Love Santa

by Sharon Glassman

  “They will now!” Evelyn says, and shows me the express mail stickers and postage she’s put on my packages. Using some kind of postal worker discount? At her own expense? She doesn’t give me a second to ask. “Merry Christmas. Please step aside,” she says. “Next?”

  Beata sono io: “ How lucky am I.”

  Merry Christmas right back at you, Mrs. Green—Evelyn—times a million. Now all I have to do is find Nancy and introduce her to the love of my life. I wonder: Will it be his place or mine? We haven’t had a chance to, you know, talk about us.

  I race, back to Mr. Canada to let him know that I’ll come back for him in the morning, after he’s had time to get his passport forms in order. Say around 10:00 A.M.

  By the way, I’m going to ask him, after I tell my parents about us, what do you think about a January wedding?

  As I run toward what I envision as his open and waiting manly hockey-playing French-Canadian arms—we’ll have kids, perhaps—our own hockey team!—the man of my dreams introduces me to an equally hunky blond man in a sensible fur-lined ski coat perfect for cold Canadian winters.

  The new man is carrying an envelope with his American passport and his birth certificate in one hand and a clear dry-cleaning bag with two men’s tuxedos in it in the other.

  “This is the nice young lady who has been entertaining me with her stories about the American Christmas!” Mr. Canada says.

  “Hi! Hey—nice formal wear. Somebody getting married?” I quip.

  “You got that right!” the blond man says, and grasps Mr. Canada’s lovingly outstretched hand.

  They have been commuter-relating for too many years, Mr. Canada explains. “But later today, we will exchange our vows in front of a small group of our closest family members and friends.”

  (Three hundred and fifty of them, as it turned out. I cried when I saw the photos they sent me a few weeks later in the mail. It was such a lovely wedding. The goalie gave away the groom. I’m sure you saw the paparazzi shots in the papers, or on TV.)

  “Sorry to be so late getting here,” blond Mark says, “holiday traffic’s been terrible, even at this hour!”

  “Pas de problème,” Mr. Canada says. “We have had such an amusing time!”

  Then he shoots his betrothed a smile whose true-love power puts the ones he’s been giving me into pla-tonic Canadian perspective. And scores, from the heart. “But even if I had been cold and alone here,” he says, “I would have waited for you all night.”

  “Happy Holidays!” we say. “So nice to have met you! Best wishes on your wedding! A bientôt! Bye!”

  A truly beautiful story with a happy ending—for everyone except me.

  What did I expect? Christmas, after all.

  But Christmas isn’t done with me yet.

  If I believed in reincarnation, I would have to wonder if I’d kicked a puppy—a very tiny, defenseless, adorable puppy—in a previous life. How else do you explain something so totally unjust yet me as what happens next?

  The next morning, I’m taking a walk in my neighborhood, thinking how for a cold day in December, things feel awfully fine. I’m saying hello to my neighbors and people on the street. I smile these warm, spontaneous smiles at little kids on the sidewalk. And you want to know something? They smile back. They can see I’m a real honest-to-goodness Christmas pro! One who’s going to get herself a nice hot chocolate at the diner… .

  Golly gee gosh. Now would you look at that.

  A beautiful little boy and his father are going into the diner right in front of me. They’re talking. The father is reaching down to take the little boy’s hand as they walk through the door. I see the boy is wearing a black down jacket. He’s part of this community I’ve entered by becoming a tzedaka Santa to a little girl in another part of Brooklyn.

  And on the bottom of his jacket, stamped in big white letters, the way you see things stamped on the bottom of football players’ jackets, are the words FIRST DOWN.

  Sucker! Arty Bike Girl says: It wasn’t a “first” down jacket; it was a brand! All that kid wanted was this year’s brand of down jacket. You just don’t understand kidspeak anymore. A First Down jacket! Get it? Get it?

  Undercover Mother tries to ease the shame: Well, at least the little girl will be warm… . But all I can see is my little girl opening her present on Christmas morning. I see that look on her face—that Suzie Homemaker Oven look—and I hear her saying, “There is no Santa—I didn’t ask for this!” Because that’s all that kids notice: which things are right, which ones let them fit in.

  And the fleecy lined hood, the elasticized sleeves, all the things that made the jacket sing for me back in the mall from hell are now the labels that label me: Giant massive geek. I’m being dissed by some little kid in my borough. I’ve been too uncool to be Santa.

  At this point, I’m ready to resign from Christmas forever. But as I said, Christmas isn’t done with me yet.

  Just as I’ve accepted my inner failure as Santa, Tzufen, my former college roommate, whose name means “good fragrance” in Chinese (and great friend in real life), leaves a message on my answering machine. I had told her and her boyfriend, Lars, about my experiences with Operation Santa Claus a few nights ago over dinner. And now Tzufen and Lars want to know where they can pick up a couple of those Operation Santa Claus letters, because they’d like to send presents to a few kids in need of an undercover Santa.

  And all of a sudden, the whole thing makes sense.

  From Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve every year from now, I’ll tell my story about becoming an “undercover Santa,” bumps and all, to friends and friends of friends and, eventually, total strangers at holiday parties and in theaters. It’ll be a personal tzedaka Christmas marketing campaign, whose goal is to get as many people to answer Operation Santa Claus letters as possible. What I’m hoping is that people will spread the word to people they know, like that old shampoo commercial with Farrah Fawcett in it—remember? The first person tells two people about this great new thing she’s discovered, and then those two people tell two people… and before you know it, the whole world’s clued in about this one particular thing.

  And yes, the point of this story is that in one way, I, your basic obsessive New York success freak, failed. And yet, maybe not.

  Because even though I got my little girl a Suzie Homemaker kind of black down jacket instead of the Easy Bake cool kind, I know firsthand, having been a kid who got the wrong gift from Santa all those years ago, that the most important thing about December 25 when you’re young and dependent on the kindness of supposedly more mature people is knowing that someone cares about you on Christmas. Brand names, schmand names. No matter how flawed Santa might be in real life, no child should have to wake up on Christmas morning without a present.

  Epilogue

  Call me crazy. But every year, I hear another amazing story from someone who’s given Operation Santa Claus a try.

  The year after I went over to his apartment all freaked out about my nondown down jacket dilemma, my friend Benji took home an Operation Santa Claus letter.

  A few days later, he called me, totally freaked out. This is a man who never loses his cool, whether he’s cooking a souffle for twenty or saving a sailboat from capsizing. Instead, he makes his little Hmmmm sound.

  “You have to help me!” Benji yelled. “I think I’m a racist. I just got back from trying to buy my little girl a doll, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to buy her a black doll because I’m black, or because, from her name and address, I think she’s black, or just because it was the most beautiful doll I’d ever seen!”

  He paused for a second.

  “Hmmmm!” Benji murmured, question answered in the asking.

  “What kind of wrapping paper do little girls like better?” he asked. “Hearts or flowers?”

  The same year, my friend Gale decided to buy a month’s worth of food for a family, in response to a letter from a little boy asking Santa for a warm Christmas meal for him and hi
s dad. On her way through the supermarket, Gale bumped into a young woman who worked there, and showed her the letter.

  “It looks like it’s from a Spanish family,” the woman said. “I’m from a Spanish family, too. I can show you exactly what to get.”

  The woman led Gale up and down every aisle of the store, filling her shopping cart with beans, pork, oil, biscuits, and plantains. As Gale waited in the checkout line, her new friend called the phone number on the letter to make sure someone was home. “We have a delivery from Santa!” she said. And everyone in the store smiled.

  A teenage boy from the store volunteered to deliver the food. It all seemed too good to be true. Was it? After all, Gale thought, this was New York. So she followed the delivery guy around the corner and watched from the shadows as he rang the bell of the apartment where her little boy lived. A few minutes later, the delivery guy and his empty cart left the building, and a little boy stood smiling and waving at an apartment window on the third floor. Gale started to walk west toward the subway, and then looked back for a second. At that moment, the guy from the delivery store, who was walking east, looked back and gave Gale an okay sign, and a nod. Santa had delivered.

  Hailey and her husband, Natalio, are artists who live in a cold-water flat in the East Village. They answered an Operation Santa Claus letter from a family of six, who came from the Dominican Republic. They chose this letter because Natalio’s from the Dominican Republic, too, and he says no matter how little money he and Hailey have, it’s more than a lot of families from back home will ever have.

  With the practiced eyes of painters, and an artist’s limited budget, they shopped for all six kids, buying knockoffs of designer fashions that were sure to please the kids, and CDs from neighborhood musicians who were the first word in hip. They also bought a few small gifts for the kids’ parents to remind them that Santa loved them, too.

  On Christmas Eve, they went uptown and spent the night celebrating with their Operation Santa family. It had been hard to contact them, since the parents, factory workers, had only recently found the cash to have their phone turned back on.

  Hailey, who volunteers as a high school tutor in her spare time, offered the kids advice on their homework and getting into college. Despite the lack of amenities at home, and the time taken from their studies by after-school jobs, all six children were honor students. A very Merry Christmas was had by all.

  Through Operation Santa Claus, I also got to know some of the incredible people at the post office who make this annual volunteer program happen.

  Richie is one of them. A very observant Jew, he’s a letter carrier who works out of the Murray Hill Post Office. Every December, like so many other amazing postal men and women I’ve met over the years, he donates his time at Operation Santa Claus headquarters, in addition to doing his regular duties at the post office. There, he helps potential tzedaka Santas find the letter that sings to them. He calls himself “the Hanukkah Elf.”

  One year, while paging through Operation Santa Claus letters during a rare moment of downtime, he found a letter he couldn’t put back. It simply asked Santa for a tree.

  That afternoon, with a Christmas tree on his shoulder, he returned home to the apartment he shares with his mother. What is that? Richie’s mother asked, looking at their menorah with its blue-and-white candles neatly arranged for the night.

  Richie showed her his letter.

  “Wait here,” his mother said, then grabbed her coat and left the apartment. An hour later, she returned, weighed down with a huge bag of ornaments.

  “Now we can go,” she said.

  The thing Richie remembers most about dropping off Santa’s tree is how surprised and happy the family was who received it. Their home was immaculately clean, he said. But he will never forget that the Christmas table was covered with newspaper because the family could not afford a tablecloth. When she saw the table covered in newspaper, Richie’s mother turned to him and asked him for some kesef—money—which she gave to the family so they could buy not only a tablecloth, but food to put on it.

  I so associate Richie with his Operation Santa Claus role that when I saw him in the spring getting out of a mail truck on Lexington Avenue, I ran over to say hello and ask him what he was doing so far from his official headquarters.

  “Delivering the mail,” he said, pointing to his overflowing bag on wheels. “What do you think elves do during the rest of the year?”

  While most of the people I know do Operation Santa by way of tzedaka or anonymous giving, here’s proof of the power these gifts have to change children’s lives.

  Currently, 14 million American children live in poverty. In New York City, the figure is one child in five. When I get on a subway packed with kids and realize that one in five of them might not have enough to eat, much less a toy, their faces don’t look like statistics; they’re kids, rumbling under the streets of one of the richest cities in the world.

  It’s even more astounding to realize that there are entire classrooms and schools, like PS 279 in the Bronx, where almost 100 percent of the students live below the poverty line. Not that you’d ever know it by visiting. The building, which sits in the middle of a neighborhood where children are not allowed to carry their Christmas gifts home during the day for fear of mugging, is beautiful. The hallways are filled with children’s art. The royal blue curtains in the auditorium were sewn by parents’ hands.

  On the staff of PS 279 was a teacher named Ellen McGovern, who makes sure that each of the school’s 750 students receives an answer from Santa to his or her Christmas letter. In addition to her full-time job teaching kids in crowded classrooms, she has kids of her own. In her free time, she devotes herself to a one-woman outreach crusade to draw attention to Operation Santa Claus—in particular, to encourage companies with caring hearts and strong budgets to adopt a classroom’s worth of letters.

  Ellen told me this Operation Santa Claus story.

  Several years ago, there was a boy named Victor in Ellen’s class. He was sliding from being a child at risk of failure to a child lost to bad behavior and hopeless grades. Victor’s mother was on permanent disability. His father was in jail.

  Three weeks before Christmas, Victor wrote to Santa, asking for a warm winter coat. Two days before Christmas break, the coat came. From that day on, Victor changed.

  He wore the coat to school every day, where he never let it out of his sight. He kept it on his chair, refusing to trust it to the coatrack. He took it to the boys’ room, to gym, and to lunch. He began to smile. His grades improved.

  By spring, Victor was safely in the achievers’ section of his class.

  “It sounds like such a simple thing,” Ellen says. “But that coat was better than gold to him. It showed him that someone out there really cared. My greatest hope is that Victor grows up to become the kind of person who someday can help a kid like he was. Because for a child, that caring makes all the difference.”

  And not just for the kids.

  As I was busy recruiting people to host” Tzedaka Santa” holiday parties at their homes and offices last year, I bumped into a guy who had just gotten involved in the residential real estate business. He felt guilty about his job, as landlords are usually the ultimate bad guys in the drama of affordable housing. The ones who raise rents and break leases in favor of making an extra buck, forcing less well-paid, nonsuit types to seek shelter far out of town.

  This man wasn’t that kind of real estate guy, he swore, but he felt bad about being a new member of a profession that had such a historically evil reputation. So when I told this kindhearted and success-obsessed man that he should host a Tzedaka Santa party in one of his apartments, he said yes immediately. (Although he claims it was really just a way to get my phone number.)

  In December, we celebrated our first Christmas together by gathering our friends for a wine-tasting and holiday storytelling party where everyone was invited to take home an Operation Santa Claus letter. On his way to our big event, my
boyfriend (let me just say that one more time: my boyfriend!) got stuck on the subway. He arrived late and was seriously worried that he’d held up the festivities. “Don’t worry,” I told him, honestly repeating one of my favorite post office lines, courtesy of Mr. Canada. “Even if I had been cold and alone here, I would have waited for you all night.” *

  But for me, the most surprising part of this story about undercover giving is that I got invited to my first Real Christmas dinner the year that I first got involved in Operation Santa Claus.

  My aunt, who’s not my real aunt but an old family friend, has an aunt who hosts an incredible Christmas Day dinner, which has been for family members only for as long as anyone can remember. But this Christmas, I was invited.

  So that afternoon, I took the train to Philadelphia. As the train headed south, I was thinking about how my New York kids must have opened their gifts by now. They’d seen the castle, the football, and the gift of the wrong down jacket. I hoped the little girl who got it would give Santa credit for doing her best. I hoped she knew somehow that I’d do my best to get things right next year.

  The bus from the train station let me out by a schoolyard. When the light turned green, I walked across the big white words on the blacktop, which read CHILDREN XING. My destination was a small brick house across the street with a big green wreath on its bright blue front door.

  Before I rang the bell, I took a second to look through the window. I saw my aunt, and her aunt. And my aunt’s sons. And her cousin, Cosmo, and his son, Little Cosmo, and his father, Cosmo Senior. And Cosmo’s second wife (who we still thought of as his girlfriend, but who actually eloped with him yesterday). And his brother, the undercover cop. And his other brother, the born-again Christian. He wasn’t supposed to know I was Jewish, but he would tell me later, “It’s okay, because the rose of Sharon is actually a symbol of our Lord.”