planned. Of their six regular temp employees in years past, three were unavailable or had already found other positions for the season and one had moved away. Only two of their regulars were available to help this year—Mac Palmer, who had been their Santa Claus for years, and Linda Smithson, who helped out in the gift shop.
She was glad to find workers where she could, at least, but she would definitely need to find extra help—in a town she hadn’t lived in with any regularity in a decade. It was an overwhelming undertaking.
She was most concerned after her last conversation with Dale Williams. The retired schoolteacher had been their general handyman for a decade and also stepped in to play Santa Claus sometimes, trading off with Mac when needed. But he had had bypass surgery just three weeks earlier and wouldn’t be in any shape to help her this year.
She faced the most uphill of uphill battles. A truly epic vertical slope.
While she was tempted to throw in the towel now, before she even started, she absolutely refused.
This might not be the most memorable holiday season The Christmas Ranch had ever enjoyed but she was going to make darn certain it was still a good one.
She repeated the mantra that helped her through the jitters she always had when taking a new teaching job. She could handle this. Heaven knows, she had faced tougher obstacles before.
She and her sisters had survived being kidnapped with their parents by leftist rebels in a foreign country—being held for several weeks in very tiny rooms with no running water and a bucket for a toilet, watching her mother growing increasingly sicker from the cancer ravaging her body while they were helpless to get her the medical help she needed, watching her father die in front of her just when they all thought they would be rescued, then losing her grief-stricken mother just a few months later.
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