This winter break I had the opportunity to fulfill a goal of mine: I became a mall Santa Claus. After a much needed, post-finals, three-day bender on Webster Ave, I went home to idyllic suburban New Jersey and caught up on some sleep. That got boring after two days and, since my high school friends were going to be in college for another two weeks, I decided to get a job to refuel my slush fund. But I didn't want just any job, oh no, I wanted something big, something I'd never done before. I wanted to join the legion of red-felt-clad merrymakers that span the globe and bring seasonal cheer to good little boys and girls everywhere.
Thus, I set out to find employment as an Official Mall Santa Claus, the most respected job in all the land. For those of you who don't live in mall-laden New Jersey, here's a little background information. If you blindfold somebody and drop him in the middle of New Jersey, spin him around a few times, and tell him to walk straight in one direction, chances are he'll bump into a mall before he bumps into anything else. And at everyone of these malls, there is a Santa who charges shoppers 10 bucks for the privilege of owning a picture of their kid on some fat, old, stranger's lap. Therefore, with the abundance of nearby malls, I figured finding a job as a Santa somewhere would be as easy as finding someone wearing a North Face jacket on campus. I was wrong.
In store after store and mall after mall, I heard the same responses: not fat enough (this, despite the budding beer gut), not old enough (granted, most of the guys I was competing with for the job had 40 years on me), and not jolly enough. Well, whatever I lacked in girth, age, or joviality, I made up for in persistence and finally found a place that would hire me as a "back-up" Santa Claus (in case the first-string Santa ever got a sudden case of Tourette's, I suppose).
I was given a Santa suit, boots, and a beard and instructed to sit quietly in a little plywood candy-cane shack with only the elves to keep me company while the "real" Santa worked his magic. And while the elves were nice guys and all, sitting in a poorly ventilated, outhouse-sized room with half a dozen wizened, old midgets got on my nerves real fast. So I struck a bargain with the "real" Santa and convinced him to call in sick one day and let me run the show.
The night before my big day, I snacked on milk and cookies to set the mood and reminisced on what Christmas and Santa Claus meant to me when I was growing up. Visions of me in the pajamas my mom had sewn, tearing open presents on Christmas morning danced like sugarplums through my head. I couldn't recall exactly when I figured out that Santa Claus was really just my mom and dad. I don't remember when I realized that the magical machinations of jolly St. Nick and his dozen reindeer were really the laborious efforts of my parents, spending hours waiting on line to buy presents and to wrap and hide them from my sisters and me. But soon after I made that discovery, the magic of Christmas, at least its secular aspect, was gone for me.
As the years went by, the toys I had dreamt about and painstakingly described in letters to the North Pole were replaced with sweaters and books. Ecstatic cries of joy upon opening a present were replaced by polite thank you's. The magic had waned and that was part of growing up. But through my role as Santa, I had a chance to experience that magic all over again, or so I thought.
As the day wore on and child after grimy, loud-mouthed, obnoxious child came and went, I realized that Christmas isn't what it used to be. You can never go back again and I couldn't recapture the magic of Christmas that comes with the suspension of disbelief, the pure embrace of something inexplicable. The moment has past and everyone has moved on; we are now a society desirous of instant access and overloaded with information. Parents wake up at 5 a.m. to battle busy signals as they order Pokemon memorabilia and Furbys over the Internet. As a generation of children wake up on Christmas morning, hoping for video games over bicycles and computers instead of baseballs, jolly, old, fat men across the land sit on candy cane thrones, shedding tears in empty malls and lamenting what has become of the world they're living in.
