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Christmas Season, 1989: It was my freshman year at the University of Utah, my first away from home. Just like any college student I was looking for some extra cash, and so I answered a Help Wanted ad for a Shopping Mall Santa.

18-years-old. Santa. My friends told me that they would never hire a kid.

If you want me to do something, tell me that I can’t. Aside from risking life and limb, it’s a good bet I’ll try. It’s one of my weaknesses.

Fortunately for me the holiday season has a looming, immovable deadline on December 25th. The employer was desperate to fill the big chair, so I walked out of my short interview with a prosthetic belly, a red suit, a wig and some bells. I was officially Santa. Or, at the very least, one of Santa’s helpers.

There is a Santa at the Layton Hills mall today. He’s been there since Veteran’s Day. Go figure. The Christmas Season is getting longer each year.

Life as Santa isn’t very glamorous. I would lug a large suitcase to the mall and make my way upstairs, beyond the food court, into an access hallway. There I would find my dressing room. It didn’t have a star on it, just a number. It turned out to be a janitor’s closet. Yes, really, a janitor’s closet, complete with mops, buckets, vacuums, and the acrid smell of cleaning agents.

In this little room I would slowly transform into a fat, jolly elf. I’d put on my belly, dawn my red velvet suit, deftly apply the makeup to add decades to my face, and top it off with the beard, wig, and hat. Then I would sit and wait.

Veteran’s Day? That’s nothing. A local radio station started playing Christmas music non-stop at 12:01 AM on October 31st. No, not at 12:01 AM on the day AFTER Halloween. 12:01 of Halloween itself. While the kids are getting ready to trick or treat, you can sing along to Jingle Bells. How nice.

After a short wait Santa #1 would finish his shift, and I’d hear the distant sound of bells bouncing toward the janitor’s closet. We’d exchange pleasantries, I’d wait a few minutes, and then I would make the return trip as Santa #2. I’d walk slowly to the door, trying not to sweat, and then throw it open with a big Ho Ho Ho!

Trotting is best. It shakes the bells in a rhythmic fashion, it makes you look jolly, and it still allows the youngsters to keep up. I’d make my way down the stairs, into Santa’s village, and take my place on the throne.

For the next two hours child after child would sit on my knee, tell me what they wanted for Christmas, occasionally shriek, and pose for a picture.

It takes some serious skill to talk to children as Santa. You see their hope, their excitement, their wonder – you want to keep that, not destroy it. And yet you cannot promise them anything, especially when you see the anxious parent watching you, trying to determine what is asked for and what is promised, all the while silently calculating the damage in their head. A simple “Santa will do his very best, and you have a Merry Christmas” is usually all that you can do.

Last year my older kids wanted electric scooters. Being such prolific consumers, we obliged. I ordered my daughter a really cute mini-Vespa-looking thing. Pink. UPS delivered it to the front door. Except it was delivered during Christmas vacation. The box had a big picture of the scooter prominently displayed on the outside.

My daughter signed for it.

Fairytale imploded.

Funny thing is, despite the initial trauma, I’m not sorry about that. I’m relieved. We had a good, long talk. She and her older brother are now Santa’s helpers for the little ones. They seem to have even more fun helping than trying to figure out if Mom and Dad are really putting them on. Plus, it’s much easier assembling little parts with extra and eager helping hands.

I played the role of the UPS guy in 1989. It was quite inadvertent.

I thought it would be fun to use my Santa costume and visit friends from my hometown. A few days before Christmas I started attending their holiday parties, visiting with their younger siblings and having an all-around grand time.

The weather was bad, though, snowing quite heavily. As I was driving along a rural road I saw a flash in my headlights.

It was too late.

I hit a deer.

I stopped and checked my rear view mirror. The deer was just lying there in the middle of the road. I couldn’t just leave it, another car was bound to be along soon, so I turned around and illuminated the scene with my headlights. I stepped out and began pulling the deer to the side of the road.

At that very moment a van passed by. Slowly. Mom and Dad, sitting in the front, with several children in the back. Each of them looking at me in horror as I tried to pull the deer off to the side of the road.

It was then that I realized the problem. I was Santa.

Have you ever experienced a surreal, slow-motion moment? This was one of them. I could only imagine the conversation in the van on that night.

I find myself pushing against the Christmas season more and more every year. I push harder when the season gets artificially longer.

I feel like I am losing the spirit of the season.

I wonder if I ever had it.

I feel like a resident of Who-ville, caught up in an ever-increasing frenzy of decorations and gift-wrapping and faux cheer.

I’m turning into the Grinch.

The most memorable experience of my one season Santa stint was with one particular little girl. She was eight, maybe nine, and dressed in the finest winter wool apparel. She arrived with a mom to match. They were certainly well off.

I braced myself for a long list of toys and clothes and games. That list never came.

She was polite, she was tentative, but when asked what she wanted for Christmas this young girl looked directly into my eyes and, with unquestionable and absolute sincerity, said simply, “I want the kids who don’t get Christmas to have a Christmas this year.”

I wasn’t prepared. I was speechless, choked up, stunned. What would you say? She believed in Santa, I could see it in her eyes. Her hopes and wishes were genuine and heartfelt. Santa could do this, he’d deliver!

I don’t remember exactly what I said. I stumbled through something, posed for a picture, gave her a candy cane and wished her a merry Christmas. I couldn’t give her what she wished for, but that little girl gave a shopping mall Santa something special that season. I have never been the same.

In this age of ever-lengthening Christmas seasons and retail bottom-line expectations I wish I knew what happened to her. It’s one thing to have your hopes dashed by a UPS driver at the door with a scooter. It is quite another to wake up and realize that Santa didn’t come through, yet again, for all of those kids who don’t have a Christmas. I failed her.

How did we get here? Our traditions have been hijacked. Or, maybe not. Maybe it isn’t that dramatic. Maybe we are accessories to the erosion, the drift, the settling for a retail season.

That little girl is probably a young mother today, with her own toddlers eager to wake up on Christmas morning. In a way I am glad I don’t know who she is, as the ideal expressed by that innocent child likely got buried as she grew older, more jaded, more weary, more like me.

But I am still looking for her, in other places and in other faces. We need more people like her. In the mean time, the memory I have of that experience is forever.

In this grand Who-ville of a culture she was, and is, my Cindy Lou Who.

November 21st, 2006 | Category: Rotation, Sunstone | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL