This morning I drove out to that storage place, gave the man in the office Walts name, and he walked me down to unit 114, and when he rolled up the door and I saw what my frugal husband had been hiding for nineteen years, I had to lean on the wall, because it was nothing I feared.
The unit was full of toys. Bicycles, dollhouses, wagons, board games, all new, all sorted by age and gender on neat shelves.
The storage unit my penny-pinching husband secretly paid for nineteen years was not hiding anything shameful, it was a workshop and warehouse for the toys he repaired and gathered to give away to needy children every Christmas.
Walt, it turned out, had grown up dirt poor, the kind of poor where Christmas morning meant nothing under the tree, and it had marked him his whole life. And in secret, for nineteen years, he had been playing Santa Claus for children who would otherwise have nothing.
He collected broken toys, fixed them up like new in that unit, bought others on clearance all year long, and every December he delivered them, anonymously, to families who could not afford Christmas, to shelters, to the childrens hospital. Hundreds of children, every year, had a Christmas because of my secretly generous husband.
The reason he saved every penny, the reason he never spent a dollar without turning it over twice, was not stinginess at all. It was so he could afford to give hundreds of poor children a Christmas morning, quietly, telling no one, not even me.
There was a note in the unit, in his hand: I never had a Christmas as a boy, and I never forgot how it felt. So every year I make sure some kids who would go without do not have to. I kept it quiet because giving should not be about the giver. If you found this, my love, please, keep it going if you can. There are always children who need a Christmas. It has been the great joy of my life.
I wept in that unit full of a poor boys determination that no child suffer the empty Christmases he had known.
I could not let it stop. This past Christmas, with help from our church and the friends I told, we carried on Walts secret mission. Hundreds of children woke to presents this year because of a man who is gone but whose kindness is not.
My frugal husband, who I half feared was hiding money or worse, had been secretly being Santa Claus for nineteen years. Unit 114 was his workshop, and it was the most beautiful thing I ever found. I keep it going now, in his name. Every child who wakes to a gift is my Walt, still giving, still making sure no child knows the empty Christmas he once did.