By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Finding a place for both Jesus and Santa Claus at Christmas time can be challenging.
The secular holiday largely ignores Jesus. The Christian celebration often forgets about Santa.
Neither happened, however, in my boyhood home. My Irish-Catholic mother found room at the inn for both.
She always told me Santa brought gifts around on December 25th to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, and she even had a small statue of Santa praying at the Nativity. I’ve long admired her skill at festive integration.
My wife Vicki and I tried it with our own kids too. And St. Vincent de Paul Catholic school in Holladay even let me do it there, as a volunteer directing the annual student holiday program.
Music director Scott Larrabee and I wrote a new Christmas carol. More than a decade later, the students still sing it each year.
The clever lyrics reflect my attempt at a unifying holiday theme:
Jesus is…
the reason for the season,
the light that makes my red nose glow
the joy behind my ho ho ho,
the magic that makes snowmen dance,
the music in each reindeer prance…
My harmonious approach is not without precedent.
Today’s Santa first took shape 200 years ago with a beloved and now famous poem written by Clement Moore. Moore’s poetic hero—St. Nicholas—was a compassionate third century Christian bishop known for giving gifts to poor children in the name of Jesus.
I love how my own family has managed to bring together the two dominant figures of Christmas. Yet, I always keep my ears open to hear how other people of faith navigate the same challenge.
That’s how I learned about Gale Batty from Vernal, Utah.
Gale lived his whole life amid the farms and dinosaur fossils of the lovely Ashley Valley in the Uintah Basin. Even as a child, Gale could quickly solve math problems in his head and build things better than most others.
He put those skills to great use, first as a kid helping his parents and six siblings on the farm his grandfather started, and then later while working as an electrical engineer at a nearby power plant.
Gale’s true passions, however, were the outdoors and spending time with his wife Tammy, their five children, and their 16 grandchildren.
His identical twin sons-in-law, Clint Morton (Vernal’s Streets Supervisor) and Carl Morton (Vernal’s Director of Finance), saw those passions up close. They married Gale’s identical twin daughters Jessica and Jennifer 20 years ago.
Clint and Carl recently told me that Gale always liked to say, “You gotta trade money for memories.”
Gale did just that by camping, hunting, and working on the Batty family ranch on Diamond Mountain. Like my mother, he was devoted to his own religion, and regularly taught lessons at his local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And also like my mother, Gale loved Christmas and Santa.
One time, during a deer hunting trip with his oldest granddaughters Abby and Lexi, Gale’s skills and passions started to merge together in what would be an unforgettable way for the Batty and Morton families.
Someone on the trip joked that they should send a photo of their hunting trophy to Santa. They then could warn him that Rudolph might be next if they did not get what they wanted for Christmas.
The brief moment of family levity inspired Gale. The very next Christmas, he planned and set the first of what would be several traps trying to catch Santa during his annual nocturnal visits to the Batty home.
That first time, Gale set out a heaping plate of delicious cookies, hoping to lure Santa into a doorway snare. Gale told his grandkids he’d hold the jolly old elf hostage until Santa agreed to give them what they wanted for Christmas.
When the grandkids arrived on Christmas morning, they rushed in to see if Gale’s plan had worked. All they found in the snare was Santa’s hat and a note wishing Gale better luck next year.
The game was on.
Much to his grandkids’ delight, over the next dozen or so years, Gale tried to catch Santa with bear traps, snares, covered holes, and various other homemade contraptions made from nets and ropes.
The scheming and plotting typically started a month or two in advance. Gale would write down ideas and sketch trap designs.
One year Santa visited a Batty family party a few weeks before Christmas. Gale started measuring St. Nick’s height and weight for the next trap.
With a wink of his eye and a twist of his head to the grandkids sitting on and around Santa’s lap, Gale reassured the perplexed but jolly old elf he was just making a new coat for him.
The grandkids helped Gale, but also sometimes acted as double agents. They’d occasionally write to the North Pole or whisper in Santa’s ear to warn him about the plans.
As the Mortons recall, “The traps themselves were fun, but the aftermath of the traps and Grandpa’s explanations and detailed storytelling was where the real fun was.”
Gale could make anyone laugh, no matter their mood or disposition. He did just that one Christmas morning with an elaborate tale explaining the big hoof print the grandkids noticed on Gale’s forehead.
Gale said that on Christmas Eve, he’d caught either Dasher or Dancer with a rooftop snare, and then tied the reindeer in a shed for his family to see. The reindeer, however, kicked Gale in the head and knocked him out.
After hearing this report, the grandkids rushed outside to find reindeer tracks in the snow but leading away from the shed. Inside, they discovered that Santa’s ally, Gale’s very own mischievous Elf on the Shelf, had intervened and released the captured reindeer while Gale was unconscious.
Another year, Gale told how he’d sprinkled sleeping powder on Santa’s cookies. Later, however, he got hungry and momentarily forgot about his sinister plot.
He ate one of the cookies and dozed off himself, thus missing yet another chance to catch the legendary Kris Kringle.
One snare did nab Santa’s black boot. Santa saved himself from another trap by setting it off with a giant candy cane, which he then conveniently left behind as a not-so-subtle message to Gale.
“And another year,” according to the Mortons, “the children showed up to find Grandpa all tied up in rope again as his plans were foiled.”
Gale never infused his trap-making or post-trap storytelling with any specific religious connotations.
The Mortons, however, think the traps expressed some of Gale’s most profound religious beliefs: “spending time with family, love (shown by Grandpa to his grandkids), forgiveness (usually Santa to Grandpa), and never giving up.”
Santa never put Gale on the naughty list for any of these trap antics. Instead, they developed a friendly rivalry.
Santa’s annual response notes showed his benevolent tolerance and patience. He indicated he understood Gale’s generous underlying motive—helping his grandkids have the best and most memorable Christmas possible.
The Battys and the Mortons (and likely Santa too) were devastated in May 2023 when Gale passed away, far too young at age 66. As Christmas 2023 approached, the annual holiday magic seemed to have disappeared with him.
His young granddaughter Veronica said, “I don’t think I want to try to catch Santa this year.” When Gale’s youngest son Luke reported that he’d found plans for the next trap on Gale’s desk, however, the little granddaughter smiled.
Now it looks like Gale’s annual Santa traps will live on long after him.
Hoping to cheer up their mother-in-law in mourning and their grieving wives, last year Clint and Carl Morton memorialized Gale’s unique Christmas tradition with Grandpa’s Santa Trap, a children’s book they self-published and gave to family members and friends.
Jessie and Jennie told me that the book helped soothe some of the grief from the loss of their father, “It’s nice to know that others are thinking of your loved one too!”
Carl wrote the words in a style that pays homage to his own favorite holiday book, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Carl’s sister, a writing professor in Tennessee, helped with rhymes and cadence.
Clint illustrated the book with charming minimalist images that Gale’s grandkids might have drawn. The art reflects the nature of Gale’s traps, which the Mortons say were simple, whimsical, and childlike too.
The two worked together on the project for weeks, laughing and plotting as each new typed page inspired another illustration. One hilarious drawing shows Gale as a young boy, but with the same grown-up beard he had for most of the time Clint and Carl knew him.
To minimize any other spoilers, I’ll only say here that just like with Gale, things don’t go exactly as planned for the book’s Santa-trapping grandfather. But in the end, like he always seems to do in every situation, Santa sees what’s really in the heart of his nemesis.
As a result, the book’s Santa, its grandfather/protagonist, and the supporting cast of grandkids all love and appreciate what they find under the tree on Christmas morning.
When Jesus first arrived in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago, his message of “love your neighbor as yourself” was born too. Santa Claus fully incarnates that message of giving to others.
Like my mother before me, I believe both are worthy of celebration. And I’m not the only one.
Try as he might, Gale Batty never managed to trap Santa. Yet, I think he and Clint/Carl Morton’s lovely little book just may have nabbed something even better.
They captured the wonderful and wondrous spirit of Christmas.
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this story on December 20, 2024.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
