Where Santa Dwelleth, Forever After

By Lesley Simeral

Each Christmas, children and adults alike know in their hearts the wonderment of the Christian Christmas season. It is a time of the year that brings forth a palpable, ethereal feeling to those who believe. Where Santa Dwelleth, Forever After is a most unusual fantastical Christmas journey, allowing the reader to imagine the season in an unimaginable celestial way. The story tells of a young girl, Les, who is escorted by an angel to a heavenly realm of spiritual knowledge. Here she learns many incredible things, including the truth about Santa Claus. The story, set in the simpler times of 1951, follows Les through spiritual twists and turns, instructive angels, talking wise trees and animals—all of whom are preparing her for an unexpected sacred meeting. This Christmas message is packed with the uplifting energies of peace, love, and joy that will leave the adult reader with a heightened perspective of the wonders of Christmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640277571

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Where Santa

Dwelleth,

Forever After

Lesley Simeral

Copyright © 2017 Lesley Simeral

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

ISBN 978-1-64027-756-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64027-758-8 (Hard Cover)

ISBN 978-1-64027-757-1 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

All great ages have been ages of belief. I mean, when there was any extraordinary power of performance, when great national movements began, when arts appeared, when heroes existed, when poems were made, the human soul was in earnest.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Simpler Times

Of simpler times we knew

the way,

for life had not yet become

the complicated day . . .

May peace and love fill

the voids

and simpler times resound

with joy . . .

From My Heart

Acknowledgements

To my Lord and Savior Jesus.

I am humbled, and I thank Him

To the memory of Rita Fettel,

teacher, mentor, friend—

for twenty-seven years of spiritual learning

I wish to thank Page Publishing for their support of this story and for the uplifting personalities of the Page staff.

A very special thanks and my everlasting gratitude to Mark and Joanie Lavin. Mark’s insightful and meticulous efforts kept my thoughts and ideas on track.

To my wonderful little sister Laurie Lars Ketelsen, who has always believed in me.

To my brother William Billy Knight Simeral, a great big brother.

To my loving, loyal friends, who stayed very close to me through the years, you mean so much to me.

I couldn’t have accomplished any of this without your support: Gail Steffes, Alice Jara, Donna and Bill Baxter, Anna Howard, Judy Swindle, Betty Debickero, Pat Summers, Jen Pope, Karen Heizer and Gary Downing.

To Pat Muth, author, whose ability to hear beyond the static of the world enthusiastically directed me to my publisher.

Thank you all.

Setting the Stage

Winter came early that year, the fifth season of my youth. Snowflakes fell from the gray skies in billowing waves of floating, white atomic particles. No two snowflakes were alike—geometrically speaking, that is. I knew that, because my big brother, Billy, had told me so. Big brothers are good for that sort of thing.

Winter came early that year, December 14, 1951, and our quiet little Midwestern village was knee-deep in snow. The streets were rutted with narrow paths where the automobile tires had plowed through, and each succeeding car drove along those same tried-and-true ruts for fear of being snowbound.

Snow was everywhere, and to a five-year-old who loved to embrace nature and all of its seasonal elements, it was an endless playground of innocent fun. Old Man Winter’s snow was a never-ending time of spirited exhilaration. Snow forts; snow angels; carrot-nosed, coal-eyed snowmen; snowball fights with the neighborhood kids; and, my favorite, sledding down the big, sloping hill at Spring Rock Park. My teeth chattered from the cold all day, all winter long; but what a small price to pay, those chattering teeth of mine, for all of that innocent play and unadorned fun.

Winter came early that year, and Americans across the Fruited Plain were eager to settle into their comfortable routine of home, family, and the prevailing wisdom that we, as a nation, owed our successful existence to a fundamental belief in God. This belief had carried the average American citizen through many troubled times. I was only five years old, but I already knew of the great wars fought and the great depressions suffered. However, I also know that Americans had that comforting blanket of God and family to lead them through the darkest of times.

As with all children, for me, time was an abundant and seemingly endless resource. The days were long and fun, the nights serene with safety. A child’s life in America was, for the most part, a comfortable paradigm of innocence and family routine.

The America I knew was an epic land of simple virtues. We were a country that embraced moral excellence by virtue of acknowledging the Ten Commandments, a nation of people who believed in their patriotic duty and that we had been graced by God. As such, we stood ready and willing to serve our nation’s ideals, as captured in the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

America took to heart these words from our Founding Fathers to mean the noble preservation of human hope. That was the America I knew in the fifth season of my youth.

Now as I look back, I cannot emphasize enough the sincere importance and fundamental meaning of family to the average American in the middle of the twentieth century. We were a nation of families, and the family reigned supreme. The family was considered the inner workings of our country, the insoluble thread that held the tenets of God and country together—a red, white, and blue fabric waving gracefully over our nation.

God, family, country . . . it was a simple formula for success that produced the uncomplicated notion of simplicity. America in 1951 was not a particularly complicated culture. It had its favorite traditions of honoring patriotism, holy beliefs, and yes, its favorite sport of, what else, baseball! God, family, and country were the call letters of simpler times. They were the principles that spoke to the preamble of a child’s innocent day.

Looking back at that time through the rearview mirror of human experience, we were not a perfect people, culture, or nation. We suffered from the chronic human condition of error and imperfection. However, despite those cultural imperfections, and the country’s lagging inclusiveness toward equality, that era still had a guileless element of naiveté that seems to have been lost in today’s world, where a malignant body of intoxicating forces exercises its brutal muscles on America’s youth, painfully excoriating the American family.

But nothing could pull the American family asunder in the 1950s. Though the family core had endured much, it had stayed intact precisely because of its simple virtues and elementary belief in God, family, and country. Leading up to the 1950s, the American family had struggled through two decades of historical torment. According to the New York Times, those were times of dire poverty that only a damning depression could bring. And they were times, as England’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill so aptly put it, of the gathering storm of war. Our parents and grandparents had endured over a decade of economic struggle; and they, in their longsuffering endurance, had delivered their children from the crushing poverty of the Great Depression.

Then came the gathering storm, World War II. The attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had declared it so. No child in America was unaffected by that piece of history. It was our patriotic duty to remember that infamous day, an event so horrific and shocking that it would live forever in the minds and sadden hearts of every American of that generation. Despite the disastrous sneak attack, our dutiful parents and grandparents answered the call to arms and, in their unceremonious courage, delivered us from evil.

As war gave way to peace, the American culture was ready, once again, to embrace its traditions, its holidays, and the certain hope of simpler and more prosperous times. Coming out of the Great Depression and the aftermath of a world war, America’s innocence had been wounded, for sure, but Americans held true to their belief in the precept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And always lodged in the American heart were the hallowed grounds of hope, inspiring a richness of faith believing. Ordinary Americans viewed that post-war time as being on the brink of prosperity and accomplishment. From the get-go, we were a nation of can-do accomplishers; and now, with a renewal of the American spirit, we were unstoppable.

The home fires were lit with these basic beliefs, and—one by one, family by family—our mothers and fathers built a new America for their children. With this ambition in mind, every child born in that time was blessed with a certificate of innocence that had been keenly protected and gifted to us by our parents and grandparents. They had gone before us to clear the way so that children born into that era would have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their mother and father’s sacrifices.

And so it was within the very essence and disposition of those simpler days of innocence and new beginnings, and driven by my desire to meet Santa Claus, I would travel on winged flight to meet my Christmas hero, Santa. On December 14, 1951, during the height of the Christmas season, through a child’s rather un-extraordinary belief in old St. Nick, I would experience the revelation of a lifetime. On that snowy night in December, I entered through an ethereal door to a celestial realm that brought me face to face, spirit to spirit, not only to Santa Claus, but to the feet of My Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.

In that moment of dead reckoning, I learned things that I would not fully understand for another two generations of my life. But also, in those light-filled moments with Santa was the seeding of a silent moral compass that eventually guided me to a life of belief in Jesus. Straight is the gate and narrow is the way is the trusted and devoted footpath for those who believe in Christ.

To a child’s belief, however, at that five-year-old moment, it was all about believing in the ultimate gift giver. To the European cultures, that gift giver is generally known as St. Nicholas, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas, Pere Noel, or Sinterklaas. To those in America, that once-a-year gift-giver is quite simply my beloved . . . Santa Claus.

Who is this gift-giver whom we have tagged with so