What Santa meant, then, was when the Silenii died off so did their stories, because they belonged to nobody else. I wasn’t terribly broken up about this since, again, I was in a whole bunch of those stories.
Something occurred to me. “Does that mean the whole Santa thing is a survival technique?”
“You could say so! And, as good stories involving Jesus go, it’s not so terrible.”
By the way, asking him if he was the “real” Santa would have been useless, for the same reason he had no problem with my immortality. And if the whole Santa thing began as an imp family story, he had a better claim on the title than anybody else around. If he said he was the Santa, I would have had a time disputing it.
This was not to say Santa is real, in the sense that there was anyone—imp or otherwise—living at the North Pole and delivering toys. But that was exactly the kind of fantastic tale I’d come to expect from his kind.
“What are you doing in New York?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve lived here for years. Nobody needs Santa year-round, of course, but I keep busy. How about you? What’s an immortal man doing in the city? Should I take your presence here as proof this is indeed the greatest city on Earth?”
“I’m sure you have a story or two to back up that claim.”
“Oh, I do! Would you like to hear one?”
“Not right now. And that’s not why. I guess the question is, what’s an immortal man doing anywhere? This seemed like a good place to stop over and have a drink for a while. I don’t have more of a story than that.”
This was true, but really more accurately described my time in the whole country. And more generally, my approach to life.
Emotionally speaking, the twentieth century was not a good time for me. I suffered a loss twenty years in, and spend most of the next eighty years or so in mourning, which in my case meant trying to maintain a high degree of non-sobriety. When I ran into Santa I was only thirty years in on that eighty-year jag, and pretty bitter.
If it isn’t already obvious, I tend to handle my problems by drinking more than I really should.
“Where wouldn’t an immortal man go?” Santa said. “I don’t have the gift of your longevity, but I’m thankful every day to have been granted an extended time on Earth. Think of all the stories I would miss otherwise!”
I smiled. Imps are always looking for a better story. It’s what drives them. I never had anything so simple to live for. “Is that what Santa is doing in New York? Collecting stories?”
“Why not? This is my favorite time of year, Stanley. I spend my days at Gimbel’s, listening to the stories of children and making them happy, and my evenings in bars like this.”
“Listening to the stories of drunks.”
“And making them happy. You know, a child and a drunkard share a similar fondness for unconventional storytelling. Ask a sober soul to tell you a story, and they’ll furrow their brow and work through the steps of the thing. First this happened, then that, and then most reasonably, of course, the other thing happened as a consequence of it all. They’re terribly, terribly boring most of the time. But a child’s perspective is untethered by the rational. And a drunkard, well… they will just speak, and whatever words come out of their mouths only so often pass an internal inspection.”
“The honesty of the irrational.”
“You have it, yes.”
“It’s been said the only honest man in a king’s court is the jester.”
Santa laughed. “That’s marvelous! What a story that must make!”
“Sorry, it’s just an observation. It doesn’t come with a story.”
“Well. I shall have to compose one. Or you will. I’m sure you have a storyteller inside of you somewhere. An immortal man… the tales you must have!”
I do have a jester story, but it doesn’t have a happy ending and I didn’t feel like telling it. A lot of my stories—and he wasn’t wrong in assuming I have quite a few—end in ways that make them either not worth retelling, or retelling only in the interest of depressing or frightening those assembled. I am an aggregator of cautionary tales.
I didn’t often share them, though, at least not at the time Santa and I were talking. I had found that keeping my own counsel was the best strategy for survival. That said, there have been a few periods in history where I wrote some of my life out, mostly in situations where nobody could take me seriously. Epic poetry, once it was invented, was a decent outlet, although I wasn’t what anybody would call a decent poet. Fiction prose writing, as a form, has also proven to be decent cover for my autobiographical writings.
Telling stories aloud was a skill I excelled at once too, a millennium ago, when traveling storytelling was in vogue. But that was only rarely about my own life, unless there was drink involved. As Santa had already observed, men talk more freely when plied with alcohol. I’m certainly not an exception.
“I think,” Santa said, “you should come to Gimbel’s with me tomorrow.”
He said it in a way that indicated this was already a settled decision.
“Why would I do that? Do you need someone to dress up as an elf? I think I may be too tall.”
There are real elves, incidentally. They’re nearly indistinguishable from humans in every way, including height. However, the child-sized elves of the Santa mythology are not real.
“You can be a helper! No costume needed, just dress normally. If any of the staff asks, I can explain you’re there from the agency to… I don’t know, to inspect matters or some such thing.”
“There’s an agency?”
“They think there is. I’m the only one who shows up, but they believe I’m part of a team of Santas that all look alike. The store has another agency on call if I’m unavailable.”
“Well, Santa is supposed to always look the same, isn’t he?”
“Tell that to Macy’s! So what do you say?”
“I can’t think of a single reason to do this.”
“Excellent! Then I’ll see you in the store. I begin at 10.”
* * *
The 1950’s were a little odd. With hindsight it’s possible to look on the era and see things that appear entirely normal and familiar from a modern perspective, but in the moment those things were new and innovative. And odd.
It was in the fifties that Americans figured out living in cities can suck, and the suburbs became a thing. That was only possible because of affordable cars and more widely available public transportation, two new realities that featured prominently in the disagreement in the bar. Not discussed at the bar but also a relatively new thing: everyone suddenly had a television. This was in part because TV reached the same level of affordability, need and utility that made radio mandatory some thirty years earlier, and partly because the whole country seemed to be enjoying an immoderate level of affluence, with no new war to spend it on.
Americans needed to spend all of that new money, and television had advertisements for products that they could spend their money on, so all they needed to know was where to go to get the things being advertised.
Thus: department stores. People would get in their new cars and drive from their new suburban homes over the new bridges built for them, to go to the nearest department store and buy the new things they saw featured on their new televisions.
I am generally an enormous fan of innovation. Legitimately new things are exceedingly rare, and when I come across them I am more often than not dazzled. The wheel, for instance, was a fantastic idea. So were toilets, and so was television, and more recently, the Internet.
But department stores aren’t new innovations. They’re more annoying versions of the street bazaar, which is a very, very old idea.
I like street bazaars. Sure, they’re noisy and smelly and crowded, but they’re also held outside, which is nice. And I know how they work. I probably have more experience as a consumer than any man alive, so I know how to find a bargain and how to negotiate one. But department stores are not designed for someone
with my talents in mind. Specifically, when I went into one for the first time—I believe I was purchasing a shirt—I attempted to haggle.
Haggling is a wonderful thing that nobody does any more unless they’re buying a car. When I asked the salesman what the price of the shirt was and he told me, I naturally assumed the price was too high, and then counter-offered a price I thought was much too low. What should have happened was that he—after a lengthy discursion on the subject of the remarkable quality of the shirt, no doubt—would give me a lower price. I would then insult the shirt and the salesman’s mother, and counter with a slightly higher offer.
Eventually, we would arrive at a price we were both willing to accept, I would give him the coins and get the shirt, and that would be that. I’d walk away feeling I had gotten a good bargain, and the merchant would feel satisfied that he had made a sale that preserved a decent profit margin.
This is how the world is supposed to work.
But in the department store—this strange indoor bazaar, just as crowded only now enclosed in a suffocating fluorescent nightmare—the price of the shirt was the price of the shirt. The salesman had no say in the price, because he didn’t own the shirt and had no authority to negotiate. He also had no idea what was happening when I counter-offered, and I had to leave the store before security got involved. I also had to buy the shirt.
This is a terrible arrangement. I’m sure it’s nice for the conflict-averse—not everyone enjoys haggling as much as I do—but as far as I’m concerned a non-negotiable cost is the same thing as accepting the outrageous initially-quoted price in a street bazaar. Instead of me—the consumer who is looking to purchase X number of shirts with Y number of coins—having some direct say in the value of shirts, the only pressure the seller feels is from the other guy selling similar shirts down the street. I realize both shirt sellers should have an economic interest in outselling each other, but I don’t know if the two guys selling shirts aren’t also working together to determine a minimum shirt value of some kind.
Anyway, I like haggling, and I’m good at it, and it’s a skill I wish I could use more often.
Also, if that hasn’t been made clear yet, I don’t like department stores, so I was at a loss to explain why I went to Gimbel’s the following morning to meet up with Santa. Maybe it was that I had nothing better to do, although this sort of described the entire millennium. It could also have been the Christmas miracle of waking up without a hangover, or just the novelty of discovering an imp in New York City calling himself Santa.
Whatever it was, I put on my suit, the shirt I paid too much for, and a tie, and headed downtown. (This did not mean I dressed up. Everyone wore a suit and a tie unless they were at the beach or on their way from the bed to the bathroom. We didn’t get t-shirts until the sixties.) Santa wasn’t surprised to see me.
“There you are, Stanley!” He greeted, waving me forward. His throne was on the second floor of the store, in the back, at the end of a series of decorative arrow signs. The signs directed shoppers—mothers with children in this case—down a non-straight path to the Father Christmas corner, passing nearly every perfume counter, kitchen appliance, cleaning product and toy the store had to offer. By the time I reached him I smelled like flowers and was thinking about buying a vacuum cleaner.
Santa was between kids. A modest line of mothers with their children had formed twenty feet away, behind a “Line starts here” sign and some velvet ropes. There weren’t any elfish helpers and the chair he was in was essentially a lounge chair from the furniture department with a few bows attached. It didn’t look like anybody much bothered to make it look like the North Pole. I didn’t even see a photographer.
“There’s a chair…” Santa said, looking around behind him. A closed lawn chair was propped up on the wall behind him. I grabbed it and sat down. “Did you have any trouble finding your way?” he asked.
“You are literally the only person in this building that it’s impossible to not know the location of,” I said.
Well, I guess that’s true, isn’t it? Come on, smile: it’s Christmas!” He turned to the line. “Who’s ready for Santa?”
* * *
I spent the whole day there, as apparently I really did have nothing else to do. We talked between children, who were content to wait for a while to see him even when there wasn’t anybody on his lap. The pace was surprisingly honorable and stately, and something one doesn’t see now. Although nowadays there are Santas are all over the place, which probably has something to do with it. People tend to have more respect for the unique.
“How long have you been calling yourself Santa?” I asked him during one break between kids.
“Oh, always, although the name itself is new to my generation. My father was one of the Father Christmases, and I have an uncle and two cousins who went by Sinterklaas. There are even a couple of Yule Goats in the family. My great grandfather was Jodin Longbeard. One of the first of the Santa line.”
“But you’re all Santas now.”
“Of course, just like your friends the Silenii.”
“I don’t know that I would call them friends.”
“If you are who you claim, Silenus actually worshipped you, so perhaps you’re correct. Friend is not an adequate word.”
That wasn’t what I meant, but I didn’t have an interest in pressing the point. My history with Silenus and his sons was complicated by a number of factors, including the perhaps accidental founding of a religious cult. It’s a long story, and I didn’t want to get into it with Santa, not in the middle of another religious cult’s holiday. But then he was calling up the next child and I didn’t have to elaborate.
“Ho ho! What’s your name, young man?”
The degree of patience and genuine interest Santa had in the things the children said was honestly impressive, especially to someone like me. I am resolutely terrible with kids, partly because I spend almost no time around them. This is for a number of reasons, the first being that I can’t have them, so far as I know. This became a topic of conversation as well, in a roundabout sort of way.
“Why am I here?”
“Aren’t you enjoying yourself?” Santa asked.
“I neither am nor am not. I’m mostly puzzled by all of this.”
He laughed. “Puzzled, you say!”
He called up another child and went through his routine, which consisted of asking about the child’s day, life, and wishes for Christmas. Whether those wishes were capitalistic or aspirational didn’t much matter. The have you been good this year question never came up. Maybe the Macy’s Santa was more concerned with good versus evil, but this one mostly assumed the best.
“Why puzzled?” he asked as soon as the boy jumped down on his own.
“Maybe puzzled is the wrong word,” I said. “I’ve been alive for a lot of different traditional festivals and celebrations, all with their peculiarities. Right now I feel like I’m watching the birth of a new tradition.”
“People have been celebrating gift-giving holidays for century upon century. Perhaps as far back as Saint Nicholas himself.”
“Was he one of you?”
“Oh, oh no, I don’t think so. Not of my line, at least.”
A little girl came up with a long story about a doll she had to have and a second one on the perils of her brother’s hand-me-down tricycle, and how chocolate ice cream is good but nobody in the whole entire world likes strawberry.
“The celebration of a saint’s day isn’t new,” I agreed, once the girl had left. “Neither were the old harvest celebrations, or Yule day. But this seems unconnected to all of that.”
“You become far too analytical when sober. Relax and enjoy the spirit of the holiday, I say.”
“What spirit is that?”
“Look around! Happy children, happy adults, people spending time with family and giving each other things… it’s jollity at its finest!”
“I see advantageously leveraged commerce preying on buyers who already ha
ve all they need in order to survive.”
He shot me a look. “You’re trying to be sour intentionally.”
“Probably. I’m usually drinking by now.”
“Well if you’re looking for an answer to the question, this is why you’re here. You need to be more connected to the world! Especially during Christmas.”
“What kind of connection did you have in mind?”
He called another little girl up. This one also said she wanted a doll, and then told Santa about a boy named Billy who pulled her hair in school. She wanted to make it very clear that Billy had not been nice, and should therefore not get what he wants for Christmas. She was just the right kind of annoying to make me glad I wasn’t often around children. I was sympathetic to Billy’s urge to pull her hair, certainly.
“Oh I don’t know,” Santa said. “Get involved! Do something nice for someone, just for the holidays. Give a gift to a person deserving of a gift. You have no children, I gather.”
“I have no family at all.”
“Then find someone else. Just one person, but one nobody has on their list. One person in need of that one gift they can’t get for themselves.”
Mostly, this sounded like a good way to get a girl into bed, but this seemed like a terrible place to say that aloud.
“How would I know where to find this one person?”
“I don’t know, Stanley. But I know you aren’t looking for them right now. So this is my charge to you, Santa to Santa’s helper. Find that someone. You have only seven days until Christmas.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“It will cheer you up!”
“Who said I needed cheering up?”
“You’re an immortal man, of course you need cheering. Especially with no family to call your own.”
“How about you?” I asked. “Where’s your family of Santas?”
“This is our busy time, obviously.”
“Yes, but any sons for you?”
I didn’t know how old he was and hadn’t asked, but I got the sense he was nearing the end of his career. It was the way he winced a little every time he leaned down to lift the next kid onto his knee. It seemed a reasonable assumption that he had a son learning to follow him, or who was already an adult Santa somewhere else.
Yuletide Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 4) Page 2