The Bronx is a long way from Balad, Iraq, where Staff Sergeant Janice Santiago of the Army’s 77th Regional Support Command spent her last Christmas.

This year she’s home in New York for the holiday, to spend her first true Christmas with her 5-year-old son, Jonathan.

“I cannot wait to see my son’s face when he wakes up on Christmas morning and screams ‘Santa!’ It’s like Santa Claus is going to come for me, too,” she said.

Sergeant Santiago, 29, returned in October from her second tour of duty as an Army reservist in Iraq. She had been away since November 2004, at a base in Balad that withstood constant mortar fire. Her first tour lasted nine months, from November 2002 to August 2003. She missed her son’s second and fourth birthdays, and his Christmases those years as well.

“When you’re 1 year old, you don’t know who Santa is. When you’re 3, there’s a little bit of excitement,” she said. But this year, “He knows who Santa Claus is now more than ever, and he knows the idea of Christmas,” she said. “I’m so excited.”

In Iraq, where Sergeant Santiago spent her last Christmas, the temperature would often break 130 degrees. “It was like trying to move around in an oven,” she said.

The fort where she was stationed was nicknamed “mortar-itaville.” Sometimes, Sergeant Santiago said, she would hear six explosions a night.

“Some days you cross yourself and say, ‘Please, God, let me be all right,'” she told The New York Sun. Mostly, though, she got used to it, she said.

On Christmas in 2002, she was living in a tent and using sweat socks as Christmas stockings. Christmas dinner was an army ration known as a Meal Ready to Eat. Gifts were candies from a post exchange.

Last year, things were better. A New York television crew brought her a New York Christmas in Iraq – Junior’s cheesecakes, Christmas trees, and ornaments that had been used on a Christmas tree in the World Trade Center. But she still wasn’t with her son.

Her Christmas this Sunday will be different. Her mother and two younger sisters have traveled from Puerto Rico to stay with her and her husband George Villagas, 29. Her older sister Jessica Santiago also lives with them, in the row house in the Bronx’s Castle Hill neighborhood. Several friends from both her military and civilian lives will visit.

“It’s going to be a full house,” Sergeant Santiago said, adding that she was glad for the time to catch up with her mother and her sisters. “It’s been a lot of late nights,” she said.

“Before I got home, his teacher said he was acting up a little. I guess there was some anger. But now that mommy’s home he’s calmed down a lot,” Sergeant Santiago said. Jonathan will graduate kindergarten at the end of the year.

Still, she said, for the first two weeks she was back, every time she left the house he would rush to make sure she was coming back.

Now, she’s spending all the quality time with her son that she can: taking him out for pizza, taking him to the movies, and most of all staying home, playing with him, and talking.

They saw a 3D version of “Chicken Little” together, she said. “It was the cutest thing. They gave out these big old glasses, and with his little head, it was adorable.”

For Jonathan’s fifth birthday, Sergeant Santiago and her husband took their son to Puerto Rico to celebrate with her mother, stepfather, and two younger sisters, who live there.

By her second tour of duty, she said, she had grown used to the risk. She would spend time with some of the younger soldiers and keep them from getting too scared.

She spent much of her spare time, however, on her own.

“When you’re used to being alone and you’ve got a five-year-old-screaming, ‘Mommy, Mommy Mommy,’ all the time,” it can be difficult to adjust, she said.

Her husband is very understanding, she added. She and George Villagas have been married since 1998 and have known each other since they were small children. “We grew up together on the block playing kick the can,” she said.

“He walked with me to the recruiting station,” Sergeant Santiago said. “He’s been a part of this for 11 years” – the amount of time she’s been in the army. When she left for Iraq, Mr. Villagas stayed home to care for Jonathan.

Sergeant Santiago joined the Army Reserves after graduating St. Catherine’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in the Bronx. She went to work as an administrative assistant at Chase Bank, and then took a similar position at St. Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, to which she plans to return early next year.

“They’ve been very understanding there,” she said. St. Vincent’s granted her leave for both tours of duty in Iraq, and her coworkers sent her care packages, birthday cards, and letters while she was serving overseas.

Sergeant Santiago joined the Army looking for excitement and a challenge.

“I was curious to see if I could handle the training,” she said, adding that shooting machine guns “is not anything you can do in civilian life.”

She’s proud of her career in the Army, and proud of serving in Iraq.

“I was honored to serve alongside so many brave soldiers,” she said. And she explained the mission: “Fighting for the people of Iraq, for them to get their freedom, and fighting for us, so we don’t have to go through another 9/11.”