost him his chance, and he'd woken to find presents on the porch. Both times, there was nothing but grainy doorbell footage showing a figure in a fake beard and Santa suit that could have been anyone. This year, nothing was getting past him. Not after four years of someone knowing things about his family they shouldn't know. This year, he was going to win.

“No pillow?” Claire said from behind him.

Nick didn't turn around. After sixteen years of marriage, he knew his wife's footsteps by heart—the soft pad of her slippers on hardwood, the slight shuffle when she was wearing her penguin pajama pants. He also knew her sighs. This one was I love you, but you're being ridiculous. It ranked somewhere between the you forgot to take out the trash again and you just told the same story to my parents for the third time.

“I'm fine,” Nick said.

“You're trying to catch Santa again.” It wasn't a question.

“Third time's the charm.”

“That's not how that saying works when you've already failed twice.”

“Then it's the ‘persistence is a virtue’ time.” Nick finally glanced at her. Claire stood in her penguin pajama pants and the oversized Colorado Avalanche sweatshirt she'd stolen from him five years ago. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, arms folded. Her head tilted just slightly to the left, the way she did when she was deciding whether to laugh or sigh. Her mouth had settled on something in between.

“Do you even know what you're going to say when you catch him?” She crossed to stand next to the chair, her hand resting on his shoulder.

“I haven't really thought that far ahead.”

“I'm shocked.”

“I just want to know who it is, Claire.” Nick gestured toward the window and the white wall of snow beyond. “Don't you find it weird that someone in this neighborhood knows exactly what we need every single year?”

“Here we go again,” Claire muttered.

“I'm serious. That first Christmas, we'd been here six months. Six. We barely knew anyone. And somehow this person knew Ella would love a stuffed penguin—“

“Mr. Waddles,” Claire said, smiling despite herself.

“—that Finn wanted that specific LEGO set, and Mia needed sketch pencils for her art class. He also knew you wanted that cookbook from that chef you loved.” Nick turned from the window. “How? How does someone know all of that?”

“Maybe they paid attention. Maybe they cared.”

“Last year, he left you that fancy tea sampler that you'd mentioned once at the neighborhood barbecue and me the cordless drill I'd been eyeing on Amazon. I don’t remember telling anyone other than you about that. Once again, the kids all got exactly what they'd been hoping for.” Nick shook his head. “It's not normal, Claire. It's...”

“Thoughtful?”

“Invasive.” Nick turned back to the window.

Claire squeezed his shoulder. “You keep saying ‘he.’ Maybe the reason this person is so good at gift-giving is that she's a woman.”

Nick groaned. “He, she, whatever. The point is, how does anyone know so much about us and everyone else in the neighborhood?” He motioned toward the window. Parkside Court sat in a quiet pocket of Lakewood, one of those suburban streets that felt insulated from everything—from Denver to the east, from the mountains to the west, and anything that moved too fast. It was a private dead-end street with five houses lined on each side of a narrow lane, with the Herons' house sitting at the end where the road curved into a cul-de-sac. On a clear day, nothing happened on Parkside Court without Nick seeing it. Today, however, he could barely see past his mailbox.

The layout bred community. Kids played street hockey and rode their bikes on the road. Summer block parties meant tables down the center and everyone eating together. You couldn't come home without seeing neighbors, which made the mystery all the more maddening.

With Nick's perfect view, how was someone delivering presents to all eleven houses without ever getting caught?

“Why do you care so much?” Claire's voice was softer now. “I think it's a wonderful neighborhood tradition. In a world where people are constantly trying to one-up each other on social media, and everyone's so cynical, someone in this neighborhood actually does something kind and expects nothing in return. That's rare, Nick. That's special. Everyone else on the street thinks it's great to wake up on Christmas morning and find gifts on their porch. Why not just enjoy it?”

“I don't like the idea of someone knowing that much about us.” Nick frowned. “What if they're a serial killer?”

“I think you've been watching too many true crime documentaries.”

“I've only watched three this week.”

“It's Wednesday, Nick.”

“Mom?” Ella's voice drifted in from the hallway. “Can we start the movie now?”

Nick twisted in his chair as Claire turned to see their eight-year-old daughter standing in the doorway. She wore her pink pajama gown decorated with gold crowns. Her right hand was propped on her hip—a pose so precisely her mother’s that Nick had to press his lips together. She’d inherited Claire’s dark hair and his brown eyes, and somehow gotten the best parts of both their personalities: Claire’s warmth and his determination, though thankfully not his tendency to obsess over neighborhood mysteries.

“Yes, sweetie,” Claire said. “Let me make popcorn and hot chocolate, and we'll start.”

“Is Daddy going to watch?”

“Daddy's going to sit here and stare at the snow,” Nick said. “Very exciting stuff.”

“Can I watch for Santa with you?” Ella's face lit up with pure eight-year-old hope. “Do you think his reindeer can find our house in the storm?”

Nick felt a pang of guilt. Ella still believed—really believed—in Santa Claus. It was a kind of belief that led her to leave out cookies with specific instructions about which ones were for Santa and which were for the reindeer, “because they work hard too, Daddy.” She had no idea the presents that appeared on their porch every Christmas morning were from a neighbor, not the North Pole.

“Not tonight, pumpkin,” Nick said gently. “Santa's very shy. He only comes when everyone's asleep.”

Ella folded her arms, furrowed her brow, and fixed him with his own brown eyes. “But you're not going to be asleep.”

“Yes, well, I'm—” Nick held up a finger, found nothing behind it, and turned to Claire.

“Daddy's going to be disappointed,” Claire said, steering Ella toward the kitchen with an arm around her shoulders. “Because Santa's magic, and magic doesn't work when people are trying too hard to see it. But after Daddy falls asleep—which he will, because he always does—Santa will come, and tomorrow morning we'll have extra presents on the porch,” her voice softening as she started down the hall, “just like always.”

“Promises, promises,” Nick muttered.

Claire shot him a look over her shoulder as she guided Ella down the hall. “Maybe after you realize Santa's not coming because you're scaring him off with your CIA-level surveillance system, you'll come watch Elf with your family.” Her feet padded against the floor a couple of paces. “We'll save you some popcorn.”

Nick's shoulders stiffened as he settled deeper into the uncomfortable chair. 

“The movie's only ninety minutes. What could possibly happen?”

Nick wanted to remind her about the previously missed opportunities, with the doorbell camera footage being the only proof either visit had happened. Instead, he just nodded and turned back to the window.

The snow was coming down even harder now, fat flakes the size of cotton balls swirling in the orange glow of the streetlights. On his laptop, the weather radar showed no signs of the storm letting up.

The news had been calling it the worst blizzard since 1982—the Christmas Eve storm that had shut down the entire Front Range and left people stranded on I-25 for two days. The snow was falling at a rate of three inches per hour. The highways were closed, the Denver airport shut down, and emergency services were limited to life-threatening calls only. The official recommendation: stay home unless it's an absolute emergency. Which meant the neighborhood Santa—whoever he or she was—would either have to skip this year or be absolutely insane to go out in this weather.

And if they did go out? They'd be easy to catch.

Nick rechecked his camera feed. The snow was making it harder to see. He tested the motion sensor on the floodlight by tapping the screen. The light blazed to life outside, illuminating his front yard with stadium-quality brightness before shutting off again.

Perfect.

A flicker of movement on his phone caught his eye. Nick zoomed in. Brittany Nest was on her porch four houses up on the north side, dressed like she was going on an arctic expedition: a parka, snow pants, and a pom-pom beanie. Her phone was mounted on what appeared to be a professional stabilizer with a ring light attached. She swept her arm across the buried street like she was introducing it to someone, then said something to the camera with the practiced ease of someone who had never once been caught off guard by her own face. Then she panned slowly down the street, the ring light cutting through the snow.

Nick watched her sweep the camera across the neighborhood, then shifted in his chair. Could Brittany or her husband be Santa?

Claire followed Brittany's social media accounts along with hundreds of thousands of others. The woman noticed everything. She had to. It was her job to talk about what she noticed and make it sound interesting. That kind of attention was precisely what the neighborhood Santa required. Plus, she had five kids, aged three to fifteen, which meant she likely knew what every child on the street wanted. Her whole career was built on understanding what people wanted their lives to look like—a perfectly draped throw blanket, an artisan mug, morning light that didn't happen by accident—which wasn't so different from knowing what they needed. She'd lived here seven years—long enough to have learned something about everyone on the street.

He made a mental note and turned back to his surveillance.

From the basement, the opening notes of Elf drifted through the floor. Mia and Finn were already down there, claiming the good seats on the sectional.

Nick cracked open his first Red Bull and took a long drink.

“All right, Santa,” he said to the empty living room and the blizzard beyond the window. “Let's see what you've got.”

Outside, the wind howled, and the snow fell like a curtain between Nick and whatever truth was out there in the storm.