THE BITTERSWEET TALE OF AN IMPERFECT SANTA

Lately, I’ve been shopping around for fat guys to play Santa. Long story, but I’ll try to make it brief:

Jewish or not, I got a burn in my belly when I discovered that our mall would allow parents to snap a picture of their kid with Santa only if they first paid to have Santa’s helpers take a suite of “formal” pictures.

Imagine, a kid watching Santa fend off parents like paparazzi all for the cause of filthy lucre. So, I got hacked off at the mall.

What to do? I put together a project called “Laps of Love”: Find a few fat guys to play Santa. Me first. Find a central location. Sit Santa on a throne. Invite folks to bring their kids and their cameras. Let Santa’s helpers give the kids candy, trinkets, cookies and cider while the parents snap away. On the way out, have a bucket to accept contributions for homeless families.

No overhead. No bureaucracy. No profits. All goodies donated. Ah, the spirit of giving. Welcome back.

Now, on to find the Santas. Plenty of fat guys in Greenville County, the home of deep-fried everything, cream-gravied everything, and otherwise healthy vegetables cooked with fatback. A newspaper reporter. A construction foreman. An asthmatic evangelist. A cabbie. My shoemaker. All practicing their ho-ho-ho’s and fattening up at Henry’s BBQ (voted best in the country by Playboy, or so I have been told).

Yesterday I popped in on my shoemaker to confirm his appointed hour, and my eyes beheld another perfect Santa – appropriately rotund, full white beard – hanging around the shoemaker’s shop. Shooting the bull with the shoemaker and his wife, laughing that deep, Santa-esque laugh, having a jolly time.

“Another candidate!” I announced.

“I have your friend the shoemaker playing Santa to raise money for homeless kids. You look like you’d do a perfect job, too. What about it?”

To my surprise, his response brought him to the edge of anger as his voice rose:

“I don’t believe in Santa Claus! I won’t do something like that! It’s all bull****! Kids don’t need that stuff! I never needed it!”

“But,” I sputtered, “it’s to help homeless kids.”

“I told you already! I don’t believe in Santa Claus! It’s all bull****!”

The shoemaker and his wife did not press the issue. Ironic, I thought. I apologized for the intrusion and instinctively looked downward, as you probably would. There I beheld the reason for the unbridled wrath. Both his hands were grotesquely mangled and malformed, an image that would likely scare most little children at their mere sight.

No, he could not play Santa. But, I projected, the rage was more than a day in the making, something etched deeply in his psyche. Kids are cruel, and his own childhood was doubtlessly filled with name-calling, rejected, treated like a freak, unable to throw or bat or fish like the other guys, an otherwise strapping young man unable to make it with the girls, little children fleeing in fear of the bogeyman, unfit for ROTC or army service.

One wonders what compassion or rejection in the world of sixty years ago his own parents, siblings, family and teachers showed him. One also wonders whether in some rural fundamentalist church his defects were not preached as signs of damnation to him or his parents. One wonders whether his little sliver of society – male, 1950’s, Southern, rural – could have offered him a chance encounter with someone(s) sufficiently understanding and compassionate to help him transcend the cruelty and make peace with his disfigurement. Who only knows?

This I do know: The joviality of that fat guy shooting the breeze with the shoemaker was real. It was not the mask of denial. It was the signature of trust that was earned through years of kindness and genuineness. He will, though, probably never make peace with people like me who, even unwittingly, challenge his wholeness. Or is it his masculinity? Or is it the long-touted myth of Southern manhood? He could not, would not, simply hold up a hand and say, “It’s better that I not.” Forever embittered, folks like me and my schemes will forever remain “bull****.”

What, then, can we do for an imperfect Santa? Only wish him well, I guess. And that God surround him with people whom he can trust, those who neither pity him nor deny him his wholeness, but simply have him as their friend.