Page 26 of The Santa Rules
“It could be self-sustaining that way,” he says.
“Precisely!”
“I could put a box at the fire station to collect donations,” Hardy offers, his eyes dancing with excitement.
“That would work better. One at the school might make kids suspicious. I can reach out to some local businesses too.”
“Okay, this is a good start. I’m feeling better about everything. Now we just need to plan the layout of the room,” Hardy says.
I scribble down some reminders in my notebook just as Avery bursts into the room.
“Is the pizza here?”
“Almost,” Hardy assures her, holding up the app to show her the tracker.
“Can I help with your project now?” Avery asks as she hops on a chair and leans onto the kitchen table as Isaac takes a seat across from her looking only mildly uninterested.
“Sure!” I say as I collect the papers, worried about stickykid fingers making a mess on them that Amber will give me a hard time about later. “Your dad and I are helping put together a Christmas shop for the school. It’s like a little pop-up store where students can buy gifts for their family and friends and we wrap them so they can take them home and put them under the tree. But we call it Santa’s Workshop, even though it isn’t the real workshop.”
“Because that one is at the North Pole,” she says.
I nod. “That’s right.”
Avery picks up a rough sketch I made of the workshop, holding it up to examine it closely. “What’s this?”
I grab the paper and shove it in my pile. “Oh, that’s just a really bad drawing of what I thought it could look like, but we don’t have time to decorate it like that.”
“We have to decorate it. It has to look like Santa’s real workshop,” Avery says. “Daddy can build it. He’s good at that stuff. Can’t you, Daddy?”
Hardy sticks a hand out, motioning for me to hand over the paper, and I reluctantly do. “I’m not an artist or anything, it was just a draft of a sketch.”
“Are these zigzags trees?” he asks with the hint of a smile.
“They’re supposed to be.”
“Do you already have a Santa chair, or would that need to be built?”
“Wait, do you think we could actually build something like this?” I ask as I look at him in astonishment. What can’t this man do?
“Oh, I know I could. It doesn’t look too complicated. I could build some theatre flats or paint over existing ones if the school has some already. And I could cut some simple pine trees out of plywood.”
“And we could wrap empty boxes to look like presents!” Avery squeals.
“Maybe the Chestnut Mountain Market would let us borrow their Santa chair? They usually have a Santa helpercome out every year to take pictures with the kids since the nearest mall is over an hour away,” I say.
“Then this should be easy. I could probably knock it out in a weekend,” Hardy says.
“And we’ll save a ton of money in the budget if we do what we talked about earlier, so we might be able to spend some money on supplies,” I mumble to myself as I look through my notes to see if there’s anything I’m overlooking that I might have committed to a budget.
“Please, Daddy!” Avery begs as she tugs on his sleeve bouncing excitedly in her chair.
Hardy turns to me and comically bats his eyes. “Please, Bella?”
If I thought telling his daughter no was hard, this is damn near impossible especially when he licks his lips and sticks the lower one out a little further making me want to bite it.
There’s no way I’m going to say no, not to either of those faces. And not when I know how important this is to both of them.
“Okay! We’re going to build Santa’s Workshop!”
