by New Yorker
“But darling!” In alarm, Mrs. Flynn felt the small heart pounding, the delicate cage of ribs pushing in and out with the baby’s rapid breath. “What is it, dearest? What don’t you want?”
“That old man!” cried Barbara. “Santa Claus. I don’t want him, Mummy. I don’t, Mummy.”
“You don’t want Santa Claus to come?”
“No!” It was a defiant wail.
“But, darling, don’t you want toys or anything?”
“No! No! I don’t want him.”
“But, sweetheart, Santa Claus is nice. He’s a nice old man. He only wants Barbara to be happy. He wants to give her things.”
“I don’t want him. Tell him not to come. Tell that old man, Mummy.”
Mrs. Flynn stood there, the child clinging to her neck. She glanced around wildly and saw the telephone. “All right, Barbara,” she said. “Listen now; listen to Mummy.” She sat down at the telephone and settled Barbara firmly in her lap, then pretended to dial a number, holding down the plunger. “Hello,” she said after an adequate pause. “Is this the North Pole? Is this Santa Claus?… How are you, Santa? This is Barbara’s mother. Santa, Barbara and I have been talking it over and we’ve decided that we would rather not have you come to see us this Christmas. Yes, that’s what I said. Thanks just the same, Santa. Goodbye.”
A faint shadow of pleasure crossed Barbara’s face as she listened, holding her breath. Her body relaxed. Obediently, wordlessly, as her mother hung up the receiver, she crawled into bed. Then she turned her head on the pillow and whispered, “Hold me.”
In the half-light, Mrs. Flynn gathered her, sheet and blanket and all, into the ceremonial, traditional good-night hug. Her eyes closed, Barbara whispered, “No Santa Claus!”
“Absolutely,” said Mrs. Flynn. She whispered, too. “No Santa Claus.”
Barbara sighed and slept.
Mrs. Flynn’s hat was on, her face was made up. She had changed her slippers and put on her coat. Tiptoeing, she left the bedroom and closed the door gently. Her thoughts buzzed back and forth between past and future—the scene just finished with Barbara, funny, pathetic baby, and the scene there would be with Bobby. And he was a pathetic baby, too.
“Good grief! He thinks he is Santa Claus!”
(photo credit 15.7)
How could she turn him away without being terribly ungracious, without hurting him. I’m tired, she thought plaintively, I’m too tired to go out with a hero, and dance and drink and listen. I’m too tired to pay Society’s debt to our boys all by myself. Through the door into the kitchen she saw Mrs. Soper fulfilling her contract, rocking in the rocking chair while she waited for the company to get out of the living room. Mrs. Soper, sitting.
Mrs. Flynn, still thinking desperately, unhappily, went into the living room. Bobby was stretched full length on the sofa, asleep. A half-filled glass balanced uncertainly on the carpet near his dangling hand. He slept not like a drunken man but like a tired boy. His face was terribly pale.
Mrs. Flynn reached over and patted his near shoulder. “Bobby,” she said, “wake up.”
Bobby slept. Mrs. Flynn took hold of his shoulder, intending to give him a firm shake, the way she woke Barbara in the mornings. Then all of a sudden, with a burst of relief, she saw her way out. It was miraculous the way it had happened.
Mrs. Flynn turned and went into the kitchen. “I’m just going out, Mrs. Soper,” she said, “and that boy has fallen into such a nice, deep sleep that I don’t like to wake him up. Just let him go on sleeping for a while, will you? Of course, if it goes on more than an hour more, you’d better call him.”
“Yes, Ma’am. You want me to tell him something?”
“No,” said Mrs. Flynn happily, “not a thing. I’m going to a party, but it isn’t a party he would be interested in. Just tell him I didn’t want to wake him up.”
“Sure, Ma’am. It would be a pity.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She paused at the front door and looked again at Bobby, asleep. He was young, yes, but not too young to learn that there is no Santa Claus. The rest of us know it, she thought. Why shouldn’t he?
As she closed the door she decided that, with a bit of luck, she could come home to an unencumbered apartment not too long after midnight. It was simply extraordinary, the relief she felt. Like Barbara’s nursery-school janitor, perhaps, when he took off that false face and could breathe again.
1945
(photo credit 15.5)
PERSONAL HISTORY
SKID-ROW SANTA
KEN KESEY
At the finale of the Christmas show last year in Eugene, Oregon, I came out as a skid-row Santa, complete with rubber nose, plastic sack full of beer cans, and a pint of peppermint schnapps to fortify the holiday spirit. I also borrowed my wife Faye’s blue egg bucket and labelled it “Homeless.” I’d jangle the cans like a bagful of aluminum sleigh bells while I worked the main-floor aisle seats: “Hey, come on, buddy. Put something in the bucket, for Chrissakes. Don’t you know it’s Christmastime? Hey, that’s better. God bless you. You’re beautiful.”
I ended up with only about seventy-five bucks. Not much of a take for a full house at a Christmas show. But even seventy-five bucks was a wad too big to pocket.
So after I got out of my red suit and rubber snoot I drove off to seek a worthy recipient. I spotted a likely assortment of candidates in the 7-Eleven parking lot, corner of Sixth and Blair. I swung in and held the bucket out the window.
“All right. Who’s the hardest-luck case in this lot?”
The candidates looked me over and edged away—all but one guy, ponytailed and slope-shouldered, his chin tucked down in the collar of a canvas camouflage jacket. “I got a streak of hard luck runs all the way back to Jersey,” he said. “What about it?”
“I’m on a mission from St. Nicholas,” I told him. “And if you are, in fact, the least fortunate of the lot”—in the spirit of the season, I refrained from saying “biggest loser”—“then this could be your lucky night.”
“Right,” he said. “You’re some kind of Holy Roller? Where’s the string? What’s the hustle?”
“No string, no catch, no hustle. I’m giving. You’re getting. Get it?”
He did. He took the money and ran, taking Faye’s egg bucket into the bargain. The last I saw of him, he was scurrying away, looking for a hole.
Since then, I’ve wondered about him. Did that little windfall make any difference? Did he rent a cheap room? Get a bath? A companion? Every time I found myself passing through one of Eugene’s hard-luck harbors, I kept half an eye peeled for the sight of a long tail of black hair draggling down the back of a camouflage jacket. Last week, a year later to the day, I made a sighting.
(photo credit 16.1)
I was in town with Faye and our daughter, getting in some Christmas shopping before we rendezvoused with my mom for supper. We’d done a couple of hours in the malls, and I was shopped out. I announced that I wanted to make some private purchases, and slipped off into the rainy cold—alone. I was headed for the liquor store on Eighth, thinking the spirit could use a little fortification.
But the trusty peppermint wasn’t powerful enough. These home-town streets are just too strange, too vacant, too sad. Corner of Sixth at Olive: empty. The great Darigold Creamery that my dad built up from a little Eugene farmer’s coöperative: bulldozed down. I ducked my head and kept walking in the rain.
The street in my memory was the clearer path anyway: John Warren’s Hardware over there, where you could buy blasting powder across the counter; the Corral Novelty Shop, where you could buy itching powder; the Heilig Theatre, with its all-the-way-across-the-street arch, flashing what we all took to be the Norwegian word for “hello,” so big it could be read all the way from the windows of the arriving trains: “Heilig, Heilig, Heilig.” All gone.
When I reached the city center, I noticed that the thing people had finally given up trying to call a fountain was newly disguised with pine boughs
and potted plants. But to no avail. It still looked like the remnants of a bombed-out French cathedral. Then, when the rain eased up, I was surprised to discover that the ruins were not quite deserted: I saw a loose black braid hanging down the back of a camouflage jacket. That seemed right. He was in the old fountain’s basin, bent in a concealing crouch at one of the potted pines.
I came up from behind and clapped my hand on his shoulder. “Whatcha doin’, Hard Luck? Counting another bucket of money?”
He wheeled around and had my wrist clamped in a bone-breaking grasp before I could finish the word. I saw then that this wasn’t a chinless street rat standing down in the basin after all. This was a block-jawed American Indian built like two fireplugs, sitting in a wheelchair.
“… flying low over housetops, landing on a roof, illegal entry into a residence via chimney, operating a sleigh without a license, keeping wild reindeer confined in harness, and creating a disturbance with loud laughter.”
(photo credit 16.2)
“Ouch! Man! Let go! I thought you were somebody else!”
He eased the hold, but kept the wrist. I told him about last year’s longhair and the matching jacket.
He listened, studying my eyes. “O.K. Sorry about the twist. I was taking a leak. You surprised me. Let’s get out of the rain and see what kind of medicine you’ve got sticking out of your pocket.”
We retired under some scaffolding. He was less than enthusiastic about my choice of pocket medicine. “I’d rather drink something like Southern Comfort if I have to choose a sugar drink,” he said. But we passed the pint back and forth and watched the rain.
He leaned to spit and a folded Army blanket slipped out of his lap. His legs were as gone as the main gut of my poor home town.
He was a part-time fillet man from the Pike Place Market, up in Seattle, on his way to spend Christmas with family on “the res,” outside of Albuquerque. His bus was laid up for a couple of hours: “I think they’re getting the Greyhound spayed before she gets to California.”
When the pint was about three-quarters gone, I screwed on the lid and held it out. “I gotta meet the women. Go ahead and keep it.”
“Ah, I guess not,” he said.
“You’re pretty choosy for a thirsty man, aren’t you? What would be your best druthers?”
“To have the money and make my own choice.”
I reached for my wallet. “I think I got a couple of bucks.”
“And a quarter? If I had two bucks and a quarter, I could get a pint of Ten High. With four and change I’d go on to a fair-to-middlin’ fifth. Cream of Kentucky.”
I hesitated. Was I being hustled? “O.K. Let’s see what we’ve got.” I emptied the wallet and pockets onto his blanket. He added a few coins and counted the collection.
“Nine seventy-five. If I come up with another two dollars, I can get a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish. Think I can panhandle two dollars between here and the liquor store?”
“Without a doubt,” I assured him. “With both panhandles tied behind your back.”
(photo credit 16.3)
We shook hands goodbye and headed off in our separate directions, strolling and rolling through the rain. At the restaurant, my mother wanted to know what I was thinking about that gave me such a goofy grin.
“I was just thinking, if beggars can’t be choosers, then it must follow that choosers, by definition, are not beggars.”
This year for the Christmas show, Santa’s got himself a classier outfit and wrangled some holiday helpers out of the high-school choir, God bless ’em. And we’re gonna work all the aisles. Come on out here you helpers, come on out. Get down there and panhandle! And you guys in the audience start passing your money to the aisles here. This is no time to nickel-and-dime, for Chrissakes! It’s Christmastime.
1997
THE TWELVE TERRORS OF CHRISTMAS
JOHN UPDIKE
1. SANTA: THE MAN. Loose-fitting nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit, funny rummy smell when you sit on his lap. If he’s such a big shot, why is he drawing unemployment for eleven months of the year? Something scary and off key about him, like one of those Stephen King clowns.
2. SANTA: THE CONCEPT. Why would anybody halfway normal want to live at the North Pole on a bunch of shifting ice floes? Or stay up all night flying around the sky distributing presents to children of doubtful deservingness? There is a point where altruism becomes sick. Or else a sinister coverup for an international scam. A man of no plausible address, with no apparent source for his considerable wealth, comes down the chimney after midnight while decent, law-abiding citizens are snug in their beds—is this not, at the least, cause for alarm?
3. SANTA’S HELPERS. Again, what is really going on? Why do these purported elves submit to sweatshop conditions in what must be one of the gloomiest climates in the world, unless they are getting something out of it at our expense? Underclass masochism one day, bloody rebellion the next. The rat-a-tat-tat of tiny hammers may be just the beginning.
4. O TANNENBAUM. Suppose it topples over under its weight of explosive baubles? Suppose it harbors wood-borers that will migrate to the furniture? There is something ghastly about a tree—its look of many-limbed paralysis, its shaggy and conscienceless aplomb—encountered in the open, let alone in the living room. At night, you can hear it rustling and drinking water out of the bucket.
5. TINY REINDEER. Hooves that cut through roof shingles like linoleum knives. Antlers like a hundred dead branches. Unstable flight pattern suggesting “dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly.” Fur possibly laden with disease-bearing ticks.
6. ELECTROCUTION. It’s not just the frayed strings of lights anymore, or the corroded transformer of the plucky little Lionel. It’s all those battery packs, those electronic games, those built-in dictionaries, those robots asizzle with artificial intelligence. Even the tinsel tingles.
7. THE CAROLS. They boom and chime from the vaulted ceilings of supermarkets and discount stores, and yet the spirits keep sinking. Have our hearts grown so terribly heavy since childhood? What has happened to us? Why don’t they ever play our favorites? What were our favorites? Tum-de-tum-tum, angels on high, something something, sky.
8. THE SPECIALS. Was Charlie Brown’s voice always so plaintive and grating? Did Bing Crosby always have that little potbelly, and walk with his toes out? Wasn’t that Danny Kaye / Fred Astaire / Jimmy Stewart / Grinch a card? Is Vera-Ellen still alive? Isn’t there something else on, like wrestling or “Easter Parade”?
9. FEAR OF NOT GIVING ENOUGH. Leads to dizziness in shopping malls, foot fractures on speeded-up escalators, thumb and wrist sprain in the course of package manipulation, eye and facial injuries in carton-crowded buses, and fluttering sensations of disorientation and imminent impoverishment.
10. FEAR OF NOT RECEIVING ENOUGH. Leads to anxious scanning of U.P.S. deliveries and to identity crisis on Christmas morning, as the piles of rumpled wrapping paper and emptied boxes mount higher around every chair but your own. Three dull neckties and a pair of flannel-lined work gloves—is this really how they see you?
11. FEAR OF RETURNS. The embarrassments, the unseemly haggling. The lost receipts. The allegations of damaged goods. The humiliating descent into mercantilism’s boiler room.
12. THE DARK. How early it comes now! How creepy and green in the gills everybody looks, scrabbling along in drab winter wraps by the phosphorous light of department-store windows full of Styrofoam snow, mockups of a factitious 1890, and beige mannequins posed with a false jauntiness in plaid bathrobes. Is this Hell or just an upturn in consumer confidence?
1992
(photo credit 17.1)
CHRISTMAS POEM
JOHN O’HARA
Billy Warden had dinner with his father and mother and sister. “I suppose this is the last we’ll see of you this vacation,” said his father.
“Oh, I’ll be in and out to change my shirt,” said Billy.
“My, we’re quick on the repartee,” said Ba
rbara Warden. “The gay young sophomore.”
“What are you, Bobby dear? A drunken junior?” said Billy.
“Now, I don’t think that was called for,” said their mother.
“Decidedly un-called for,” said their father. “What are your plans?”
“Well, I was hoping I could borrow the chariot,” said Billy.
“Yes, we anticipated that,” said his father. “What I meant was, are you planning to go away anywhere? Out of town?”
“Well, that depends. There’s a dance in Reading on the twenty-seventh I’d like to go to, and I’ve been invited to go skiing in Montrose.”
“Skiing? Can you ski?” said his mother.
“All Dartmouth boys ski, or pretend they can,” said his sister.
“Isn’t that dangerous? I suppose if you were a Canadian, but I’ve never known anyone to go skiing around here. I thought they had to have those big—I don’t know—scaffolds, I guess you’d call them.”
“You do, for jumping, Mother. But skiing isn’t all jumping,” said Billy.
“Oh, it isn’t? I’ve only seen it done in the newsreels. I never really saw the point of it, although I suppose if you did it well it would be the same sensation as flying. I often dream about flying.”
“I haven’t done much jumping,” said Billy.
“Then I take it you’ll want to borrow the car on the twenty-seventh, and what about this trip to Montrose?” said his father.
“I don’t exactly know where Montrose is,” said Mrs. Warden.
“It’s up beyond Scranton,” said her husband. “That would mean taking the car overnight. I’m just trying to arrange some kind of a schedule. Your mother and I’ve been invited to one or two things, but I imagine we can ask our friends to take us there and bring us back. However, we only have the one car, and Bobby’s entitled to her share.”
“Of course she is. Of course I more or less counted on her to, uh, to spend most of her time in Mr. Roger Taylor’s Dort.”