The Year Santa Brought A Doll by Patricia Bradley

Pat, her sister, and the redhaired dolls.

When I was a kid, every year about the middle of October, a wonderful item arrived in our mailbox. The Sears and Roebuck Toy Catalog. The first day or so, my parents made my sister and me draw straws to see who got to look through it first.

I think my sister had an inside track since she almost always got the short straw. And sometimes, because I was the older sister, I was supposed to let her go first. I still don’t know who made up that rule.

Sometimes, I would offer to do her chores if she’d let me get the first look at it. Not sometimes. Every time if she drew the short straw. She’s the one who sometimes agreed to our deal. But oh, was it worth it.

Do you know how many pages of cap pistols there were in the catalog? I do. Eight. Eight wonderful pages of Roy Roger or Gene Autry toy pistols that I could image strapped to my side. I read every word of every page and dreamed of riding my stick horse, ready to catch the bad guys with my toy guns. I may have spent a few hours dreaming of practicing my fast draw, as well.

Roy Rogers and Trigger

Of course, this was during an innocent age where toy pistols were just that—toys. The age of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger...The time of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. I think it was a much simpler time, but I digress.

My sister, on the other hand, went straight for the dolls and dollhouses. And tea sets. Girly things. She wasn’t the tomboy I was. One year, somehow my mother got it in her head that I was missing out on something. I was eight years old and had never asked for nor received a doll for Christmas.

“Wouldn’t you like a doll, like this one?” She pointed to a dainty, red-haired little doll in a cute little dress.

“Sure, but did you see the Roy Rogers cap guns with the leather holster?” I could already feel them strapped around my waist. Did I mention it came with a shiny star badge? I could see it in my mind’s eye—I would be the sheriff, and my sister and the other kids in the neighborhood would be the train robbers that I would track down and bring to justice.

I marked every day off the calendar with a red crayon. Christmas Eve I barely slept, and at 4:30 Christmas morning, I woke my sister, knowing we wouldn’t get in trouble if the favored child was the one who woke our parents up at that time of the morning.

Minutes later we crept down the hall. “What if Santa hasn’t come?” she asked.

“He’s been here,” I assured her. I’d already been up an hour earlier and peeped in the living room and had seen my sister’s tricycle. Our parents must have heard us because they met us before we made it to the living room.

“What are you two doing up so early?” Our dad asked with a wink. “Never mind, go see what Santa brought you.”

We tore into the room and I frantically searched for the flat box I knew my cap guns would be in. No flat box. But there was a rather large rectangular box with my name on it. Maybe Santa brought me a double set! Or maybe there was a pair of cowboy boots in the box! I tore into it and…lifted out the doll with curly red hair.

“Do you like it?” My mom seemed to hold her breath.

I looked up into her face. Even at eight years old I knew I couldn’t say anything other than I loved it. Somehow I manage to make my mama think it was what I’d always wanted.

It would be a few years before I realized the real meaning of Christmas…celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior. But even at eight, God was working on me. Otherwise, there is no way I could’ve understood how much it meant to my mother for me to be happy with the doll.

Oh, and later that afternoon, God blessed me with a present from my godparents. Yep, a deluxe set of Roy Rogers cap pistols with real leather holsters.

                             

USA Today Best Selling author Patricia Bradley is a Selah and Reader’s Choice Award winner, and a Carol and Daphne du Maurier award finalist.

She and her two cats call Northeast Mississippi home--the South is also where she sets most of her books. Her seventeen novels include Heartwarming’s Matthew’s Choice and The Christmas Campaign, and four romantic suspense series: The Logan Point series, the Memphis Cold Case Novels, the Natchez Trace Park Rangers, and the Pearl River Series. Fatal Witness, the second book in the Pearl River series set in the Cumberland Plateau area above Chattanooga releases February 6, 2024.

Bradley is a popular teacher at writing conference and has been the keynote speaker at several. When she has time, she likes to throw mud on a wheel and see what happens.

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