I've spent every Christmas Eve my entire natural life at my grandparents' place south of Eveleth. My earliest memories of these Brown family gatherings stem from when I was the age my children are now. It's a blessing to have such a strong tradition, but also a curse. It gets hard to tell the years apart. Some years were completely unremarkable, others punctuated by arguments. Some years relatives drank too much. Some years I drank too much. These years seem foggy. At some point the food become more important than the presents, but I can't pinpoint that, either.

I do remember one Christmas Eve in Eveleth, about 12 years ago. There were two reasons I recall this. The first was that it was the year after LTV closed its taconite mine at Hoyt Lakes. It was the big news that year, casting a dark cloud over the holiday for people across the Iron Range. But I would have forgotten all that by now, just like all the other years in which mines closed that I have since forgotten. This year sticks out for one simple reason: It was the year Santa Claus came early.

We all know the story of Santa Claus, how he visits all the houses on Christmas Eve to deliver presents. Some people don't believe in Santa, but we come from a family that does. My sons would gladly tell you how they heard him on the roof last year, and how they saw Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer nibbling on the brush near the window of their bedroom.

But we all know that Santa works at night, alone. You're not supposed to see Santa, unless something's gone horribly wrong. And I'm afraid that one time 12 years ago something did go wrong and we saw Santa at the Browns' Christmas Eve.

The night was going along the way it usually does. I had eaten the amount of cheese you need to eat to increase your resting heart rate without exercise. This is a lot of cheese, but not an insurmountable amount of cheese for a man of my lineage, particularly on a holiday or on any occasion in which cheese is made available at no cost to the consumer.

It was a year or two before my wife and I had our first son, so we were the sort of young professionals who mill around at family gatherings like this wondering what the future will bring. Kids. Jobs. Pressing matters of our times, not yet realizing that it's all been done before. We've lived these lives through our ancestors, the human race. Perhaps even it's all been done in the stars, our future coming like the ore trains along Highway 7, a train that always runs on time. Or a sleigh, for that matter.

We heard a commotion down by the split entry to my grandparents' home. Suddenly, up the stairs clomped Santa Claus. Now, contrary to reports that Santa Claus is a short, fat old elf, I can tell you that Santa Claus is very tall — 6'2" even accounting for the boots. Fat, maybe, but in a way that's pretty common for the Upper Midwest. He looked about 55 or 60. I'll let you decide if that's old.

Now, Santa had visited the grandma and grandpa's place before, many times since I was a little kid. But everyone, even the kids, knew that guy wasn't really Santa. It was my grandma's brother Tubby. Tubby used to live in the trailer next to ours on the family junkyard until he had to move out to make room for hubcaps. But this Santa wasn't anyone we knew. This was a man with a red suit, a white beard, saying HO HO HO, showing up on Christmas Eve unannounced. This *was* Santa Claus.

Santa winded his way through the house, stepping over the human limbs and beverages lining the floor of the crowded living room. He wiggled his workman's frame into the dining room where my grandfather keeps court in a custom-order chair at the end of the table. Santa leaned over to the patriarch of my family, his hair is even whiter than Santa's. Whispered words exchanged. In a moment he was Ho-Ho-Hoeing his way out the way he came.

Grandpa grinned. "He's looking for Thunderbird Road."

Directions. Santa was lost on his way to a gig. On his way out my grandma complimented his rough, beaten footwear, "Nice boots, Santa!"

"Courtesy of LTV Steel," he said, letting out a laugh that made his belly shake like the ball drum in a concentrator plant.

That's when Santa Claus piled into his four-door domestic compact (with eight reindeerpower under the hood), motoring off to his next stop -- only to return that very night, right on time, as all the boys and girls of the Iron Range dreamed of better times.