Holiday Magic: Secret Santa Saves the Day

It was 1 a.m. on Christmas morning, but for Marisa Shumaker, it was still Christmas Eve. Like so many other parents, she had holiday magic to make.

For weeks, her four-year-old daughter, Aubree, had been asking for one thing only for Christmas: a “real piano keyboard,” not just some dinky one made for little kids. Now that Aubree was asleep, Shumaker pulled the box from its hiding spot in their home in Bel Air, Maryland, ready to unveil the 61-key keyboard with full-size keys—perfect for (serious) beginners like Aubree. Shumaker figured she’d assemble the stand and bench, and set it all up so it would be ready to play when Aubree woke up and discovered her surprise. But when she opened the box, only the stand and bench were inside. No keyboard.

Panic overtook her as she realized what she hadn’t noticed before: The keyboard was sold separately.

The night before, mother and daughter had watched the movie The Santa Clause. At one point, two of the main characters talk about the gifts they desperately wanted when they were kids but never received, which made them doubt the existence of Santa.

“That scene immediately played in my mind,” says Shumaker. She recalled how happy she was as a little girl, about Aubree’s age, when she got her first guitar as a gift. What would Aubree think when she came downstairs and found only a bench and stand—no keyboard?

There must be some way to fix this, she thought. Maybe an online retailer could deliver a keyboard by morning. Maybe she could sneak out to a store, if one was still open. She looked into both options, but no luck. Now desperate, Shumaker posted in a neighbourhood Facebook group: “I’m about to cry,” she wrote, explaining the situation. “I’m so devastated this will ruin her Christmas.”

Andy Spencer, who lives five miles from Shumaker, was crawling into bed just before 2 a.m. when he saw her plea.

“Any parent would be in a panic,” Spencer says. “I wouldn’t want anyone who believes in the magic of Christmas to be disappointed.”

He thought of the keyboard his wife had gotten for their daughter, Hailey, two years earlier. They still had it, and honestly, Hailey had hardly ever played it. Spencer got out of bed and headed down the hall to see whether Hailey was awake.

She and her brother, Justin, both home from college, were still up. When their dad told them what was going on, they were eager to help. Hailey’s keyboard looked new, and had the power cord and AC adapter that went with it. Plus, it had 61 full-size keys and would fit perfectly on the stand that Shumaker had.

“My daughter was more than willing to give up the keyboard, and my son was like, ‘We’ve got to do this,’ ” Spencer says.

So he typed a message to Shumaker: “Where do you live? We have a smaller keyboard that we could part with.”

Reading the message, Shumaker couldn’t believe how quickly her luck had turned. “The fact that he didn’t know me at all...not many people are like that nowadays,” she says.

The two messaged back and forth, agreeing to meet at a grocery store across the street from Shumaker’s home.

“It was late and kind of foggy,” she says. “I was like, This is either going to end up on the ID channel [the Investigation Discovery channel, which features true-crime programming] or the Hallmark Channel.”

Within a few minutes, the Spencers pulled in—all three of them. There was no way Hailey and Justin were going to miss this. Together, they loaded the keyboard into Shumaker’s car. “What do you want for it?” Shumaker asked, figuring she’d send them some money.

“No, seriously, it’s free,” Spencer replied. All he wanted, he told her, was a photo of a happy Aubree on Christmas morning.

Unless, maybe...“We all joked together that if she ended up being the next Taylor Swift, I wanted a shoutout,” he says.

Just a few hours later, Aubree woke up and scampered into the living room.

“Mom!” she exclaimed when she saw the keyboard. She immediately began tickling the keys, and her face lit up like the Christmas tree beside her as those first few notes emerged.

Aubree beams by the keys on Christmas morning—and has, on many mornings since. Photo Courtesy: Marisa Shumaker

Later that day, Shumaker messaged Spencer to say thanks once again and to tell him that Aubree was so engrossed with her new keyboard, she had several presents and a stocking still unopened.

He showed the message to Hailey and Justin. “We all had a good chuckle over it,” says Spencer. What had been such a little thing for them meant everything to someone else.

Aubree practices on her keyboard almost every day, her mother standing behind her and teaching her classics like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” It’s often the first thing she wants to do in the morning, hopping on and off the bench throughout the day.

“I have never seen something keep a four-year-old’s attention like this keyboard,” Shumaker texted to Spencer months later.

“I don’t think there’s anything that could possibly top it,” Shumaker says. “Maybe if I got her a grand piano, but I’d probably have to get a new place for that.”

Jokes aside, the whole experience of that night had Shumaker believing in Christmas magic. “It didn’t hit me until I got home,” she says. “I literally just met Santa Claus, like, in real life. That was actually him, and he came with elves and everything.”

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