Love Santa

by Sharon Glassman

  “They told me, ‘It’s a new “marketing concept.”’ Which, as far as I can see, just means, ‘Ain’t got a clue.’ But those marketing people figure folks will just give in and buy something if they can be tricked into walking through the door.”

  This was probably a bad time to confess I earned my living in the field of marketing; that I was paid handsomely to convince innocent people to walk through the wrong door.

  “Not me!” I said, the sympathetic shopping mom talking to tired, hardworking dad. “I’m immune to all that ‘marketing’ hooey!”

  Hooey? Had I just said the word hooey? I had never said the word hooey in my life. But it definitely sounded momlike, which was a good thing—for appearances.

  Dad nodded. He was antihooey, too.

  “Kids like my son would rather have a toy than a piece of clothing with a picture of some toy on it any day of the week!” I said, suddenly realizing that might be true. “What’s a nine-year-old boy—my son, he’s nine… ”

  Pause. No higher power smote me for making up the kid’s age.

  “Nine and a half… ”

  Big smile from dad. Mom smile back.

  “What’s a nine-and-a-half-year-old boy going to do with a sweatshirt with a picture of a castle on it? Drive his toy soldiers up the sleeves and attack the collar?”

  Dad, supreme guardian of innocent children from evil marketers, laughed. He knew, as (he falsely believed) I did, that the world outside the family unit is oh so cold and often strange. Thank goodness for normal parents like us in it!

  “Or maybe he’s supposed to hold the sweatshirt over the bathtub and pretend the bathtub’s a moat?” he said.

  “Whoo boy!” We sighed in unison.

  “Well!” I said, realizing that we mothers also use a lot of words that begin with w. Wow, and whoo, and well! I guess they go where all the cursing should be.

  “It’s been great chatting with you, but maybe I should start with something easier. Like sports.”

  “There’s a sporting-goods store right across the hall from here. They actually sell sporting equipment, not just the clothes. I’d give them a try,” dad said helpfully. “And you have a nice day.”

  “I already have!” I said, realizing that was true, too.

  Before I crossed the threshold of the first sporting-goods store I had ever walked into in my life, I took a moment to silently, discreetly read my other little boy’s letter outside the electronic doors. Then I walked in.

  The first thing I learned was that footballs come in different sizes, just like sweatshirts. There were junior footballs in brightly colored foam and pro footballs that weighed as much as a steak. A lot of them were even labeled “genuine leather,” which disturbed my vegetarian sensibilities. Even more disturbing was the fact that none of these footballs sang to me in a way that told me which one to buy.

  So I walked up to this very attractive young man in a green sports store vest and said, “I’m looking for a football for my son.” He smiled a variation of the security guard smile.

  “A football. A football! No way!” he said. “That’s gr-r-r-r-reat! How old is your little guy?”

  “Uh, he’s eleven.”

  “Eleven is such a great age! I remember, ‘cause for me it’s only been, like, six years. Where’s the kid live?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “A-MA-zing! I’m two hundred percent Brooklyn. Why two hundred? ’Cause both my folks were born and grew up here!”

  He paused. I laughed.

  “So is this Brooklyn boy a Giants or a Jets fan?”

  The Undercover Mother in me wanted to ask, Don’t the Jets play in New Jersey? But before she made this guy suspect I wasn’t really the mother of a football-loving kid, Arty Bike Girl was on the case, flirtationally speaking: “Give us the green one. Green goes great with his eyes!” It wasn’t a very sportswomanly answer, but it did the job. Because the salesclerk gently tossed us a Jets football, which, defying the odds and all previous personal experience, I caught.

  Then I entrusted him with the second half of my child’s letter, the “or fish” part. Fortunately, my new friend was a sports polymath, as well versed in the lures of lures as he was in footballs. Frankly, I’d never met anyone so happy with his job. “Now here,” he said, barely able to contain his excitement, “is the big daddy of freshwater-accessory knapsacks.”

  The only word in this sentence I fully understood was knapsacks.

  “It’s power-packed with lures and reels and accessories that are triple A-okay for freshwater fishing!” my new friend explained.

  “Super!” I said. “Superdooper!” In my desperate attempt not to sound significantly dumber than I felt, I was smiling so hard, my face was in danger of falling off, revealing the raging fishing ignoramus I’d so blissfully been until then.

  Hey! Don’t you think we should be getting this kid something vegetarian? Arty Bike Girl says. Just kidding! We’re not shopping for us. I know that! Get the knapsack. Go on! I won’t say a word. I promise!

  Now, a mother shouldn’t have a favorite child. But as I was standing in line at the cash register, I couldn’t help thinking that I was getting very attached to this little boy. My first letter. He was quickly becoming my favorite child, the apple—no, no, the football of my eye. My hope for a happier next generation. He was so friendly and simple, and so easy to shop for. He probably slept through the night from the day he was born. As I fished (Get it? Fished? I’m even making Mom-type jokes!) into my knapsack for my wallet, signed the white copy of the credit-card slip and pocketed the yellow, I was indeed one lucky mother.

  Next stop? The down jacket.

  There was a mother of three coming up from the basement with a big bag of kids’ clothing from that kids’ clothing store that takes up the whole floor. What a promising sign!

  The minute we walked through the door, Arty Bike Girl started running from racks of overalls to boxes full of purple leather hiking boots. She reached for a pair of rhinestone hoop earrings. The Undercover Mother in me slapped her—my—hand. Ouch!

  Hey! Arty Bike Girl snapped. Then she sulked her way around the rest of the store, which was packed with everything a little kid could ever need.

  For instance, there, on a rack labeled GIRLS’ OUTERWEAR, was an entire rainbow of puffy little girls’ jackets. With her high-fashion eagle eye, Arty Bike Girl reached down at the end of the rack and plucked out the one puffy black jacket in a size 10/11 small.

  You see! she said. I don’t always think that we’re “shopping for us,” you big grouch. I stuck my arm inside the sleeve. It was puffy but not very warm. And something about it didn’t sing to me.

  Well, Arty Bike Girl said, maybe what we need is an accessory!

  Just then, we saw a table with all these red and black fleecy hats piled on it.

  You know, 90 percent of your body heat leaves through your head.

  Those hats are kind of cute!

  Then we were standing in the checkout line, which was half a Brooklyn mile long, offering motherly advice to the man behind us, who wanted to find a hat for his little boy that was as cool as the one we’d found for our little girl. This other mother reached over and said, “You know, I was going to buy my daughter that jacket, but because they’re not down, they don’t keep the kids warm.”

  You mean we have been standing in line for the last thirty minutes holding a down jacket that is not a down jacket? The only size 10/11 small nondown girls’ jacket in this mall and maybe in all of Brooklyn?

  What are you looking at me for? I’m only sixteen!

  “Next!” the cashier announced. And I could feel an hour’s worth of Brooklyn Christmas shoppers standing behind me. Knowing they might riot if I did anything other than pay quickly and let them advance in line, I pulled out my credit card. That’s one of my favorite backup plans: When in doubt, charge it. It’s an incredibly helpful strategy in those moments when I can’t decide whether I’m about to buy the wrong thing or am just too tired to
know that I’m holding the absolutely most perfect thing in my hand. And if I’m wrong, hey, that’s what return policies are for.

  Buying this jacket would also help me in one other area near and dear to my heart: pride. I am not a competitive person—okay, I am a totally competitive person. Competition in this city is like oxygen: You don’t compete here, you die. But while I can handle losing out occasionally to another human—like the day I came in 3,453rd out of 3,500 runners in the mini-marathon I ran last spring, or the time that other woman grabbed the last sample-sale designer dress in our size off the rack right in front of me—I couldn’t tolerate being beaten by a mall at this highly competitive game of holiday shopping.

  This very unimportant-looking building had just blown a big fat retail raspberry at two out of my three kids’ Christmas wish lists and sucked every last ounce of energy from my aerobically fit body.

  Yes, there is a learning curve in every new undertaking. And yes, I could have given myself a chance to ramp up to speed before I demanded to be victorious. But that day, I, an expert in selling other people things they don’t need, had been denied my basic human right to buy some simple, necessary items!

  I had learned there are places that look like toy stores but that sell only clothes with pictures of toys on them. Fine, I told myself. Tomorrow, after hours of rest and a bottle of wine therapeutically administered during dinner tonight, I will head to some location as yet unknown to find a three-dimensional castle for a little boy who loves me even though he hasn’t met me yet, and never will.

  But this nondown down jacket was another story entirely. It was a three-dimensional object in the correct color and size. If I could check the jacket off my list, I would have successfully purchased two out of three kids’ presents today. And to my mind, two out of three spelled victory!

  So, it wasn’t technically down. But who was going to know that? I, a professional marketer, hadn’t been able to tell that jacket wasn’t down when I picked it from the rack!

  Okay—I suspected it. But since when did innocence become a crime? Or honesty a virtue?

  If my fabulous pseudofriend Tina had been there instead of vacationing at Coppola’s hideaway in Belize, she would have said, “Calm down, sweetheart! The jacket you’ve selected looks like a down jacket. Aren’t appearances what this season is all about?” Then she’d have gone home, waxed her legs, and headed out to some fabulous party where she’d have fun, fun, fun!

  I, on the other hand, bought the hat, the jacket, and the red-gold-and-green-patterned gift box. Then I took the subway home to my apartment, where I lay on the floor of my living room and stared at my ceiling in misery for a seemingly endless amount of time.

  One part of me was thinking, Hey. Who would know if I sent this kid a fake down jacket instead of one that’s warm? I’m an anonymous Santa!

  The other part is saying, You would know. That’s who.

  I saw myself in a room full of amateur parental stand-ins in some church or synagogue basement in January, confessing how badly I’d failed my child when the holiday chips were down. I saw the banner hanging over our heads. It read NDJBA: NONDOWN JACKET BUYERS ANONYMOUS.

  To make matters worse, thirty minutes later, when I left my apartment to have dinner with my good friend Benji in Manhattan, everyone on the street was wearing these enormous down jackets. And looking at down jackets in store windows. And flipping through thick fashion magazines with pictures of down jackets on the cover.

  All the way into the city, the windows of the subway keep clacking real-jacket-fake-jacket-real-jacket-fake-jacket against the frames. And at every stop, the conductor said, “Change here for DOWNtown! DOWNtown!”

  “Why can’t everybody just mind his or her own business!” I said to Benji when he answered the door. “I just spent the entire day trying to buy a size ten/eleven small black real down jacket for this little girl I’ve never met in Brooklyn, and now I find out the jacket’s not down!”

  “Have a seat on our new imported ottoman,” Benji said with his trademark sense of calm. “Taste this pesto Rose bought in the country.”

  “But it was the only one, and I fought so hard to find it!”

  “Hmmmm!” Benji murmured. It’s a little noise he makes when he knows he’s got things under control, no matter how freaked out we mere mortals might be.

  “Have you ever tried to wash a down jacket? You have to put sneakers in the dryer with it—it takes way too many quarters. Have a glass of Oregon merlot.”

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “But it’s not down!”

  “Look, if one little kid’s jacket is getting you so upset, maybe you’re not cut out to be a mother.”

  “What?”

  Benji made his little Hmmmm sound. “Dice this Vidalia onion—maybe you are.”

  When I got home, I called my friend Gale, who’s from the same place outside of Philadelphia I’m from, which is probably why we say all the same things.

  “Does it really matter that it’s not a down jacket?”

  “You’re not rich—a down jacket could cost you hundreds of dollars.”

  “But what if I give her the fake jacket and she’s cold?”

  “Oooo, yeah. What if she’s cold?”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Yeah. What do you do?”

  That night, I did what any normal New Yorker in my position would do. I obsessed. Wildly. And not just about the normal things. Like: Have I been invited to enough corporate and noncorporate holiday parties to feel professionally successful and interpersonally popular? Or: Would the nonsectarian greeting cards I’m sending to clients and friends have more holiday oomph if I mailed them in frosty, semitransparent vellum envelopes or in traditional green ones?

  I didn’t worry about whether the snowfall to date meant that skiing would be good this year and I should really reserve a weekend at that adorable, but not too adorable, lodge in Vermont. Or whether skiing was passe and it was now time to try snowboarding.

  Instead, I spent half the night wide-awake and worrying about shopping for my kids, and the other half having shopping-related nightmares. Hiding under the covers in the overheated dreary dark of my apartment, I dreamed I was racing down fluorescent-lighted hallways into acres of crowded fluorescent-lighted stores. Each store had an enormous picture window with a huge poster that read WE DON’T SELL WHAT YOU NEED! Around every corner, trombone sextets were playing free-jazz versions of carols in an increasingly minor key, like Bach on a very, very bad day. Only the players weren’t human; they were… they were Heat Miser, the villain from The Year Without a Santa Claus special I stopped watching years ago. I screamed, and they started chasing me through ever-repeating mall hallways.

  I can’t believe it, I thought when I finally woke up. I’m having nightmare reruns!

  As the seasonally delayed dawn approached, I was chasing a dream-goose, whose down I would pluck—vegetarian principles be damned!—and shove into a jacket I’d make at home from designer pillowcases stitched with unwaxed mint dental floss. As the garbage trucks outside my window began their daily urban reveille of grinding gears and screeching brakes, I swore that if I could just fulfill my kids’ lists, I would never ask for a Real Christmas again.

  It was just like the deals I used to make with God after drinking too much warm beer at those jock parties I’d go to with my boyfriend, the adorable, highly alcohol-tolerant coxswain of the varsity crew. I always swore I’d never drink again if He’d just stop the room from spinning this one time—and me from throwing up. My oath about Christmas was that feverish—and just as nonbinding.

  I dragged myself from my bed and headed into a day that was as gray and depressingly low-ceilinged as a 1970s suburban basement. I was going straight to the mall. Not the new mall. I was going to the ten-block-long, outdoor, cement, bus-clogged, slightly bankrupt, “largest number of items sold per square foot in America” mall—right there in Brooklyn—a mall as big as the town I grew up in. And I
was going to buy a castle and a 100 percent washable real black down jacket if it killed me and everyone around me. Oh yeah, and I was going to do it all before lunch.

  Because now I understood. Being Santa is not some “Kumbaya” thing. It’s about being Hercules. Only the strong survive.

  To add to my holiday merriment, as I turned the corner, it began to rain. Not enough to need an umbrella. Not enough to give me an excuse to stay inside. Just enough to dampen my spirits that extra fabulous mile.

  To raise them a bit, I picked up a three-pound bag of Hershey’s Kisses in red and green foil at the pharmacy just outside the gates to hell, where a sign wrapped in torn tinsel read WELCOME TO AMERICA’S LARGEST-NUMBER-OF_ITEMS-SOLD-PER-SQUARE-FOOT OUTDOOR MALL!

  The first toy store I saw had no name. Just a handwritten sign on a dirty window that said WE SELL TOYS. And a sign on the door that said WE TAKE CASH. And a sign inside the door that said CHECK ALL BAGS. SO I walked up to the bag-check guy, who was 50 percent chest hair and 50 percent attitude, flashed him my letter, and said, “I’m looking for a castle.… ” And the guy leered at me and said, “Hey baby, how about a prince instead?”

  All that pomaded hair. All that sleazy attitude and half-unbuttoned green-and-orange polyester shirt atop distressed brown leather pants and motorcycle boots. In a flash, Arty Bike Girl abandoned the state in which we’d been living for the last few days—Abject Misery, Brooklyn—for Total Crush City.

  Wow, she said to herself, gazing at her reflection in the guy’s shiny shirt. I bet he loves to go dancing! But Undercover Mother wouldn’t brake for hormones.

  Young lady! she said. We are not here to shop for him!

  So I checked my knapsack and showed the letter with the castle on it to this woman who was waiting at the bottom of the stairs; she looked like she’d been waiting down there for the last billion years. Her hair was dyed “Cosmic Hole” black and pulled into a ponytail so tight, it yanked the deep wrinkles that should have been around her mouth to somewhere behind her ears. Her cardigan and lipstick were the same bilious bright pink; her shoes orthopedic; her cigarettes menthol.