The best answer

The red velvet suit was stifling in the summer heat, but Bruce Sheppard had stopped noticing…

One hundred and fifty children will do that to a man. Kids with their sticky fingers and enormous eyes, their whispered wishes and gap-toothed grins, their parents hovering with phones raised like the paparazzi at a film premiere. The Auckland Zoo hummed with Christmas chaos around him, the Argus Fire party in full swing.

Bruce had lost count somewhere around child eighty-three. There’d been requests for iPads, PS6’s, for puppies, some new game he’d have never heard of called ‘trucks’, for something called a ‘Squishmallow’, and not one request for little brothers to disappear. He even spent a solid ten minutes laughing and talking nonsense with a girl called Mollie.

Then she sat down.

Twelve years old, maybe. That awkward age where you’re not quite sure if you still believe, but you’re not ready to stop pretending either. She had serious eyes and a quiet way about her that made Bruce sit up a little straighter in his Santa chair.

“And what would you like for Christmas?” he asked, the same question he’d posed a hundred times that afternoon.

She didn’t hesitate.

“Good memories.”

Bruce blinked. In twenty years of occasional Santa duty, he’d never heard that one. Not once.

“Good memories,” he repeated, letting the words settle. “For you, or for your family?”

The girl looked at him as if the answer were obvious. As if he’d asked whether the sky was blue or whether Christmas came in December.

“For my whole family.”

And there it was. No elaborate lists. No brand names. No price tags. Just a twelve-year-old girl who understood something that most adults forget; that the best gifts aren’t things at all.

“That,” he said softly, “is the best answer I’ve ever heard.”

She smiled then, small and knowing, and slipped off his knee to rejoin the party.

He thought about all the wishes he’d heard that day. The toys that would break by February. The gadgets that would be forgotten by Easter. And then he thought about her.

Good memories. For my whole family.

Bruce smiled.