Last year I stood in the living room of my sister’s house on Christmas morning while my nephew showed me a plate of half-eaten cookies and carrots. “See,” he said, holding up the plate. “Santa was here!”
“Must’ve been in a rush,” I said, examining the desecrated sugar cookies. “Pretty wasteful, you ask me. And what’s with the carrots? Santa on a diet?”
“Those are for Rudolph,” he explained.
“Just Rudolph?” I said. “What about the rest of them? Dasher, Dancer…uh…Julio…you know, the other ones?”
My nephew was four at the time. His response was the typical “you are old and I do not understand you” sidelong glance before he danced out of the room. Everything was magic and cookies to him. I was entirely envious.
My first encounter with Santa was suitably innocuous, at least on the surface. I was four at the time and visiting relatives for Thanksgiving. It’s an understatement to say I was surprised to see Santa shaking hands in the dimly lit foyer. To me he was probably the third most important person in the world after Larry Bird and Optimus Prime. I had no idea he made out-of-season house calls. “Ho ho ho!” he shouted at no one in particular. “Ho ho ho!” He certainly had the catchphrase down.
Everything else, however, was not as advertised. This was no shiny, magical sugar plum cherub. This was an unnaturally droopy man in an ill-fitting red sweat suit with a black Hefty bag slung over his shoulder. He smelled faintly of Stetson and pastrami. Mind you, I never doubted it was Santa Claus. I was just worried for him. Something had clearly gone wrong at the North Pole. Santa looked like he had been living out of his sleigh for a few months.
He beckoned me to his side and asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Being a shy child I demurred and replied that I wasn’t sure. It seemed too loaded a question to answer honestly, and frankly I was conflicted about taking anything from Santa in his present state. “I know!” he shouted. With a wink he reached down into his enchanted sack and produced my “gift”: a package of five crayons. “Merry Christmas!” he screamed, pushing me aside. “Ho ho ho!”
As a four year old boy I knew very few truths about the world, but one thing I did know quite well was this: crayons are not presents. They are supplies. They are equivalent to construction paper, disposable pens and toilet paper. In my eyes, the Claus had made a bold opening statement: “I am Santa, maker of dreams, giver of crayons. Fear and love me!”
In the years that followed, Santa made sure to balance out every Tootsie Pop with a banana and every G.I. Joe with a package of tube socks. He seemed to be telling me that life was the balancing point between euphoric thrills and crushing disappointments, but my favorite food was Pop-tarts and I walked around with pictures of Spiderman on my crotch, so the philosophy was somewhat lost on me.
When I was eleven years old I discovered a spectacular cache of Nintendo games while rifling through my parents’ closet for…I dunno, shoe polish or something. Thanks to our first meeting I had never embraced the popular image of Santa as a reindeer-and-elvish-slave-force-aided demigod, but this just further confused things for me. I knew Santa couldn’t construct something as complex and wonderful as River City Ransom (which, for my money, is still the greatest 8-bit game ever featuring frenetic, gang-style karate fighting and extensive male showering scenes), but I still imagined him taking the time to roll down to K-B Toys and pick me up a copy. If my parents were doing all the leg work, what was the point of Santa Claus?
I never really got an answer to that question. Two years ago, however, I found myself sitting propped up in the bird food aisle of the Johnson, RI Petsmart wearing a plush red pantsuits with what appeared to be someone’s couch cushion squashed against my chest. I was there to coax terrified daschunds into sitting on my lap for photographs, the purpose of which was either raising funds for the local animal shelter or a controlled attempt at finding Rascal’s breaking point, I was never clear on which. In between bouts of heat-induced lightheadedness I caught sight of a shopping parent and their young son passing between aisles. “Look,” the parent said. “It’s Santa!” The child smiled, took in a big breath of air and then actually saw me, a sweaty spectacle in red, waving weakly, a dazed and far-away look in my eyes. The child waved back of course, being polite, then shot a crooked look at their parent that said, quite clearly, “Everything you’ve ever told me is now in doubt. I’m going to begin some serious fact-checking when we get home.”
Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I don’t think I ruined Christmas for that kid, because ultimately I don’t think Christmas can be ruined, at least not the part represented by Santa Claus. He’s too much of a contradiction to ever be ruined by the occasional inconsistency. He’s magic and he’s ordinary. He grants wishes and he likes to hang out at the mall. He flies around the world in a single night and he’s a notorious tax evader. At the end of the day Santa’s just some guy who likes cookies and works as little as possible. He’s like us. He’s a part of us. He’s always and forever.
I swear though, if he gives me socks again this year I’m gonna lose my mind.
