Eat Your Heart Out, David Sedaris

Mall Santa for a Day

The nylon beard was scratchy, the wig hanging over my eyes made seeing through my daughter’s glasses more difficult. The red-and-white cap needed sharp tugging to fit over my now padded skull. Impossibly shiny black puttees covered most of my huge shoes, but the red knickers barely stretched into them so I was forced to wear the waistline much lower than was usual for my vestigial, middle-aged, sense of fashion; I imagined myself as a hip-hop Santa and laughed my first natural laugh of the day.

The photographer, in her Santa-esque jumpsuit, cocked her head from side to side, adjusted my cap and wig, finger-combed my beard, pulled the too-short cuffs down past my bare wrists to meet my white gloves and, nodding more to herself than to me, coolly appraised the large package before her and said, “Okay, are you ready?, They’re waiting.”

 I looked at her through the white strands that covered my black eyebrows, took in the blue-grey cinderblock walls, conduits and ducts that hung suspended some fifteen feet over our heads in the back corridors of the mall. Still off-stage, I took the hand bell from her, shook it as loudly as I could to herald my arrival, gave a hearty ‘Ho Ho Ho’ and strode out, past the guitar shop, around the cordons and, waving regally, made eye contact with each of the grinning, quivering children individually, some of whom took a step or two back from me, and the smiling mothers needlessly pointing me out.  Mounting the low, foil-wrapped dais I magisterially lowered myself into the shallow ornate throne and smiled at my awestruck petitioners.

                Santa was in session.

                Showtime

Two days before, after a day spent in the kitchen of the New Yorker Hotel, I texted Debra from the B train as it rumbled over the bridge and I arranged to meet her for Happy Hour at the Applebee’s conveniently situated above the DeKalb Ave. station. Having secured a waiting seat for her, just after the barmaid asked me where the other half was, I was approached by a regular of casual acquaintance.  When he asked me if I’d be interested in being a Photo Santa I surprised myself by arranging with Debra the care of neighbor Evander on the day in question, and agreed to it.

At 11:05 of the appointed day I met him on the lower level of the mall, was handed my brand new, slightly too short poly wrapped costume and prepared to start a day unlike any I’d had before. My first tiny supplicant was a delightful little girl, quiet and smiling, clearly ecstatic to be on the knee of this personification of Christmas, myth made real, an incarnate abstraction with fuzzy red pants and a six inch-wide patent leather belt that draped loosely around my belly, feeling like a large Muppet but being, to her, the embodiment of wonder, of bountiful giving, the guide at the threshold between the real and the magical. (“Bear but a touch of my hand…and you shall be upheld in more than this.”) Accompanied by her grandmother who stood off to the side of the camera during the photo shoot, the girl needed no prompting to smile. What made this a perfect beginning to my stint was her grandmother returning to my dais a few minutes later to show me the pictures of her grandchild with Santa. Her eyes, moist with the ready tears of age, were crinkled in a smile. “I wanted you to see these, thank you.” she said. I thanked her in turn and my session was off and running.

Through the eight hours of my holding court I saw patient loving parenting and angry mishandling; a mother brushing the sparse hair of a three-week old before entrusting him to my arms, and toddlers, berserk with alarm at the sight of a huge red suited man whose eyes and nose were the only features visible through a mass of white hair that fell down to the middle of a vast chest, being dragged by their little arms towards the terrible source of their perfectly reasonable fear, a mother who yelled at such a child, “Stop that crying, you’re too big to be crying like that!”, a young father, baseball cap askew, berating his son for not smiling at the camera, a grandmother trying ploy after ploy to get her frightened charge to stand beside me. It’s true, I know, that holidays can bring out both the very best and the very worst in people, but I was not prepared for this broad a spectrum.

There was the thirteen year old girl, just budding past immaturity, who, at her mother’s suggestion and against my sense of propriety, alighted on my lap and whispered through her smile that she was doing this for her mother; another young girl, perhaps Indian, perhaps Afghani, in beautiful non-western clothing whose father translated my words to her. What must she make of this? I wondered, she to whom the trappings of Christmas are as opaque as the festivals of Vasant Panchami, or Mawlid are to me? This piecemeal embrace of a newly adopted land, its life, beliefs, has it always been the immigrant’s way of fitting in, like my father, Chinese, accepting the cruel joke of some immigration agent in changing his name from Chai to Charles?

One, another girl, perhaps ten or eleven, whose father stood some way apart, announced that some of her friends claimed I did not exist. When I told her that I was clearly sitting before her and that I would exist as long as the spirit of Christmas she smiled and recited her wish list, posed for her photos, then walked off to her father and ascended the escalator without making eye contact with me or inquiring about the pictures they had no interest in. Was this done out of poverty or a get-what-I-can stance, and was this bright girl desperate to convince herself that Santa yet existed despite her dawning vision of the stark, less magic-filled life stretching before her?

There was the trio of smirking street-wise fourteen or fifteen year old young women who chose to stand around my vacant lap and only reluctantly followed the photographer’s suggestion to hug Santa. Had they already crossed into that stark life and were casting wistful glances over their
shoulders?

After our lunch break, a BLT and diet cola in the cinderblock corridor backstage, I readjusted my beard and wig, looked in the mirror and finished dressing. We started to use the props I’d brought to the show. Debra had taken a ten-pound coffee table book, covered it in shiny silvery paper and written across it in large Magic Marker block letters-

                                   Santa’s List MMXI

I placed this huge book and a long quill on the stack of gifts to my left. Leaning forward on my raised throne I loomed over each child in turn and asked if they had been good in the time since last Christmas. All but one assured me of their squeaky cleanliness and rectitude both at home and in school. The photographer would then walk over and put the book in my lap, tilt it up, and nudge them back to keep them from peering over the top of the book to the pages. I would ask the child again for her first and last name and run my quill down a series of pages until the name came up.

“Ah, here you are! Now you told me you’ve been a good child and listened to your mother every time, right?” I’d say. At this time my brief glance to the mom would bring a conspiratorial nod or quick shake of the head. “Well, it says here that you usually listen but that you sometimes forget. Does that sound about right?” This was nearly always met with downcast eyes and a whispered admission. With the book now closed on my lap I lowered my voice and asked them to try a little bit harder to listen to Mom and be the kind of child both she and Santa knew they could be, that Mom loved them and tried to do what was right for them. Behind my whiskers I prayed they had mothers as good as my promise. They were then told such increased efforts would make Mom and me very happy and, as befit my part in this commercial enterprise, asked if they’d care to have a picture taken with me. Relief and joy flooded their faces and that joy shone through onto the photos.

There was the boy who, when I looked up his name, seemed insulted-“Have you been spying on us?” he asked. There was also the heart-rending response from the girl who, when asked if she had been good replied, “No, but I will be.” Stunned into rare silence, Santa sat back in his chair, waved her closer and whispered, “Thank you for being honest.” After her photos I beckoned her mother over to me with a subtle, gloved gesture, (how willing adults were to accept my authority!), and told her what her daughter had said. Mom told me her daughter sometimes had tantrums both at home and at school but was by far the brightest in her class. I nodded, arose from my seat and walked over to the girl. Bending my creaky knees I told her I knew it could be difficult to be the brightest, how it made one seem different, made other kids treat you differently, and that her being bright was a gift she shouldn’t cover up or waste. The fierce hug she gave me helped the next few hours race by. I will not soon forget her, and she may long remember that large man who played Santa.

 I was very aware of referring to Mothers exclusively for fear of hurting the child of a single parent. I took the chance that there would be few if any children of same-sex parenting. I hope I was right.

Wearing the costume created both distance and false intimacy. While hiding and thus separating me, it lent the outsiders, those observers being observed, a shorthand understanding of who and what I might be. This interaction was fairly new to me, for my own childhood family was not given to the other great American costume ritual-Halloween, and I didn’t don one until my mid-thirties when I took my young daughter to Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue parade. I wore the hooded orange and black jalaba I’d bought in Morocco over my six-foot-four frame and put on a Death’s skull mask. A plastic scythe completed the transformation to what was a surprisingly powerful persona-while children reacted as one would expect, freezing in terror or backing away, adults, and especially older adults, chose to cross the threshold with me. I took to approaching seniors, both those along the parade route and other participants in costume, at a slow and gliding tread. After locking eyes with one, something quite easily accomplished, for their participation in this ritual required them to be observers, I would then look slowly at my wristwatch, slowly back at that person, and, as decided by whim and the degree of trepidation displayed, either slowly shake my head ‘no’ or beckon them to join me. The most effective of these impromptu glimpses into the magical took place when I planted myself, motionless, in the open doorway of a bar where the patrons, one by one, noticed the apparition. One man, shaking off his surprise, nudged his buddy whose back was to me, pointed his chin at the window and said, “Someone to see you.”  When the drinker turned to look at me his mouth fell open and his beer dropped from his hand.  

That Halloween night I learned the liberation of the costumed; how the taking on of a new identity frees one from social restraints and lends the privilege to interact with others on a heightened, distilled plane. Wearing the Santa costume did this and more by showing me how costume allows others to shape their actions and reactions to a Mythic being, one existing outside of time and age, for the Santa of one’s youth was old beyond young reckoning and, seen now through adult eyes, is of the same attenuated and undetermined age as before.

Santa, though a male figure, is so old, both in the then and in the now, and so mythic as to be beyond active gender. There was a young mother who came to the dais with her child and husband for a photo with Santa. When the photographer suggested she take her seat on my lap the mother’s only voiced concern was for my comfortably supporting her weight. She cast not so much as a glance at her husband for his approval of her sitting on a strange man’s lap, but instead chose to accept what she perceived as my age and magic neuter state; she was worried that the Old Elf’s leg would be injured by her medium frame.

As child followed child to an audience with Santa, it became increasingly clear that what I said and did might become a lasting and profound memory for each of them. One never knows what will adhere to a child’s mind, which fleeting glance or casual words will go into shaping what they become. Given the heightened, distilled plane on which we met in this dance of magic, I grew ever more aware of the responsibility implicit in my day’s work. This suspension of disbelief is delicate and must be treated withcare. As I walked through the Mall after changing into my street clothes I saw one of the girls who had solemnly handed me her wish list. My breath caught as she came near, but she and her mother walked past, no glimmer of recognition in the eyes of either one, and I hoped the mother’s purse still held the girl’s list I’d slipped to her. She

         

was