Clause and Effect

“He switched from vodka to light beer. He started booking two-hundred-dollar-an-hour corporate Santa gigs. He reconnected with his son and even employed him as an elf. The easy explanation would be that playing Santa Claus saved Billy and that the magic of Christmas had wrapped its warm glow around another lost soul. That’s what Billy thought. That’s what a lot of men who worked at Macy’s thought when they, too, found happiness sitting in a gold-painted chair wearing a red costume. But there was something else at work on Thirty-fourth Street. Something more profound. A better story, actually.” David Gauvey Herbert in Esquire: Yes, Bob, There is a Santa Clause.