Beards, Brunscrackers and Snowflake Kisses

By Carol Nickles

Widow Carol MacKenzie always felt an affinity for Christmas. During a casual internet search, she stumbles upon a Santa School website. Carol applies and is accepted into Santa School as a solo Mrs. Claus.
Attending Snowflake Visions Santa school is life-changing. Carol learns how to wrangle reindeer, American sign language holiday greetings, and meets a worldwide community of like-minded people, including one beautiful bearded single Santa musician who lives one hour from her west Michigan home.
Charlie Johnson has a decade-long resume of performing as Santa. A Mrs. Claus has never been part of his repertoire.
Santa friends encourage Charlie to pursue Carol. Meanwhile, Carol’s sister-in-law Penny pushes Carol to try an online dating site. Which maneuver, if any, will succeed?
Through a few unexpected twists and holiday surprises, a happy finale prevails.

• Language: Unknown
• Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781509246458

Carol Nickles

Carol Nickles is a romance novelist based in Western Michigan. She has a Master's Degree in Clothing and Textiles from Michigan State University and has been a faculty member at both Utah and Michigan State Universities. She is a quilt artist and a professional Mrs. Claus.

Book preview

Wonder what the guys are up to? Carol rolled the mini lipstick sample over her lips, stowed the remaining free samples in her handbag, and crept out of the makeup room. Down the hall, rock music blared. She slipped into the men’s makeover classroom. A buried sensation surfaced. Heat flamed her face just as when she mistakenly entered the hombre’s room at the Ranchero Restaurant. Yikes.

No dimly lit cavern like the women were assigned. No self-applied makeup. No meager amounts of blushes, brushes, or pots of glitter.

Red leather barber chairs trimmed in shiny chrome lined three sides of the generously lit room. Heaps, piles, and mounds of lotions, makeup, glitters, and sprays teetered on counters and tables. Booted Santas fidgeted, their knees bent to their chests, their butts in red leather, their beards resting atop black plastic barber bibs.

A bevy of stylists, sporting a rainbow range of hair colors, a measuring tape range of hair length, tattooed, bedecked in body adornments—nose rings, eyebrow studs, and hemp-twined bracelets, flitted around the Santas, combing, curling, cutting, spritzing, spraying and fawning.

Carol grinned. The contrast between the two grooming areas spoke volumes. No fawning in the Mrs. Claus makeover room. All the flattering was in this room. Santa is the man.

Praise for Carol Nickles

In Praise of THUMB FIRE DESIRE

Nickle’s story, following the Civil War, is full of things plain and rich: love and work, fire and disaster, the author’s forebears, black kid shoes from Bloomingdale’s Department Store on the Lower East Side of New York and a genuine Chesapeake Bay Ducking Dog. Nickles joins the Midwestern women writers—Angela Flournoy, Lorrie Moore, Ling Ma—who remember and recreate the life and loss of that time.

~ John Crowley, fantasy, science and historical author

~*~

Like its heroine seamstress Ginny Dahlke, THUMB FIRE DESIRE deftly pulls together threads of Michigan’s history, Native and immigrant cultures, and natural beauty. Meticulous research, poetic passages, and touches of humor enhance this engaging story.

~ Nan Sanders Pokerwinski, memoir author

Beards, Brunscrackers,

and Snowflake Kisses

by

Carol Nickles

Christmas Cookies Series

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Beards, Brunscrackers and Snowflake Kisses

COPYRIGHT © 2022 by

Carol Andreae-Nickles

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Contact Information: [e-mail]

Cover Art by Tina Lynn Stout

The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

PO Box 708

Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

Publishing History

First Edition, 2022

Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-4645-8

Christmas Cookies Series

Published in the United States of America

Dedication

This story is dedicated to all the lovely people who bring joy and hope by portraying Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. And special recognition to my Santa, Charlie Johnson, a genuine, selfless man who embodies love, humor, and goodwill.

Chapter 1

Unexpected early snow fell overnight. It powdered the pines heralding the Glacier, Michigan, Convention Center entrance, blanketed the holly-berry-red pickup trucks parallel parked on Main Street, and stuck to the beards of the jolly men arriving from all corners of the United States and beyond. Santa Clauses had come to town.

Carol MacKenzie maneuvered her sporty, four-wheel-drive car between a utility van emblazoned with a Sew for Santa logo and a double cab truck, decked in silver-rimmed wheels and a red reindeer nose fixed between the headlights. She took her foot from the brakes and extracted the key from the ignition.

The Lords and Ladies of the Holiday season, the Santas and Mrs. Clauses, exited their vehicles and headed to the town’s Convention Center, ablaze with early morning sunlight reflecting the mirrored-glass exterior. The annual convening of Snowflake Visions Santa School began promptly at nine o’clock.

Carol squinted her eyes, rubbed the tip of her cold nose, and smiled. I was meant for this. She was born two days before Christmas, December twenty-third, sixty-one years ago. According to the handwritten entry in her baby book, she’d been scrubbed, packaged in a red felt stocking, and presented to her primigravida mother and her awestruck father in the maternity ward of Brotherly Love Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In eighth grade, Sister Mary Verda selected her to play the part of Christmas Carol in the annual St. Edward’s School Christmas pageant. So, Mother created another red felt costume for her—an A-line shift festooned with pointy green leaves and scarlet berries.

Today Carol chose red again—stovepipe-tight velveteen slacks tucked inside pewter-buckled, black-heeled boots and a red-and-white wool cardigan sweater knitted in a traditional Icelandic pattern. She styled her auburn hair in a youthful ponytail that cascaded from high on the back of her head and spritzed the updo with peppermint-scented, heavy-hold hair spray. Enamel-painted, candy-cane striped earrings dotted her earlobes, and two red-and-white bangle bracelets adorned her left wrist.

She opened the car door, fanned her boot toe on the ground, and tested the asphalt for slipperiness. Best to avoid the shiny spots. Keeping her gaze on her feet and her arms close to her sides, she walked vigilantly to the salted sidewalk. Crisp October air, laden with the tang of wood smoke, swished and rearranged the desiccated leaves dominating an industrial-grade welcome mat. She pushed against a tall, brass-trimmed door, stepped inside, and merged into a boisterous, hallooing strand of Christmas Mr. and Mrs. icons cramming the lobby. Was I meant for this?

****

I can’t wait to tell Penny all about today. Carol pulled her seat belt across her lap and adjusted the car defroster to full blast. She fingered the wooden medallion that nestled between her breasts and hung from a green-and-white striped ribbon draped across the back of her neck. The lightweight pine construction, shaped like a round tree ornament, featured a three-dimensional Santa face and a six-branched snowflake. The Santa emblem couldn’t have weighed down Carol’s excitement if it had been a three-pound chiseled chain. First checking the rearview mirror, she backed out of the lot and drove to Penny and Jeff’s house.

A burst of retracting sunshine penetrated the gray snow clouds over Wildrose Lane.

The car tires crunched on the icy remnants of yesterday’s wintry mix as she finessed a winding driveway leading to a stone house tucked into woods studded with pine, oak, hemlock, and maple trees. Gauzy smoke puffs streamed from the chimney and lent ethereal character to the basketweave brick orientation.

Staying with Penny during the week of Santa School was the icing on the cookie.

Penny waited in the fieldstone-frame doorway with her arms open. The sinking sun brightened the pixie smile on Penny’s face and the lemony strips streaked through her blonde hair.

A Goldendoodle puppy bolted from the house and jumped on Carol’s pants.

Cody Bear, hello, love. Carol knelt and buried her face in the puppy’s fur, inhaling a mixture of fertile earth and fabric softener. The odd combination of scents was no surprise, considering Cody divided his day trolling the surrounding forests and snuggling at