Maybe it was the post office lighting, but every girl’s advantage shone. And then one of them put her hand to her mouth, pointed to her letter, and said, “Oh my God, did you see that?” and “Oh my God, did you see that?”
Because in the center of the room was this enormous banquet table with seven boxes of letters on it. There was one box for each of the five boroughs of New York City and a box that said “New York State” and a box that said “Foreign.”
And all of the people piled into this room as if it were a rush-hour subway car—the suits and the scary grandmas and the high school girls—were putting their hands in the boxes, pulling out a letter, saying, “Oh my God, did you see that?”
As soon as I saw an inch of free space, I ran up and put my hand into the box that said “Brooklyn,” because I’d lived in Brooklyn for the last seven years. I knew the people in my building. I knew the people on the street. Sometimes, I even smiled at little kids on the sidewalk. We were all kind of connected, like family.
The second my hand touched the box, this feeling started racing up my elbow, like there was one letter that was singing to me on some kind of personal frequency. The way a red chenille sweater will sing to me from a store window when I’m just walking by, minding my own business, and I’ll have to stop what I’m doing and walk right in. Only I couldn’t figure out which letter was singing to me because the box was really tall, and I’m not.
I pulled my hand out of the box. It was attached to this pile of letters. I read the first one. It said: “Dear Santa. I am the mother of an eleven-year-old boy who has been a very good boy this year, and all he would like for Christmas is something to play football with, or fish.”
How hard could that be? I figured they probably sold footballs at the corner hot dog stands, this close to Madison Square Garden! What an easy request to fulfill! And so affordable, too. I put the letter in my pocket. That was simple!
Actually, it was too simple.
Christmas, the full-bodied, genuine, carol-inspiring kind, as I know all too well from a lifetime of anguishing personal experience, does not happen to someone like me for answering one simple letter involving a rod, reel, and a small sports ball. Remember the X in the road? Rome? The ashram? I get it now. That first letter was a tzedaka test. A Christmas quiz. A minitrap. But you can’t fool me! Expecting a true Christmas experience from answering one little letter would be like skipping one dessert and expecting to wake up with totally flat abs in the morning. That stuff only happens in dreams, and low-fat dessert commercials. Back here in the real world, one little letter couldn’t change my Christmas karma.
But two letters could!
I hereby propose and pass the following revision to my original plan: I will look for one more letter, one that can increase my giving burden to acceptable proportions. One that will harmonize with the one that’s sung its way so sweetly into my pocket. All in favor? I. Me. Whatever. This mental meeting is adjourned!
The second letter in my hand was from a boy who stapled a picture of this yellow-and-orange castle from a toy catalog onto a piece of notebook paper. And it said: “Dear Santa: I will be happy if you bring me just this castle for Christmas. But if you bring me a different toy, that would be okay, too. I will leave your cookies in the same place as last year.”
I could resist that.
” PS: I love you, Santa.”
Oh sweet Jesus, Krishna, and Jehovah, no I couldn’t. “J love you, Santa”? This little kid I’d never seen had written four little words at the end of his letter and I was devastated: “I love you, Santa”? Santa, as I remembered him, was not an “I love you” kind of guy. He was more like a one-on-one corporation with a simple contract. You be good. I’ll bring the presents. And now here was this kid writing “I love you” to a total stranger—me—who he probably thought was wearing a red polyester suit and a beard!
I walk around all day in these meticulous casual ensembles from SoHo and I’m lucky if somebody on the street says: “Nice red chenille sweater, baby!” (“Thanks, it just sang to me from a store window!”) And now this little kid was offering me love—and cookies—in exchange for a plastic toy castle in the mail. I put the second kid’s letter in my pocket. There was no way I was going to give up on somebody this accepting.
I had two letters now: one filled with love, one filled with ease. It was almost enough. But not really. Let’s go for letter number three, I thought, and make this a holy, whole epistolary trinity!
My third letter was written by hand in all caps by an unemployed mother looking for “A FIRST DOWN JACKET FOR MY DAUGHTER, SIZE 10/11 SMALL, IN BLACK.”
And there’s something about those words—“A FIRST DOWN JACKET”— that made me mist in the middle of the main post office on a Thursday afternoon. Because a kid who doesn’t get a football or a castle for Christmas is unhappy. But a little girl who doesn’t have a down jacket to wear outside when it’s cold is COLD! And that is not an acceptable thing.
The idea that there was a little girl in my borough who was cold made me want to say to everybody standing in line at the main post office, Hey you guys! There’s a little girl who is freezing at this address out in Brooklyn! And in my mind, I saw everyone in the post office stop what they were doing. They put their stamps back on the counter and handed back their registered mail so we could start an organization called Friends of Post Office Kids Without Heat—FOPOKWOH, for short. We formed a conga line of righteous people and danced our way out of the main post office onto Eighth Avenue, adding people along the way. By the time we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, there were 7 million of us, carrying safe space heaters and blankets and money to pay for gas.
So, there I was, standing at the checkout counter of Operation Santa Claus with my three letters in hand and seven boxes of runners-up behind me. I know, I told you I was looking for the one letter that would sing to me. One letter, one kid: a logical move for someone who’d never changed a diaper. But with three, I had a major chord—a family’s worth of kids to whom I could give a real Christmas!
And besides, how could I possibly have put one of these letters back? Which one would I have chosen? Each letter was as personal as a child’s face. How could I have looked at that face and said, “Sorry, adorable Football Boy, your request is too simple.” Or “Sorry, Young Mr. Love and Cookies, there’s no room for you at my one-bedroom Brooklyn inn!” How could I have listened to a letter sing and then said, “Thanks, but no thanks!” That would have made for one heartwarming image for a Christmas special, no? A Very New York Scrooge-Ass Christmas! I can just see it now:
“Please?” asks the letter, played by the voice of a compellingly real child actor. “Look. I even made a couple of cute misspellings, not the fake ones you see on Christmas specials. Actual errors, ‘cause I’m a real kid. See? I even used the word—’cause—the way real kids do!”
“Sorry,” says the coldhearted woman, cruelly being played by me, dressed in a month’s rent’s worth of new designer separates. “I know this seems hard for you, having me put you back in that overcrowded box where no one may ever hear you sing again. And yes, it’s true: You could end up being recycled or something when nobody ever reads you again or takes you home. And yes, maybe on Christmas Day, instead of getting a present, the hope-filled child who wrote you will get nothing but a broken heart and a loss of faith in Santa, and, to extrapolate reasonably, humanity. And, okay, maybe that loss of faith will KO his hope of anything good happening in his life. And sure, all kids deserve to have something good happen to them, not just once in a lifetime, but once a day, like some kind of happiness vitamin.
“But hey! Look on the bright side! Maybe you’ll end up with one of those guys in the suits. They may have less time than I do to shop, but, God knows, they’ve got more disposable cash. And isn’t that what the holiday season is about? More cash, more toys, more loot?… ”
Sorry, folks, but I had no intention of starring in that particular special. Three Christmas survivors had believed
in Santa—and ended up with me, a woman who has been known to buy two nearly identical orange lipsticks just in case one of them looked a tiny bit better in natural light.
How could I have returned a letter? It would have been like returning a kid.
I was riding the subway back to Brooklyn, my letters in my Italian designer knapsack. I think I felt the way a guy must feel when he’s got an engagement ring in his pocket—like everybody had to know what I was carrying, because the letters in my knapsack were singing so loudly. But everyone just minded his own business.
The first thing I did when I got home was unpack my letters and put them on top of my desk so they could breathe. Then I steamed some spinach in a warm filtered-water mist, read a book, and went to sleep. Then at four o’clock the next morning, I woke up in a cold sweat. I had gone from being an independent single woman to being the sole provider of Christmas for three innocent children. What had I been thinking?
I went running into my living room, and there they were: three letters. Three little kids’ worth of Christmases sitting on my desk. Three sets of little kid eyes looking up at me saying, We know you’ll do it, Santa!
And what they were looking at right then was the worst side of myself. The scared and selfish side, which was saying, Santa, who? There is no Santa here! I am just a confused young woman in search of her first Christmas. I’m in need of help, not a provider of it!
My scary selfish side was deeply convinced there’d been a mistake, a case of confused identities. Just like when the guy behind the counter at the doughnut store calls me “Ma’am” and there’s no one in the store except for him and me. I want to say, Who do you think you’re talking to, young man? There’s nobody grown-up here!
Three hours later, as the sun came up over Brooklyn, I was still standing there staring at those letters. I was thinking that maybe if I stared at them hard enough, I’d find a way to make this project dealable, palatable, easier to swallow.
Sure, I wanted to do good, but this much good? Why had I jumped into the deep end of the tzedaka pool before finding out if I could swim?
After all, I’d never done this before. Maybe I didn’t have the required skills to be hired for this nonpaying but crucial job! Maybe there was some night-school course in Christmas Giving that I could take. A tutor I could hire. Maybe there were more proactive, perhaps battery-powered letters to Santa that shop for themselves?
Was it possible? Could I fail at the fine art of giving? Not possible! I told myself I live in a city where hailing a cab to get to work every morning requires the tactical skill of a military general and the seductive charms of a sorceress. I am equal to any of life’s challenges!
Except perhaps this.
Inhale… exhale… Get a grip! I experienced an unexpected moment of holiday enlightenment. If this is the true, evil spirit of Christmas, I will exorcise it ASAP. I will do my Operation Santa shopping this week! Today! This morning! So I can get on with the rest of my life after lunch. I felt a moment of inner peace.
Then I realized, I now have to think of a place to get some deeply anonymous giving done fasti Near my home! So I won’t die making the trip!
I had a vision—not a spiritual vision, but more like a memory with a visual snapshot attached to it. I remembered that there was a mall in my neighborhood that someone had pointed out to me once as being the mall with the “largest number of items sold per square foot in America.” I saw its image in my mind’s eye: gray and big and crumbling, filled with chain stores and discount stores with forgettable names.
Which was exactly why I never went there. How can you find something that sings in a place where everything looks the same? Not that I don’t have a firm grip on my identity, but I have to admit I was a little bit afraid that I could walk into that mall as this serious vegetarian who shops in SoHo—east of Lafayette Street—and walk out on the other end as Arty Bike Girl, the suburban sixteen-year-old I used to be when I went shopping in malls.
As the sun feebly broke through the mid-December clouds, exchanging the hopeless black of night for a rare bright blue day, I went for a run over the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s what I do when I feel like I need to be moving ahead but I don’t know where I’m going. The sight of downtown Manhattan’s tall buildings coming through the pointed arches always puts things in perspective. It’s as if the soul of the engineer who built the bridge is saying, Hey, I figured out how to span a river with wire and a few pounds of cement. Your problem’s got to be easier than that!
I was getting my first good look at the Manhattan skyline when it hit me: There was this other mall in Brooklyn.
My neighbor Rita and I had literally run into it the week before when we were looking for the parking lot we used to cut through. It was like that old Joni Mitchell song about paradise and the parking lot, only in reverse. Because where our parking lot used to be, someone had built this brand-new three-story white concrete mall with a sporting-goods store and an office-supply store. And music. We weren’t just hearing music, it was singing in our bones.
The music carried us up the escalator to the second floor and dropped us off in front of this “spiritual brass band” from Harlem, which was playing at the mall because it was opening day, and anyone who was anyone in Brooklyn was there. There were grandmothers and fathers and kids who were friends and my neighbor Rita and I, all trying to see what the excitement was about.
No one went into the stores. We just stood there watching these six guys playing these jazzy versions of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Good King Wenceslas” on the trombone. The youngest guy was about ten. The oldest was around eighty.
As the music filled the space over our heads, everybody started singing and dancing. Soon, it was a call and response, the dancing firing up the musicians to improvise riffs on carols that threatened to tear the brand-new roof off the house.
“He’s the King!” the youngest trombone player shouted in a high, determined voice.
“Comin’ to town!” shouted the oldest player, taking a breath-break from his horn.
As far as the crowd was concerned, the King was already there, and doing fine. People yelled “Hallelujah!” in front of T. J. Maxx and shook hands with one another. Rita and I shook hands with everyone. I was shaking. I had tears in my eyes because the music was just everywhere. The trombones were getting louder and louder. And then somebody in the crowd testified from sheer joy: “Praise the Lord—He’s in the building!”
Which made sense. Why shouldn’t God be celebrating the new mall with everybody else in Brooklyn?
Now, the spirit of God or Santa or modern commercial real estate was sending me back across the Brooklyn Bridge to my apartment, where I got ready to head to the new mall, where my kids’ Christmas wishes would hopefully come true. I took a quick shower; packed my knapsack: Two energy bars. Check! Two lipsticks. Check, check! Checkbook. Double check! A bottle of water. An extra pair of socks in case I got blisters from shopping.
I locked the door behind me. Opened it again. Went back in and, this time, remembered to take the letters with me.
Thirty minutes later, I got off the subway at the mall in my green reversible down jacket with the red-and-green-plaid lining. It wasn’t the most fashion-conscious piece of clothing I owned. Okay, in fact, it had been sitting in the back of my closet for years, but I was hoping its color scheme would bring me good Christmas luck.
As I was riding the escalator to the second floor, I passed other mothers going up to the third floor or down to the basement. Some of them were wearing down jackets. Others were holding bottles of water. We smiled. Then the other mothers looked down to make sure their kids were where they should be. And I looked in my pocket to make sure my kids—my letters—were where they were supposed to be, too.
I was sweating; I was nervous. I thought I was passing. I was an “undercover mother.” The only person who knew I had no idea what I was doing was me.
The escalator left me off on the second floor, in front of a
store that looked like the perfect place to buy a kid a castle. There were all these posters in the window of kids wearing sweatshirts with dragons on them and little denim jackets with choo-choo trains running up the sleeves. As I walked through the door, my inner sixteen-year-old Arty Bike Girl started screaming, Oh my God! That orange jumpsuit with the balloons painted on it would look great on us in an extra large! But my Undercover Mother told her, Young lady, we are not here to shop for you!
So I walked up to the security guard and said, “I’m looking for a toy castle for my, uh—”
Hold on. For this to be true Christmas tzedaka, the guy couldn’t know I was answering these kids’ letters as an act of charity. To be a tzedaka Santa, I needed him to think I was just another mom—the kind who knows about kids, and has them.
“For my, uh, son?”
And would you look at that! The security guard gave me this totally nonthreatening dad-to-mom smile, the kind I’d never gotten from a man in this city before. Probably because I’d never been anybody’s mother before.
“Isn’t it the darndest thing?” he said. “We’ve got windows filled with pictures of kids wearing clothes with pictures of toys on them. Then folks walk in and find out that there are no toys to buy. I told the people who run this place, ‘Not that it’s any of my business, but don’t you think customers will find this confusing? Toys on clothes in the window. No toys inside?’
Love Santa Page 4