The Spirit of Christmas

The Spirit of Christmas

Peter A. Hempel

I never expected what would happen when I signed up to be a Santa.

I wasn’t destitute when I took the job, but, like most of us, I did feel like I could use some extra cash. I worked as a carpenter, mostly on home renovations, but the economy was in the doldrums and gigs were spotty.

It turns out I had to take a “Santa Training Course” to get the job. About 20 of us met with an instructor who began by explaining that this was a chance to have fun and bring children some of the magic of Christmas – an experience that many of them would look back on with nostalgia as they one day would bring their own children in turn to participate in this same ritual. With that out of the way, he spent the next six hours explaining the rules about Santa’s appearance (no dirty suits or scraggly beards, please), and most importantly, the updated and very detailed rules about Santa’s conduct with the young children perched innocently on their laps. No one wants Santa – or the store where he works – to end up with a lawsuit.

Most of my hours were spent at an old department store – you know, one of those stores that was still there but had seen its glory days come and go and now was barely managing to hang on. Christmas, however, provided a brief season when the number of visitors would increase as people were forced to look for presents to buy, often in a last-minute panic.

Being Santa wasn’t just a 9-to-5 gig at the department store. Once I became an accredited Santa, there was plenty of demand for my appearances at all sorts of places, from nursing homes to children’s hospitals, where my visit could help brighten up a dark and lonely season. But the department store was still the main stage.

At the department store, it was all about the kids getting to tell Santa what they wanted for Christmas. I didn’t have any sympathy for the entitled little shits whose wish list for Santa was basically a list of demands, and who were extremely specific about whether they wanted an Xbox or PlayStation and just what the specs should be for their intended model. I would let their parents deal with their expectations and sullen resentment about anything left off the list.

No, what got to me were the kids who absolutely believed in me as a magical figure, and earnestly presented requests which were either heartbreakingly modest – no ponies here – or sometimes, enough to make me weep: “I just want daddy to stop hitting mommy. I want them to stop drinking and I want them to get a job and I want to be part of a real family.”

Post-Christmas, that is the week or so from Christmas to New Year’s, there was one bar in town where the Santas used to go. A lot of them would go still in their Santa outfits, because that’s why they were there. They were there because they had been Santa too much, too long, and couldn’t stand the pain.

There were some Santas, of course, who understood that the game was a hustle to sell $50 and $100 photo packages to parents with young children, and for whom the earnest Christmas wishes of children were simply a technicality. But for many of the Santas, those who often sat drinking late into the night, their role had become a window into a hopelessly tragic world, a world where the magic of childhood could not compete with what the world was actually going to give them.

Despite the commonality of our experience, this wasn’t a situation that encouraged us to sit around in groups and talk or even grouse. Sharing our stories would’ve meant sharing our feelings, and none of us could handle that, not then.

Each night I drank more than the night before, and by the end of the week I was totally shit-faced. As I went up to the bar – staggered up to the bar – to get one more shot, the bartender looked at me and said, “Go home, and take off that damned suit. You can’t handle it. You’re probably a good guy, and that’s why you can’t handle it. The ones who can handle it are pretty much psychos. The ones who are good at it are the very ones who should never be around children at all.”

I stumbled home and climbed the long flight of stairs to my apartment. I was still drunk and already starting to feel hung-over. But I did what the bartender had told me to do – I took off the suit. Took off the boots, took off the beard, took off the white-haired wig, the big black belt, took off the damn red outfit, and let the pillow I used for stuffing my belly fall on the floor. Then I found an empty box and put all of it into the box and put it in at the back of my closet.

I’m a wreck. What now? When my next carpenter gig comes up, that will help. But what about next Christmas? What the hell do I do about that?

 © 2025 – Peter A. Hempel

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