Memories: A One-Horse Open Sleigh
We married in late October, 1992. One day shortly after our honeymoon, Jim came home from work beaming from ear to ear. “Guess what Keith has!” he said.
I couldn’t imagine. Keith was Jim’s best friend and had a reputation for buying the most unusual things at estate sales and auctions.
“KEITH BOUGHT A ONE-HORSE OPEN SLEIGH AND SAID HE’LL SELL IT TO ME!”
In Clifton Park, New York, every Christmas season from 1992 through 2017, the locally-built hundred-year-old sleigh came out of our garage to sit under the front lamppost. We hung a wreath on front and placed wrapped boxes and evergreens in the seats. Our friends’ kids and our nieces have photos in the sleigh.
One year, Jim set it up after the boys next door were home from school and in for the night. The next morning, they looked out the window and excitedly proclaimed to their parents that Santa was in the neighborhood! His sleigh was next door!
(One of those boys was Joe Vellano, who grew up to play in the NFL. We didn’t stay in touch with the family after they moved. I wonder if he and his brother remember the time Santa’s sleigh was next door.)
We decided not to bring the sleigh to Tybee. We would have nowhere to display it. It wouldn’t look right under a palm tree. It should stay in the area where it was built.
None of the local museums wanted it. We ended up donating it to the Town of Whitehall to use in their holiday display. We delivered it on a snowy day in November 2018. The town employees were delighted the sleigh was brought to them by a fellow with a bushy white beard wearing red and green.
On December 30, 2018, during my sister’s family’s traditional holiday visit, we had Sunday brunch in a restaurant overlooking icy Lake George. It would be their last Christmas visit to upstate New York, because Jim and I were moving to Tybee in February. We had boxes packed and movers scheduled.
After lunch, we drove to nearby Whitehall to see the sleigh, and I took the picture that ended up being the last one of Jim. His funeral was six days later, in the Church he had helped decorate for Christmas. His last words to our Christmas guests, when they left on the morning of December 31 to catch their flight home to Georgia, were “See you on the Island.”
