Manslaughter, Santa Claus, and a Hatchet

A Coming-of-Age Christmas Story

The Nightmare and the Wifely Decree

“You better fix it,” my wife said. I’m pretty sure she had used some expletives, and her tone was low and decisive, the kind of tone she uses when she knows that I have no retort, no recourse, no privilege of the word “but.” Nightmares had been keeping my son from sleeping for several days, and it was entirely my fault. Let’s back up.

The Invocation of Hatchet Foster

I’m not one of those fathers who merely loves his children. My love is absolutely conditional, and the going rate for my love is some combination of the following: humor, kindness, curiosity, imagination, and work ethic.

To be fair, I don’t expect my kids to magically possess these qualities. I put more stock in nurture than nature, so I do my part to help my kids be lovable. Sometimes my nurturing works, sometimes it goes sideways. This is a story about how it sometimes works because it goes sideways.

The idea came when I was cutting back some ivy that was strangling one of our Live Oak Trees. I pulled out a pocket knife and carved a heart into the bark, and then I carved two sets of initials inside the heart— H.F. + LM. The initials were random, details I would fill in momentarily.

I typed up a letter in an ornate cursive font. I printed it out, rolled it up, and burned the edges on the stove, soaked it in coffee, and dried it in the oven. Then I printed out a fake Romanian stamp and glued it onto an envelope, I crumpled the envelope and rolled in dirt before stuffing the letter inside and speeding to the post office.

My wife and kids would be back soon, so I needed to draw Shilpa into this adventure quickly. Shilpa was the woman who regularly ran our post office. We live in a rural area and the mail trucks don’t come down our street, so our neighborhood has P.O. Boxes, which is to say that we’re pretty cozy with Shilpa. 

I told her I wanted to send my kids on a little adventure, and that was all I had to say. She pulled out a box of rubber stamps and doctored up the letter to make it look like it had traveled through a dozen third world countries before arriving in our P.O. Box. 

After that, I went home and waited. 

Fifteen minutes later my wife pulled into the driveway. Her dubious smile countered the enthusiastic astonishment of my kids. While my daughter’s energy leaned into the adventure, my son remained reluctant. He’s more cowardly lion than scarecrow. 

Immediately they asked if I was behind the letter, and I didn't lie, but I didn’t tell the truth. “What letter? What are you talking about?” And then my daughter read it aloud:

Dear Residents~ 

I write to you from a dungeon somewhere in Eastern Europe where I’ve been imprisoned by a sorcerer. This has been my home for many years, but your home was mine when I was a boy. I built the stone fireplace with my own father. If you require proof of this claim, I believe you’ll find it at the northwestern most tree on the property. 

Because I have spent so much time in the very place where you now live and dream, I have faith that you must be in possession of kind souls and lovely spirits, and it is with this faith that I ask for your assistance in escaping this prison. If you’re willing to help, please draw a spiral into the earth as a symbol of your willingness, one that my tippler will be able to see as she flies overhead, and I will be in touch with further instruction. 

In faith and gratitude,

Hatchet Foster

I faked ignorance and marveled at the mystery. I didn’t overdo it the way an overzealous adult sometimes speaks down to children. I even introduced a little apprehension, suggesting that we probably shouldn’t mess around with this type of risk. My son nodded, like, “Yeah, dad makes a good point,” but my daughter is less about words and more about actions.

As soon as she verified Hatchet Foster’s initials as one of the two within the heart on the Live Oak, she found a stick and drew a spiral in the ground, and immediately they both looked skyward. We live in a canyon where more people have chickens than don’t. The neighborhood is basically one giant bowl of bird seed, so the odds were in my favor that a bird would fly overhead. And one did, but it was a hawk, followed by a pair of doves, and then a crow. After about an hour, a single pigeon flew overhead, and I was able to sell that as a tippler.

“What now, dad? What now?” 

“Yeah, Norm,” said my wife, cocking an eyebrow, “what now?” My wife could tell that I had set up enormous expectations, and obviously, she had some concerns about the direction of this little adventure. 

“Why are you asking me? I don’t know any sorcerers, and I’ve never met this Hatchet Foster dude. I guess we just have to wait and see.” Of course, this was my way of saying that I needed to recharge my creativity and figure out my next move. I definitely wanted to draw this adventure out so that it was more of an epic.

Carnage in the Rose Garden

I drafted another letter, this one verifying that Hatchet Foster’s tippler reported back and that Hatchet would be in touch with next steps. The next few days were fit for the Norm Leonard Hall of Fame as it pertained to my favorite days of life. My children overflowed with wonder. They looked at everything like it could be something magical, some portal to adventure—a rock could be watching, the cat could be a double agent, the roots of a tree could be phone lines to another dimension. And I believe as much. Okay, not literally, but I do believe in the sublime adventure, that mysteries are everywhere if you just gaze in the right light, if you saunter out to the edge of imagination, if you’re bold enough to wonder the words, Why not?

About once a week, a few hours after sundown, the pack of coyotes that patrols our canyon take down a deer. When they do so, we hear them howl and yip and bark. It comes on all at once, like an explosion of depraved hunger and then peters out after a minute or so of sustained melee. It’s haunting and sad and wonderful and majestic all at once. As I was wondering, trying to come up with the next sequence in this Hatchet Foster adventure, my daughter and I were on a hike where we came across one of the pack’s recent kills, a six-point buck picked clean, nothing but bones and antlers left.

“Can we take the antlers?” my daughter asked.

I looked at the antlers. They were still attached to the skull, which was still attached to the vertebrae. They would have to be twisted off.

“I suppose we can, but by we, I mean you.” I want my daughter to fall in love and have a great, fulfilling relationship some day (see “Are you there, Judy Blume? It's me, Norm.” for more on this) but not before I want her to be self-reliant. To her credit, she kneeled down, grabbed by the buck by the antlers, twisted, and popped its head off.

She carried the skull and antlers all the way home, and I researched how to clean them. You can boil them in a stock pot, which I’m pretty sure my wife would have something to say about, or you could bury them in the garden and let the insects and worms do what they do. Which is what we did. Right between one of our two rose bushes.

The next morning, we woke up, and the skull and antlers had been unearthed, the garden had been thrashed, and there were feathers everywhere. Not chicken feathers either—we know what those look like. My guess is that a rat got a whiff of the deer skull and then went toe-to-toe (or forepaw-to-talon?) with an owl or a hawk. My son, though, had a different interpretation.

He was certain the sorcerer’s imps had tracked Hatchet Foster’s tippler and killed it. And he was certain we would end up in the Eastern European dungeon or, worse, dead as a deer, at the hands or tentacles of dark magic. This was when his nightmares started, and this was when my wife made her decree.

Instincts and Improvisations for the Win

As a writer, I’ve learned that most storytelling solutions come from an intangible place, some creative energy you didn’t notice the first time around. That is, you didn’t notice the potential, you didn’t allow yourself to feel the possibilities, to intuit all of the promise. Sometimes it’s as simple as turning something sideways, upside down, or inside out. I remembered as much and whipped up another letter from Hatchet Foster.

This one brought good news. Hatchet revealed that the sorcerer did indeed order his imps to follow the tippler to our home so that Hatcher’s co-conspirators might be snuffed out. Luckily, Hatchet said, the spirit of a buck was on our property, and it saved the tippler and chased off the imps. As long as the buck’s spirit was with us—and buck spirits are renowned for their loyalty—then we would be safe for the foreseeable eternity. That night my son slept deeply and dreamt sweetly for fourteen hours.

Traditions with a Twist

Now that I had instilled a little confidence and security, it was time to twist the knife ever so slightly. The usual traditions are fine—Christmas presents, midnight kisses at the New Year, 47 beers on St. Patrick’s Day—but I enjoy adding my own touch, and I thought this little adventure made for a great opportunity. So I penned another letter.

In the next correspondence, Hatchet Foster revealed that an elf was also in the sorcerer’s Eastern European prison, one of Santa’s who made the naughty list a few times and had been in temporary exile from the North Pole, eventually ending up in the sorcerer’s clink. Hatchet had beat said elf at poker to pass the time, enough that the elf owed him a favor. It was in the elf’s best interest to help out Hatchet as it would make him a viable candidate for the nice list. So, Hatchet relayed, the elf arranged for Santa Claus to deliver a message by way of his usual Christmas rounds.

This raised the stakes on Christmas. Sure, it came with the usual bacchanalia of peace on earth and a capitalistic orgy of toys and treats, but the kids knew there would also be another step in this adventure. And they were not disappointed.

Santa delivered a letter, confirming his knowledge of Hatchet Foster and the Leonard kids’ agreement to help stage a prison break. He also offered words of commendations and a few gifts to help on the journey—chief among them a trowel, a compass, and the first few pieces of a hand-cut puzzle. Santa’s post script suggested that more puzzle pieces would be forthcoming, perhaps from unexpected places.

When you’re a writer who’s been involved with film production, theater, podcasts, and other creative collaborations, there’s no shortage of willing participants when it comes to shenanigans. I enlisted several friends to deliver puzzle pieces, sometimes straight to the house, sometimes around town when we were out at dinner or running errands.

The best was when it was a friend my kids didn’t know and the friend would play it like we were total strangers, running up on us breathless, relaying that an elegant woman with long, gray hair had asked them to deliver a piece of cedar with letters burned backwards into the wood grain. Over the next few weeks, the kids collected all the puzzle pieces, assembled the puzzle, and used a mirror to read the message. Later, a Hatchet Foster letter would explain that the backwards writing was meant to encourage the mirror reading since witches, warlocks, sorcerer’s and other unsavory types are unable to see anything in a reflection.

While the kids were assembling the puzzle pieces and trying to decode the message, I was busy searching Youtube tutorials on how to build a puzzle box. I filled it with the next stage of the adventure and buried it on top of a hill a couple miles behind our house. I had to time this burial perfectly. When the kids were three and five, we buried a cigar box of treasure (bubble gum, action figures, and a handful of silver dollars) on a bike trail near Cook’s Corner. We made a treasure map, the whole deal, and when we to dig it up a few weeks later—nothing. It was gone. Either we got looted (never a shortage of ne’er-do-wells in and around Cook’s Corner) or the rain shifted the earth. I dug for the better part of an afternoon trying to recoup the booty and got nothing but a bruised ego and a, well, sore booty.

Anyhow, Hatchet Foster’s puzzle gave the kids directions and instructions, which made sense of the compass and the trowel. They hiked to the hilltop and came down with the puzzle box and nothing but wonder about what was inside.

When Everything Fell Apart; i.e., The Unintentional Killing of St. Nick

My daughter had been quiet. She’s more of an introvert like me, so it wasn’t totally unusual, but she seemed heavy, too, like she was burdened with the weight of Santa Claus himself. And so she was.

She called my wife and I to her room, and she started to hyperventilate, heaving crying. She told us how she opened my laptop to search something for homework. The same laptop where I was keeping all the notes about this little adventure. I had made the incredibly dumb—world class stupid—mistake of leaving the document open.

She saw the words, Hatchet Foster, and I already had her curiosity ramped up to Alice-in-Wonderland levels, so of course she read it. In those few seconds, she realized that I was behind Hatchet Foster. And if I was behind Hatchet Foster, I was also behind Santa Claus. And more than likely the Easter Bunny. The tooth Fairy. All the traditional childlike wonder.

I killed the lot of them in a matter of seconds.

Added to this, she made the discovery a couple months previous (this little adventure was almost half a year deep at this point) and she had been going along to keep up the magic for her brother. But something about it felt disingenuous to her, the pretending, the ruse. Her sweet little heart couldn’t take it. And she had to unburden herself. “Still,” she said, “I want to keep it going for Sammers” (our nickname for her brother).

As heartbroken as I was, I was also heartened. The entire thing was about fun, about encouraging them to dream and to wonder, to imagine and to pursue, and although the chase had come to an end for her, she recognized the joy in creating the adventure for someone else. And that’s exactly what we did.

She helped Sam crack the code of the puzzle box to expose the next set of clues. And then she and I drew out the adventure for Sam for another year or so. We wrapped it up at the next Christmas. We brought in more puzzles, we devised more twists and turns, we fleshed out characters—the elegant woman with the long gray hair being Lila Monroe, Hatchet’s one true love—and we empowered Sammers to free Hatchet Foster from the sorcerer’s dungeon, which happened to be in an alternate dimension.

Hatchet used Santa Claus again to deliver a letter of gratitude and a token to remember him by. They both hang in my office now, which we call The Magical Imaginarium.

Several of my friends who knew of this little project often expressed concern that I might be psychologically damaging my children. Might be? I definitely did. But I think they’d both tell you it was worth it. And some day when they have kids, we’ll definitely have to resurrect Hatchet Foster and see what the next adventure brings. I could see it actually taking us to Eastern Europe, ya know, maybe raise the stakes a little. Nothing like manslaughter on a global scale to create some good ol’ fashioned family memories.

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Thanks for reading, subscribing, and sharing. Some of my more adventurous friends suggested I could turn this gag into a business, something similar to that David Fincher movie, The Game, but, ya know, for kids. What are your thoughts on that?