Love Santa

by Sharon Glassman

  She was one very scary lady. And this was one very scary store.

  “Everybody says they want a castle,” she cackled, reaching for a cig as she glared at the NO SMOKING sign. “But no one comes here to buy! I tell them, ‘Look at this black-and-gray castle with the bloody body parts in the moat. And this purple castle with the unicorns.’ So much nicer, even for boys.

  “But all the other mothers, they just go to that fancy toy store across the street. But I know you’re different. You’re the kind of mother who knows a real castle when you see one. You believe me. We discount. We gift wrap… ” Arty Bike Girl wondered if this poor Scary Toys Witch worked on commission.

  But Undercover Mother, that heartless capitalist, told her, Let this be a lesson. You stock quality goods, you get good sales, young lady. And we—

  I know, I know! Arty Bike Girl muttered. We are not here to shop for her!

  Two minutes later, I was fighting for a yellow-and-orange castle with every mother in that fancy toy store across the street. I’ve never been pregnant, but as I waddled into the checkout line, I got a sense of what it’s like to fight a crowd with an extra-large package attached to your abdomen.

  As I waited in line with all the other mothers in Brooklyn for the next ninety minutes, all I could see was the look on my little boy’s face as he opened this gift on Christmas morning. How my little boy would somehow know that Santa had been very, very tempted to buy him the castle with the bloody body parts in the moat. But she hadn’t. Oh no! Because Santa had bought him a yellow-and-orange castle with—a gigantic gash in the side of its box!

  “Don’t pop an artery, lady!” the cashier said. “Go back upstairs and just find a perfect one!”

  Okay. Maybe Hercules—or a better tzedaka Santa—would have done it. But I had a little girl’s down jacket to buy. And I had only so much time—and sanity—left. I was no longer in the “frills” section of this project. I was up on the terrifying high wire, where basic items might not be found!

  I wasn’t playing favorites; I was just being practical. A little boy can live with a hole in his castle box. He might not even notice it. You know how boys are. But a little girl in a fake down jacket is cold. And there’s nothing like a cold kid to say Santa’s lost “his”—“her”—my—ability to do things right. These were no longer letters we were talking about. These were my children, and I would deploy every aggressively creative thing I’d learned in this city to make their every last wish come 100 percent true!

  (Have I mentioned that there were only four shopping days until Christmas? And that wasn’t counting the time it would take to get each of these gifts through the holiday mail.)

  Okay, I was outside. It was 11:30. Thirty-two degrees and cloudy. Forty percent chance of snow. Which would go so nicely with existing light rain—no, wait. Could it be? Of course it could! Hail, which was now pelting me from on high.

  I was limping into the anchor store of the “largest number of items sold per square foot in America” mall. This was the store that was supposed to hold everything together, although everything there seemed designed to pull me apart. The castle had created a box-size bruise on my knee, which throbbed in rhythm to the holiday easy-listening tunes that assaulted me as I rode up the escalator.

  My own down jacket had become a personal sauna in the heat. So, yes, by the time I got to the kids’ clothing department on the second floor, I was a little less than rational. I saw a black fiberfill jacket and a pink-and-turquoise down jacket, and I started shoving the pink jacket into the black jacket to make a jacket for my little girl that was twice as warm as every other little girl’s jacket in Brooklyn.

  That’s when this friendly saleswoman came running over and said, “Do you need help?” So I asked her if there wasn’t a girls’ size 10/11 small black real down jacket in a secret closet in the back, on hold for some other mother, who didn’t really want it.

  “There isn’t,” the woman said, “black being this year’s color in down jackets and it being so close to Christmas.

  “But mother to mother,” she said, grinning conspir-atorially, “the boys’ department is packed with black down jackets.” She made little quotation marks in the air and said, “’Boys’ jackets, ‘girls’ jackets”—she shrugged—“who can tell?”

  God bless her retail soul, the woman was right. Somehow, everything in the boys’ department was simpler. Which was exactly what I was learning from having boys. There were black down jackets with big fleecy hoods, black down jackets with big flap pockets. I put my arm into the sleeve of one of them. Not only was it as puffy as a down comforter; my arm boiled.

  With the adrenaline rush of a climber approaching the summit, I hoisted the jacket from the rack and carried it back to the saleswoman, who was waiting for me by the register. Even my knee was feeling better.

  “This ‘Boys’ small,” I said, making quotations around the word Boys with my trembling free hand and adding a capital letter from sheer joy, “it’s just like a ‘girls’ small. Right?”

  “Oh no!” the saleswoman said, in horror and disbelief. “In ‘Boys’,’ it’s a whole different story!”

  My wildly throbbing knee returned with a vengeance.

  “How old is the little girl?”

  “She’s, uh, she’s a girls’ size ten/eleven.”

  “Yes, well of course!” the woman said. “But is she this big?” She put her hand inches from the floor. “Or this big?” She raised it over her head.

  I was busted. Fortunately, Arty Bike Girl believes that when busted, the best defense is belligerence. (It’s always been one of my less successful backup plans.)

  “She’s above average, of course!” I said in a tone that implied the woman had just questioned my kid’s IQ, not her height.

  “Well,” the woman said, deploying the w word in a tone that implied she was talking to a total nut job. Which she was. “In that case, you need a large.”

  O, holy soul of holiday retail! There is one boy’s large black real down jacket left in the anchor store of the “largest number of items sold per square foot in America” mall that morning. Yes! Yes! Yes!

  And I bought it.

  As I walked home to my apartment, I expected everyone around me to erupt into a spontaneous Hallelujah chorus. Which they didn’t. So I just hummed it to myself.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon wrapping each of the boxes in holiday paper as I happily sang along to every carol-playing radio station I could find. I wrote letters from Santa to each of my children on fake parchment paper.

  “Dear[child’s name],” I wrote, “I know what a good little[boy/girl] you’ve been and hope you will love your new[name of gift] as much as Santa truly loves you. Merry Christmas to you and your family! Love! Santa”

  Then I wrapped each box in post office-approved wrapping paper and sealed them with post office-approved tape.

  By now it’s 11:00 P.M. a too few nights before Christmas. My friend Nancy, who’s got a huge heart, a night owl’s habits, and a blue (the official color of Christmas vehicles—at least in my life) used station wagon, drove me to the main post office and told me she’d circle the block while I popped up to the window and mailed my boxes. Then she’d drive me home to Brooklyn.

  Ho-ho-ho!

  Ha-ha-ha.

  In the dark, the post office had changed from a very important-looking building into something even worse. As I revolved through the doors that separate the street from the post office lobby, I saw what the future had in store for me: a never-ending series of lines.

  Like the star of Bethlehem, the lights of the post office had drawn hundreds with the promise of deliverance—or at least, a timely delivery. Each mail person’s window was besieged by an endless winding path of supplicants bearing packages and letters that had to be mailed now!

  There were women in African head wraps and young kids in sweatpants, denim jackets, and spotlessly clean hiking boots. There were old men in work clothes, hipsters in outfits that combined fo
ur generations of thrift shop chic in awesomely baffling combinations, and the ubiquitous suit people—overworked, overpaid, overtired.

  We could have been the photo on some sadistic charity’s holiday card—a series of stressed-out faces on the front, with an inscription inside that read” Why the hell did we ever wait so long to send this stuff out? Happy Holidays! Please send cash.”

  But there would be hours ahead in which to sympathize. Right then, I needed to find the shortest-possible line between my packages and a post office clerk.

  Maybe there was an express lane for people with less than three kids—or packages? No such luck. And following the laws of holiday physics, the longer I hesitated, the longer all the lines got.

  Wait! There was one line that did seem shorter. And then I saw why: It was the line with the Crazy Lady in it.

  You know the Crazy Lady. There’s one in every queue in the world. The woman in the supermarket who looks totally normal in her striped shirt dress and sensible flats, until she gets three people from the register, when she starts exchanging every item from her cart for something else, just fast enough to keep you from moving ahead of her in line?

  The Crazy Lady at the post office looks just like the Crazy Lady from the supermarket, except she’s walking in little circles and arguing with herself about which months really have thirty-one days. Giving myself a mental high five for not getting in line behind her, I opted for the next-shortest line, which was only about the length of six football fields. As I secured my place in it, I was flooded with relief. A second later, I was flooded with sweat. The post office lobby had been heated to summer levels of heat and humidity. Waiting there would be like sharing a steam bath with a thousand grouchy strangers.

  Down in Boca, my parents were sleeping off the Hanukkah latkes after a wine-enhanced dinner with friends. Upstate, Buddhist monks were still hours away from silent predawn prayers. Beati loro, as my Italian friends would say: “How lucky are they.”

  An hour went by—slowly.

  I bet that in some very logical, northern country, post office lines no longer exist. In Stockholm—or Ontario—for example, I can imagine local children doing village dances while the post office employees go around politely stamping customers’ packages and offering tiny cheese snacks along with itemized receipts.

  After a few minutes of postal heat treatment, the only thing keeping me from falling asleep on my feet was the nagging pain of the overburdened twine around each package slicing into my fingers. Actually, it was starting to feel kind of comforting.

  Just as I was losing consciousness, the post office delivered a rousing Sensurround wake-up call. A skinny white woman with an African head wrap and a long batik skirt jumped out of line a couple of rows down and yelled, “HA!” and started flapping her arms behind her like a bird. “HA!” she screeched as she flapped her way over to the line next to hers, where she again shrieked “HA!” mere inches from a now-terrified man’s face.

  Two Crazy Ladies in one set of lines! A new record in waiting-related torture.

  The German tourist in front of me opened his knapsack, pulled out a camera, and readied his flash in case the dancing woman returned. Think of how much fun this will be to show in Dusseldorf!

  The woman in front of him didn’t even flinch as Crazy HA! Lady danced by. She was too busy stuffing dozens of designer scarves into dozens of international express mail envelopes. When each envelope was stuffed and sealed, she attached a preprinted address label to it and crossed another item off the computerized list she had attached to a designer clip board that hung from her thick logo-encrusted belt.

  BAM!

  “Somebody’s shooting, sweetheart!” a man said. I don’t know what his sweetheart did at that moment, but the rest of us ducked, fast, even the woman with the scarves.

  With the impeccable logic of a big-city crowd, we believed one of us had chosen to ignore, big-time, the yellow ATF poster asking us to leave our guns at home and was going, as the French might say, postal

  BAM!

  “At least spare the children!” someone else shouted.

  And then I heard the German tourist’s voice saying, “It is just some younger boys with heavy boxes.”

  BAM!

  Hundreds of embarrassed, prone postal customers looked above their endangered heads, to see two teenagers with T-shirts that read MANNY’S PACKAGE MOVERS unloading a four-wheeled cart stacked with heavy cartons printed with Santa heads and sleighs on them. Each carton greeted the floor with a ballistic echo.

  BAM!

  “Cut that crap out!” screamed a gray-haired man in an olive drab windbreaker with a U.S. Army insignia on the back.

  “HA!” screamed the Crazy Lady, arms flailing as she reached out to embrace the spirits in all four corners of the post office world.

  BAM! went the boxes.

  “CUT THAT CRAP OUT!” screamed the army man again, even louder.

  “Next,” a tired voice said from the window I was working my way toward oh so slowly. In the distance, I could see the face of the woman behind the bars that protected her from truly dangerous customers. It was the same mask of distress and resignation I’d seen on cabdrivers at 2:00 A.M.

  I could also see the sign beside her now that read THIS WINDOW FOR EXPRESS MAIL ONLY.

  As the woman with the scarves pulled out her designer wallet, I realized that I was holding about a month’s rent’s worth of mail were I to send it express mail. I pride myself on being a very honest person (impersonating three kids’ mothers didn’t count as dishonest. It was a gray area for a good cause, okay?). But, honestly, after investing close to three hours to reach the front of that line, I had reached the conclusion that life was too short to change lanes now. Come on, I thought. What’s one more little touch of holiday dishonesty among friends?

  Just as I was working on my creative backup plan—a “spontaneous” look of innocent surprise I was planning to use when I made it to the front of the line—a woman wearing a post office sweater and Santa Claus hat walked through the line, saying, “This window is for EXPRESS MAIL ONLY! I repeat: No regular mail services at this window.”

  I sighed the long and deep sigh of the damned.

  “Tell me about it,” the guy behind me in line said mournfully, pointing to the overstuffed manila envelope in his hand. “I’m a CPA. These are my returns, and they’re two years late.”

  “I’m in the wrong line,” I said, pointing to my boxes.

  “Hoo boy!” the guy said, turning away. “And I thought I had problems.”

  “A-HA!” The Crazy Lady had made it to the front of her line. She handed the invisible person behind her window a single postcard and a dollar, got her change, turned to the rest of us, bowed, and danced her way out the door.

  I wondered if my friend Nancy thought I was dead.

  1:15 A.M. Nightly talk shows had ended. Safe under their covers, couples with better holiday-mailing habits were laughing at jokes they’d forget in the morning, turning off lamps on night tables, and going to bed.

  Somewhere in the city, a clock chimed twice—2:00 A.M. By then, I’d been staring at the ceiling for a good half hour, pondering the sign above my head.

  That,” I say to Mr. Canada, “is where you walked in.” Mr. Canada and I smile and watch together as the woman two people in front of me in line pulls out her neatly ordered packages of scarves, then proffers her platinum card to pay for the international express mailing. The card is swiped… and rejected!

  Before I can stop myself, I’m gleefully shouting, “Serves her right!” Call me a sadistic Santa, but it feels so great to be in the real spirit of the season finally and watch somebody else suffer, for once. She’ll go down in his-to-ry, that scarf woman will! Teach her to double-dip at Gucci so close to Christmas! Maxed out her platinum card sending expensive gifts to people who probably will return them for international store credit, did she? Boo-hoo-hoo!

  On the second swipe, the woman’s transaction, all four digits of it,
is approved.

  “I’d love to do her taxes,” the CPA behind me says.

  There is no justice in this unjust Christmas world.

  “Next?” the woman behind the counter says.

  My hockey honey offers to help me carry my boxes those few feet, but I tell him I’ll take things from here. I’m in the final few steps of a twenty-year marathon. I want to cross the finish line under my own power. It’s a point of pride.

  It’s amazing how long it takes to push three boxes across a foot of floor when everyone behind you is wishing you were already gone. Sweaty, and misting from emotion, or the heat—it’s hard to tell—when the woman asks me for what I’m mailing, I hand her the box with the football and fishing gear. And the box with the castle. And the box with the first down jacket. I can already picture them gliding down the ramp to wherever boxes in the office go.

  “Return address for insurance?” the woman asks without looking up from her postage meter.

  “North Pole?” I say.

  She looks up and smiles.

  “You want to know something? I answer as many of those letters as I can,” says the woman—Mrs. Green, according to her name tag, but she says, “Call me Evelyn! My children and I go out and shop for them together every year! That is the real point of Christmas, the kids!”

  By now, the hundred people behind me are convinced that I’m the new Crazy Lady in their line. But to Mrs. Green, I’m golden.

  “I didn’t know this was an express mail line,” I whisper.

  “Of course you didn’t—they type the signs so small!” Mrs. Green—Evelyn!—says, Santa to Santa, as she weighs my packages and rings me up.

  The total seems awfully low, even for regular mail. And that’s what I start to say, but Evelyn’s giving me the “Sshhh!” sign that tells me she is the adult in charge here. She punches a code into her meter and pulls her half glasses back on top of her head.

  “Do you think the boxes will make it by Christmas?” I ask.