April 11, 2012 scottcjones 6Comments
Detailed and largely inaccurate map of Santa's Village.

I was instructed to meet a Mr. Carbone in the diner up on the second floor of the mall at 9 a.m. sharp on Saturday morning, one hour before The Arrival. “Mr. Carbone is your Santa Squad leader,” Gerta had said over the phone. “He’s the one who will go over the weekly shift schedule with you and describe the overall flow of activity in Santa’s Village.”

On my drive to the mall, I realized that my father’s good-luck pancakes weren’t cooperating with my nervous stomach. I had no choice but to make an emergency stop at a Citgo bathroom, barreling into the parking lot like I was there to rob the place.

When I finally arrived at the mall diner, I scanned the restaurant for Mr. Carbone and the rest of my Santa Squad. The thick smell of bacon grease and coffee made my stomach start to twitch again. “See? I knew you were Santa material,” a familiar voice said. Terry, a.k.a. “Tinsel The Elf,” peered up at me from a nearby booth. Sitting next to him was Mrs. Tinsel, a.k.a. Carla, who once again had a bit of knitting in her lap.

“What are you two doing here?” I asked, hoping that running into them was little more than an unfortunate coincidence.

“Well, Carla and I are big fans of watered-down coffee and burnt toast, aren’t we, darling?” Terry said, elbowing Carla while making “mmm” sounds. Carla ignored him and continued to knit. “What do you think we’re doing here? Like you, we’re employees of Blossom Hills. We,” he said, pausing to let this piece of news sink in, “are your Santa Squad.”

“But where is Mr. Carbone?” I asked, my voice cracking like a teenager’s. Mr. Carbone, I figured, could sort out all of this for me.

Terry looked at me like I was a lost cause. “Santas are never the brightest bulbs in the box, are they, Carla?” he said. “I’m Mr. Carbone. And you’re late, on your first day, which I should write you up for, but I won’t. Now sit down and let’s get started. Thanks to your tardiness, we’ve got less than an hour to pull this Arrival together.”

As Primary Santa, Terry explained, I’d be working all the Primary shifts, which were from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, with a half hour scheduled for lunch each day. I asked Terry when my day off would be. He pretended to shuffle through the paperwork in front of him, then said, “Good news! All of your days off are scheduled to begin on December 26 and continue until the end of time.” This was seasonal employment, he explained. “That means everyone works every day, all day, until the season is over.”

The way Santa’s Village worked was this: parents and kids would form a line behind a maze of ropes that lead to Santa’s House. Terry would keep the line moving, planting a new child in my lap every 30 seconds to a minute. Terry would also be responsible for trying to convince waiting parents that the Holiday Moment that was only seconds away from happening could be captured for eternity in a “memory.” That’s when he’d explain the individual “Memories Packages” to parents. For $9.95, parents could purchase a package that featured a 5 x 7 memory and 12 wallet-size memories. But for $24.95, parents would receive an 8 x 10 memory (suitable for framing), four 5 x 7 memories, and 24 wallet-size memories. “I’ll handle the parents,” Terry said. “I know just what to say to them to get them to open up their fat wallets.” Carla, he explained, would operate the camera/memory maker

Terry then proceeded to lay out a few Santa rules for me. “Rule one: Santa must be escorted by a Santa Squad member at all times, without exception,” he explained. “You are never, under any circumstances, allowed to be out of your house and roaming the mall on your own.” A roaming Santa, Terry said, was a “soft target.” “Outside the Village, kids won’t be able to leave you alone. Even worse, teenagers will taunt you. You wouldn’t believe what a group of teenagers did to an unescorted Santa in a Hoboken shopping center last year. They took that poor guy apart. I don’t care if it’s only for a 30-second bathroom break. Carla or I will walk with you to and from the Village,” he said.

Throughout all of this, I wondered where the Secondary Santa was. Why didn’t he have to attend this all-important Santa Squad meeting? “You mean ‘Dave’? Oh, he’s another bright bulb,” Terry said. Terry and Carla had met with Dave earlier in the week. And since Dave was only the Secondary, he didn’t require the same degree of training that I required.

Terry tapped the face of his watch. “We’ve got 15 minutes to get you into the suit,” he said. “Meeting adjourned.” As Terry and Carla collected the loose papers scattered across the booth’s table, I asked where exactly we’d be meeting the antique fire truck. “Gerta didn’t tell you?” Terry said. “The fire truck is cancelled.” Not only had the fire truck itself suffered multiple mechanical failures on the way to the mall, the whole notion of driving a vehicle through the mall, even at a speed slightly slower than a crawl, was deemed too dangerous by mall management. “Kids lose their shit when they see Santa,” Terry said, “and the mall was concerned that a kid in a ‘holy crap I see Santa’ state of excitement might hurl himself under the wheels. It wasn’t worth the risk.”

I asked Terry to tell me that he was kidding.

“For the last time, there is no fire truck,” he said.

The new plan, Terry explained, was that I’d be escorted by four decorated members of the Syracuse Police Department. “The five of you will take the elevator up to the second floor, right over there,” he said, pointing out the front of the diner and across the expanse of the courtyard towards an elevator door. “The doors will open, and together all five of you will ride the escalator down into Center Court, straight into the Village. It won’t have the punch of the fire truck, but it’ll get the job done.”

Before I had a chance to feel sorry for myself over the underwhelming way that I’d be arriving at the mall, Terry and Carla were hustling me through one of the mall’s invisible side doors just outside the diner. Behind the door was a narrow, concrete block-lined corridor, which opened up onto more corridors. I was completely lost in this labyrinth of steel doors and concrete, but Terry and Carla seemed to know where they were going.

The two of them led me to a large, dusty storage room that was filled with every seasonal decoration the mall used throughout the year. There were large plywood cutouts of chipper-looking turkeys that were typically propped around the roof of the mall every Thanksgiving. There was the foam rubber Jack-O-Lantern that was approximately the size of a compact car that stood outside of the Sears every October. And there were the life-size bipedal rabbit family—mom and dad and their brood—all with cloudy marbles for eyes and bald patches where their pastel-colored fur had been eaten away by mice. In the middle of all this stood a clothing rack. On the rack hung a pair of Santa suits.

The suit and I, to put it mildly, did not get along. The pants rode up so high on me that it looked as if I was wearing a pair of red-velvet clam diggers. And the oversized jacket, even with the waist pillow, hung on me like a sail in need of a decent wind. The four decorated members of the Syracuse Police Department, thumbs hooked into their gun belts, began making fun of me as soon as they arrived. “Hey, boys! Santa looks like an old scarecrow that’s been left out in the rain,” one of the cops observed as the other three guffawed.

That’s when Carla stepped in. She grabbed a grease pencil and whitened my eyebrows. She positioned the beard on my face, then found a brush in her knitting bag and combed out the tangles. “One minute and counting,” Terry said, looking at his watch and shifting from foot to foot. Carla reached into her knitting bag one final time. To my surprise she pulled out several fat skeins of wool, then stuffed them underneath my jacket. Then she said two of the approximately 10 words that she’d ever say to me over the next four weeks of our time together. She said: “That’s better.”

And it was better. Even the guffawing cops agreed.

The four cops and I rode the mall elevator up to the second floor together. “Come on, Santa, let’s hear your ho, ho, ho,” one of them teased. I opened my mouth, and as Gerta had predicted, the ho-ho-ho was there, at the moment I needed it.

“Not bad, Santa,” one of the cops said.

We rode in silence after that. A decade later, years after my four-week stint as Santa Claus, long after the Penn-Can Mall closed its doors for the last time in 1996, I would come across a quote that had some unexplained, vague significance to me: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has discovered yet.” It was something that Oscar Wilde, a man who knew something about artifice, had written.

For years the quote knocked around in my head like a gum-ball caught in a vacuum cleaner. Then one day, it dawned on me that the quote was significant because it accurately described the way that I’d found my way, or lurched my way, or lucked my way into a Santa suit, and all the various suits, literally and figuratively, that I’ve subsequently somehow found myself wearing ever since.

This is what the mall's old Center Court looks like in its current incarnation, "Driver's Village."

I can still remember the moment that those elevator doors opened. I knew the crowd for The Arrival would be big, but nothing could have prepared me for what I found out there. Center Court was at capacity. The crowd sprawled in every direction, spilling over into the mall’s various wings.

“Jesus, you’d think the damn Bee Gees were here,” one of the cops said.

Another cop nudged me off the elevator, towards the escalator. “It’s showtime, Santa,” he said. “Let’s move.” The five of us began our slow, escalator-driven descent into Santa’s Village.

One of the cops poked me in the back. “You should probably give them a wave, Santa,” he said.

I lifted one of my green mitten-covered hands and waved. A bona fide roar went up. “See? They’re eating it up,” the the cop said.

“You should probably give them one of your ho-ho-ho’s, Santa,” another cop said.

He was right. I definitely should do that. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs. Then I unleashed an otherworldly ho-ho-ho that boomed across Center Court. It traveled the length of the Sears wing, then eventually echoed its way back.

The third cop leaned close to my ear. His breath reeked of garlic and eggs. “That’s it, Santa,” he said. “Now you’re giving these crazy assholes their money’s worth.”

6 thoughts on “Man Vs. Donkey Kong: Epilogue

  1. HA! That was so great. 😀 I so don’t envy you having to work for four weeks in an ill-fitting Santa suit, with a gazillion thousand kids and parents all cloying and impatient and stressed, ugh. But I love that the magic “Ho Ho Ho!” prophecy came true for you! Have fun thinking of something else to write about now.

  2. This was probably the most fun and interesting blog I’ve ever read. I’m a little sad to see it finish but I guess all good things must come to an end.

  3. Congratulations I had to look up artifice in a dictionary. Jerk.
    Also a bigger picture of that mall would have helped.
    and thanks for the great blog, it’s been empty these last couple of days but i understand, everybody needs a break.

    /patience

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