It is Christmas Eve in the house of an unidentified family in an unidentified location. The father of the family is the speaker and he notes that the home is filled with a calm and soothing silence. Everyone except him, it would seem, is fast asleep, including his children whom he imagined are enjoying sweet dreams anticipating the arrival of Santa Claus sometime during the night.
He and his wife are also in bed, exhausted from a good kind of tired. He has just barely made the transition from wakefulness to sleep when he is suddenly jarred back to full consciousness by a loud sound coming from outside. He jumps from the bed and rushes to the window overlooking the lawn, throwing open the shutters and pulling glass upward. The scene is illuminated only by moonlight, but it is bright enough to cast a reflection of the noonday sun off the snow-covered ground. Such conditions allow him to see quite clearly the mechanism behind the loud sound which awoke him and it is a fantastical sight, indeed.
A small sleigh has been powered by eight appropriately sized reindeer. The man in the driver’s seat is obviously older than he himself, but nevertheless moves quickly and with a spryness beyond expectation. It is Saint Nicholas. With a whistle and the shouting of eight fanciful names, the reindeer respond as if they were eight large loyal dogs.
The man in the house watches in wonder as the reindeer now take flight—literally. Pulling a sleigh filled with toys, they make their way to the roof of his house and he soon hears the sound of the old man making his way down the chimney. And before you know it, he appears from the chimney looking none the worse for wear except that soot is staining the fur in which he dresses form head to toe. Toss over his shoulder is a large bag filled with toys as he begins to pull them out, his eyes seem to twinkle in delight and his cheeks grow flushed. Getting a better look at the man now, the narrator described him as fat, jolly, bearded and smoking a pipe. The sight is almost the point of being absurd and he cannot refrain from letting loose a small chuckle of appreciation.
As if to warn the man into whose house he has just broken and entered, the jolly fat man winks and jerks his head as to say he won’t be bothering him for more than a minute. And he goes straightaway to his intended mission as he starts filling in each of the Christmas stocking hanging on the fireplace mantle with gifts. Once done, he turned back to look one more time at the narrator before doing a curious thing: he puts a single finger up to the side of his nose and silently nods his head. This turns out to apparently be some sort of magic trick enabling him to rise as quickly up the chimney as he came down for in an instant he is back on the roof. The narrator listens to the sound of his returning to his seat in the sleigh and hears the familiar whistle instruction to the reindeer and in another burst of loud noise, the team of eight rush across the roof and launch the sleight off into the sky, but not before he hears the old man cry out the greeting of a “Happy Christmas” and a “good night.”
