since Santa Claus rang me up on the phone.
I was up on a ladder doin' my
usual dadly chorin' thang ---
this time swapping out a fritzed
light bulb in the kitchen ceiling fixture ---
and as usual, not really
having much luck of it.
The phone's jangle-jingling
brought the lowing sounds of
the fidget stampede
("...I'LL GET IT! I'LL GET IT!!)
scrambling for the phone,
as I discovered the foe I once
again engaged in battle at terrifying
nosebleed heights was none other than
my arch-nemesis,
the evil Mr. Oxidation.
r-r-r-R-R-I-I-N-G!!!
"I'LL GET IT!!"
"You ALWAYS get it, let ME get it!!"
The bulb, rusted in its socket, would not budge.
I twisted it again,
this time with a little more English.
Nothing.
"M-O-M-M-M-M-M-M! It's MY turn to get the phone!!"
r-r-r-R-R-R-R-R-R--I-I-N-G!!!
"Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!!"
My long suffering wife, making her
usual dimensional beeline into
the kitchen from outta nowhere,
at once found daylight through
the offensive line and intercepted
the cordless. She spoke through teeth
clenched hard enough to break
any number of blood vessels.
"No. I believe I'LL get it,"
she whispered.
"...but...BUT..."
With a sweeping Swanson gesture,
she bade them away.
"Now get...back...to...your...WORK!!"
she hissed, propelling each syllable
with equally measured venom and force;
an oratorical skill quickly developed
by M & P's everywhere.
Reluctant but resigned, they stomped off,
muttering all manner of foul schoolyard oaths,
to continue their torturesome task
decorating the Christmas tree.
I gave the spent bulb another little yank, and
BANG!
it shattered into several million shards,
falling to the kitchen floor in
a wafty cutting flurry.
The big pieces, however, remained lodged
firmly beneath the fleshy heel of my bleeding palm.
I swallowed the torrent of expletives
I felt about to cross my dadly lips,
opting instead for the more
politically correct Homer Simpson
"doh!"
sound, as my wife flipped the phone open.
"Hello??" she happily chirped in a
remarkable Hyde-to-Jekyll transformation.
I picked at the glass slivers
perforating my palm and held my breath,
hoping beyond all hope that it was
neither my mother, nor
to git me at last.
My spidey sense a-tinglin,'
I began waving my bloody hands
criss-cross criss-cross,
and shaking my head like
a mime offered cash money to get the hell away,
but my wife, with a most quizzical countenance,
handed up the phone anyway.
"It's, uh...uh..."
A flash of wild desperation rippled
across my craggy face.
"Well, it's Santa Claus."
"Santa?"
She nodded silently and handed up
the receiver, the two of us locked
in an unblinking, puzzled stare.
"...uh, hello??" I babbled into the
handset, peering from the top of
the paint-splattered ladder through the
night window and into the infinite sky.
It was Santa all right.
I climbed down, and twisting a
cheesy Christmas dish towel into
a make-shift tourniquet,
I halted my little hemorrhage and
proceeded to have quite the
pleasant chat with Jolly Old Saint N. hisself.
And what, you might now be asking,
did Ded Moroza say to me in
that unprecedented chatty-chit?
Come, now, dear dads,
I think you all know me better than that by now.
You wouldn't believe me in any case,
as I have heard vicious murmurings
from many of you out there in
dadsville questioning your favorite dad's
very sanity after I so willingly related
the true and terrifying tale
of Walt Dinny rising from his icy grave
to roll me for a coupla bucks in Dinnyworl.
For shame, I say!
But since the holiday season is upon us,
and in that I keenly feel the capricious
nature of my tentative
readership all of whom I'll need in
order to sell this sorry Web place to
a publisher for several billion dollars,
I'll tell you as much as Santa will allow.
Here goes:
I've been going to the same Santa for years now.
He has presided over his glittery Arctic Kingdom
in the shadow of the food court as long as
we have been living here in
the wilds of dadsville.
His whiskers are real, and they're naturally white.
For all of these years he has endured
the daily punishment that non-stop
wishing brings to bear, all in a
steaming woolen suit under the incessant
glare of the fluorescents with
only one lunch break as the
raggedy harried tsunami of jaded
holiday bargain hunters wash by.
Some rubberneck and point.
Some wait and wait and wait,
having gussied their kids up in
their finest Sunday-go-to-meetin's,
threatened now by the grease of
blackmail burgers and fries dished up
to keep 'em busy and keep 'em quiet
in the punishing queue.
Some, wearing mammoth insecurities
on their polyester sleeves,
laugh at him out loud,
smug in the superiority of the
knowledge that he is,
in fact,
faux.
But is he really?
I was so taken by his serene and jolly
comportment the first year we stumbled
on him at the mall, I was so
transported back into a state of belief,
that I ran into the newsroom where I
worked first thing the Monday
after and immediately assigned a
reporter to do a profile piece on
the "Real Santa."
"What's this guy's name?
"Where's he from?
"Iz he under contract and for how long and how much?
"Who's his agent? Who handles him?
"What's his off-season gig??"
I spat out a hail of questions for
which I wanted answers ---
ultimately more for myself than for
my 6:00 viewing audience.
The afternoon dragged on and on and on
and I juggled the positions of
this homicide and that arson fire,
this injustice and that tragedy,
in the senseless miasma of misery
that generally comprised the first section
of our warring local TV news shows.
I didn't care much about any of it anymore.
But I was on pins and needles
waiting to hear back from my
Santa reporter, and I saved a
whopping three minute slot
(as much time as the whole weathercast got)
for the real Santa at the end of my show.
"Well, what's the deal?" I asked the
reporter as he brushed a slurry of snow
off his coat with his nicotine-stained paws.
"What?"
"Who IS the guy? What's the deal with the mall Santa?"
"He won't say. Won't tell me anything."
"His name???"
"Said to just call him Santa.
"Says he's from the North Pole."
"WHAAATT?! What about Mall Management, what'd THEY say?"
"Same thing, man. Good story. Good bit.
"Canya gimme 3:45??"
I saved the story ---
had it dubbed off onto a VHS right away
along with all the out-takes too.
For years I'd pull them out and study them
just at the start of the Christmas season,
looking for any nuance, any clue,
anything that could convince me that
this man was in fact, NOT Santa Claus.
Three years ago, I gave up.
Instead, I made a copy of the tapes
and I wrapped them up in the
Muppet Baby Christmas paper scraps we
had left over from the year before,
taped my business card to it,
and after my kids had their turn
with Santa, I had mine.
"Um...I don't know if you remember me,
"Santa, but I've been bringing my
"kids here every year...and I had
"you on my TV show a few years back...
"and I kept the tapes, you know,
"so my kids could look at 'em an'
"all...and I just this year found 'em
"again, and I thought you might like
"a copy of 'em...you know, for your
"own resume or demo tape or whatever..."
He offered me his gloved hand
as I blathered on and on,
his blue eyes twinkling,
his smile infectious and boundless.
It was later that night that he phoned.
I'll see him in the next few weeks.
I guess I look forward to it
even more than my kids do.
You see, it's my first year
being a dad with kids
who now ALL know about Santa,
and who Santa's elves REALLY are.
It's the first year that they're all
on the other side of wanting only toys;
and so it is the first year that
their own personal Santa
doesn't know quite what to do.
We don't really talk about it.
They know I know, but we're not about
to let that on to each other,
and we don't have to ---
and that's because I can see
that their belief is still there---
it's just changed.
Now and forever,
they have come to believe
the magic of Santa
that dances in their hearts.