Bad Santa? Our Christmas Eve foray through Plantation
All the other Santas had enough sense to wear black shoes to match their faux pullover boots; I have my white New Balance workout shoes. And even a pillow can't keep my black belt up.
I'm easily the worst-looking of the 17 Christmas Eve Santas ready to ride through Plantation. Will people notice? Will children dash away from our truck, scarred for life over a vision of an underfed Santa? Will adults shake their first and cry out "Santa! You fraud!"?
This year, our family manned one of the 17 trucks that drove through the streets of Plantation, tossing out candy canes and greeting the children, parents and grandparents that dash out of their houses when they hear first police sirens, then Christmas music. (Kind of a sick juxtoposition, eh?)
My 11-year-old son, wanting to be an elf, volunteered us for Plantation's annual visit from Santa. He has an outgoing personality and red hair that is perfect for his green elf hat. He and my wife will throw candy and finagle with organizers to get a route through our Jacaranda Lakes neighborhood (thanks for trading, Larry Lerner).
Me, I have skinny arms and am averse to having even my own facial hair, let alone a fuzzy white fake beard. But I do have the name.
A recent study showed school children gravitate to the letters in their name. Adams make more A's, Billys make more B's, etc. I've dressed up as St. Nick as far back in high school (under the false hope that the girls in chorus would sit on my lap) and at prior newspapers, when two weeks after a pay freeze was announced, I strolled in to the company party, spread my skinny arms out and joked "Hey, it's been a lean year everywhere!" only to be met with stone-dead silence.
But this is a four-hour gig, and there are expectations. And 30 minutes into our drive through Plantation, I'm already out of lines. ("Ho-ho-ho" and "Merry Christmas" can carry you only so far.) Only then do I realize Santa never has a speaking part in movies or even those cartoon TV specials.
Fortunately, it's a job where you really don't have to do much. The youngest children are too wide-eyed to realize that Santa's beard is two inches away from his chin, the middle-aged ones are too cool to hang around much and the adults ... well, the adults seem like the happiest of all, even the ones with inflatable dreidels in their yards.
My theory is that for adults, seeing Santa isn't about the present moment. It's about tapping back into years of Christmas memories. I'm merely punching a mental tape in their childhood video archive, the time they got the Barbie or the electric football game.
The highlight for me comes in the final five minutes, as we rolled through our final cul de sac, where a family of two girls too shy to speak stood on the curb. (I blew them a kiss.)
"We've been waiting for you," the mom said. "These are for you."
She handed me two Post-it notes:
Little marmeid
Bratz guitar
Bike
and
My littel powne
Bratz gettur
Bratz fashen
To those girls, now they could go to sleep. Santa had come by on Christmas Eve, and now he was headed back to the North Pole. They'll never know that actually Santa went to his home just a few blocks away, propped his feet up and sipped on a glass of zin.
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