Joni Rodgers
I had stopped believing in Santa Claus long before his powder-blue Buick Skylark ripped through a busy intersection in Allentown, Pennsylvania, clipped the back of a pickup truck, bolted over the curb, and slammed into the corner of an abandoned gas station.
The gray day was filled with stinging, sleetish precipitation. Too cold for rain, too ill-natured for snow. I’d pulled into the empty parking lot to salvage a few of the carefully decorated Christmas cookies my daughter had just dumped out of a foil gift box and onto the backseat of the car as we rushed, late as usual, to her preschool Christmas pageant.
“Oh, Jerusha! God bless America.” I was better at biting back my cuss words back then.
“I want a cookie,” she sobbed.
“We fixed them up all pretty for the bake sale. Now look. Who’ll want these?”
“I will!” My girl. Always willing to sacrifice for the greater good. And so quick on the uptake, it made me laugh out loud.
That’s when the Skylark and pickup truck connected with a pop on the street in front of us. That frozen puff of laughter was still hanging in the air. The old Buick hit the wall eighteen or twenty feet away. I felt the shock wave, the noise of it. Then that altered-time sense in which images (crumpled metal, buckling bricks) become gut response before they translate to actual perception and, finally, a semi-reasoned impulse to help.
Leaving Jerusha latched in her car seat, I scrambled across a crusty, brown snowbank toward the Skylark. A strange odor steamed from the angled hood. Not gasoline. Something slick and transmissiony. The old man behind the wheel was weeping and frantically pushing on the deeply indented door. His false teeth were half out. Blood flowed from his mouth and nose into his long, white whiskers, spattering dark spots on red velvet, red spots on white trim; making a horror movie costume out of the most recognizable ensemble between here and the North Pole.
Santa Claus.
I called for help. Cars on the slushy street slowed but kept going. Someone rolled down her window and shouted that she was calling 911. The truck driver sat in the cab of his pickup, beating back the air bag, yelling something about F-ing old coot don’t know the brakes from the gas. Santa battered his hand against the spider-veined window. I braced my foot on the side of the car and yanked until the door groaned open.
“Someone’s coming,” I said. “Stay calm.”
He seized my hand, croaking and babbling in some Slavic language. Or maybe the language of panic; an utterly foreign expression of how baffling it is to suddenly find your face in tatters. He leaned against me, and I stroked his long, white hair.
“Here,” I said, “let me tuck this jacket around you.”
But as I shucked my winter coat off my shoulders, he swung his legs out of the car, grasped my torso, and pulled himself up. He wasn’t a fat man, but he was a head taller than me and much fuller than he’d looked folded into the driver’s seat.
“No! Sir, please! Do you speak English? Please, keep still. The ambulance is—”
He swayed, then slumped heavily against me. I did my best to steer our trajectory as we awkwardly stumbled back onto a jagged bank of snow and mud left by the street plow. We ended up in a clumsy Pietà; me with one coat sleeve still on, him laid out across my lap, still grasping the waist of my sage-green dress.
“Crap!” I whispered. “Please, Jesus… shit… tell me what to do.”
Santa didn’t move. I yanked my coat the rest of the way off and spread it over him. Wadding part of my full pleated skirt in my hand, I gingerly applied pressure to his streaming nose. I know nothing about first aid, but that seemed like a first aid–ish idea. Apply pressure. Santa made a small, wet sound, breathing through his shattered mouth.
“Schum schie, schum schie…”
I am a mother, not an EMT. When in doubt, we lullaby. This little German carol I’d learned in grade school always soothed my children when I rocked them in their footie PJs.
“Joseph dearest, Joseph mine, help me cradle this child divine.”
“Mommy?” Jerusha called from the open car door. “What’s the matter with Santa?”
“He, um… he bumped his nose,” I called back to her. “He’s resting for a sec. You stay in the car.”
“Can I see?” She craned forward, trying to get a better look.
“No! Stay in the car, Jerusha.”
“I want to give Santa a cookie.”
“Not right now, Twinkie. Santa doesn’t feel good.”
“Can I have a cookie?”
“Sure. But stay in the car. I’m watching you.”
“Is Santa watching me?”
“Yes! Santa is watching! And he told me… he says…” Oh, I hate those little lies. I had vowed I would not be a mother who manipulated her children with those little hoptoad lies that leap so easily to the tongue. “He says if you get out of that car… he’ll be seriously pissed!”
She nodded solemnly and pulled the door shut.
The sprung trunk of Santa’s Skylark bobbed in the wind, which riffled up bright red bows and Mickey Mouse wrapping paper. On the dashboard lay a street map of the city and a beat-up leather Day-Timer. Santa probably knew he was too old to be driving around in a world where no one yields the right of way to reindeer. Probably found himself having to check his list more than twice lately. He was an old man. But he was an old man on a mission.
“Schum schie, schum schie…”
I was wearing patterned tights that matched my dress, but my skirt had billowed up when we fell. My legs felt raw and freezer-burned against the icy embankment. We waited the same eternity it takes for the teakettle to whistle. Finally, the sound of sirens came, and then came closer. Father Christmas gripped my hand.
“They’re coming,” I said.
The ambulance skidded to a stop, and the attendant strode toward me, lugging a white plastic case in one hand, using the other to gesticulate as he spoke with a Jersey accent.
“How stupid are you, lady?” He launched into a litany of my unforgivable gaffes, from “takin’ the victim outta the goddamn car” to “lettin’ a total stranger bleed all over ya” and other things that “any pinhead knows from junior high health class.” I didn’t bother explaining that in parochial school, health education was preempted for abstinence-only indoctrination, primarily concerned with “the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh.”
“Will he be okay?” I asked.
“No thanks to you,” the ambulance attendant assured me.
Meanwhile, two other EMTs rushed over, dragging an assortment of equipment. Once the first guy had completed a perfunctory exam on Father Christmas, they carefully maneuvered him onto a gurney and took him away. I got up, shaking, partly because of the cold, partly because the human body does that when it realizes the person it embodies has been changed.
“I’m gonna need a statement from you,” a policeman called from the curb, but I pretended not to hear him. I crunched back through the dirty snow to my car and opened the door. Jerusha looked up at me with big brown eyes, her mouth and both hands full of gingerbread.
“You shed I could haff a cookie.”
I gave my statement to the officer, who stuffed my bloody coat into a trash bag as if it were evidence in a case of foul play. We’d already missed the preschool luncheon, but I figured we might still make the program, even if I stopped to buy a clean dress.
“C’mon, c’mon,” I mumbled, cruising up the frontage road. “There’s a friggin’ Wal-Mart jammed into every crevice of the known universe. There’s gotta be a Wal-Mart around here.”
“There!” Jerusha pointed.
Uncanny. The child was a shopper from day one.
“Mommy! You’re pulling!” she complained as I dragged her across the parking lot.
“C’mon!” I barked. “We’re in a hurry!”
“My shoes are gonna get wet,” she whined. “Carry me!”
“No. I don’t want to stain your dress.”
“If I get a stain on my dress, can I get a new one?” she asked.
“No.” And knowing how her mind worked, I added, “Don’t even think about it.”
“You get a new dress,” she wailed, dragging her feet. “Why don’t I get a new dress?”
“You get a new dress every five minutes! You’re wearing a brand-new dress! Now C’MON!”
First the lies. Then the barking. Now I was yanking her along by her little candy cane arm. Obviously, years of therapy stretched out in front of this child like industrial gray carpet between aisles of plastic wise men and flocked fake trees in Wal-Mart’s Holiday Center. I joylessly selected a cheap blue shirtdress and asked the clerk if I could leave my soiled dress and tights in the trash can behind the fitting-room counter.
“No,” she said, crinkling her eyebrows together. “But here.”
She primly held out a plastic bag. I took it, changed, and shoved my bloodied clothes into her trash can when she wasn’t looking.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” I mumbled.
“You said the Fword,” Jerusha saw fit to mention. “If you get to say the Fword—”
“Don’t even think it.”
We arrived at the preschool just in time for her to run up and join her class onstage singing “Jazzy Jingle Bells.” There was a little play about a snowperson family, and a few other songs that carefully avoided saying anything that might mean anything. All adorable, of course, but it felt so empty. As the children sang “We Wish You a Happy Holiday,” inoculating the traditional lyrics with stilted rhythm, Santa burst into the back of the room, hefting a huge bag of Little Golden Books, which the Mothers of Preschoolers had wrapped and garnished with curly ribbon at our last MOP meeting.
“Ho Ho Ho! Merry Christmas!” he bellowed, and parents crowded around, waiting to photo/video-document their child’s meeting with Santa. But I’d left my camera in the car, I realized, so I just stood there lamely when he lifted Jerusha to his lap. She stared intently at his face, reached up, touched his nose. I could tell by the look on her face that she had awakened from the dreamiest part of her childhood.
My own awakening had come in second grade. On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I sat cross-legged with the rest of my classmates in the Story Corner of Mrs. Glenmar’s classroom at Mount Calvary Evangelical Elementary. Cold winter sunlight spilled across the linoleum floor. With her crown of blue hair, stumpy orthopedic shoes, and a spray of jingle bells on her green dress, Mrs. Glenmar looked as festive and welcoming as a fake Wal-Mart Christmas tree. We wriggled and giggled with excitement as she pressed floppy felt letters onto a nubby board. They stuck as if they were made of magic, and because we were big enough to know important stuff like letters, we called each one out loud.
“S-A-N-T-A!”
“Who can tell me who that is?” said Mrs. Glenmar with that winkishly conspiratorial expression adults wear all December long.
“Santa! ”we cried in hyper-ecstatic holiday shrill.
“That’s right!” said Mrs. Glenmar. “And who can tell me who this is?”
She slowly rearranged the letters, but this time, the spelling-along was a lot less enthusiastic.
“S-A-T-a-n.”
“Anyone?” Something about the arch of her eyebrow said, Answer, or face the lake of fire.
“Satan?” I volunteered meekly, because all my classmates were sitting there with their little peppermint pink mouths hanging open.
“That’s right. SAY-TAN, ”Mrs. Glenmar enunciated. She went on to explain how Father Christmas was a lie invented by the Pope, who served the Father of All Lies, and anyone who believed in Santa was stealing baby Jesus’s birthday. And that made Jesus very sad. She looked up at the plaster-cast crucifix on the wall near her framed and autographed eight-by-ten glossy of President Nixon (who’d recently been reelected by the will of God). Our eyes followed, but quickly slid away from the Savior’s wounded expression. To get crucified by Jews and have your birthday stolen by Catholics—well, no wonder he always looked so mournful.
I didn’t cry. I wasn’t a crybaby like all those other kids. And I loved Jesus! No way was I a sniveling little birthday-stealer. A few kids tried to present repudiating evidence. Thumpy noises. Mysteriously vanishing Oreos and milk. Someone’s daddy had actually stepped in reindeer droppings! But my eyes were open now—even before Mrs. Glenmar explained that sometimes adults lie to children for reasons we would understand when we grew up. And when I grew up, I did understand.
Twenty-some Christmases later, I also learned the true story of Santa.
I was playing the Virgin Mary (oh, shut up) in a traditional Elizabethan miracle play at a little theater in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. (Pennsylvania’s Bethlehem is to Messianic birthplaces what fake Christmas trees are to a pine forest, but it’s close enough for about eight hundred million tourists, so local artists make the most of it.) My friend Rita Lipsitz was playing the angel Gabriel. I loved Rita, even though it took a lot of energy to quash my kids’ giggling at her name. She was a brilliant artist who (when she wasn’t struggling with the anti-gestalt of being a Jew announcing the birth of Christ) taught liberal-artsy college courses like Renaissance Poetry, Ecclesiastics, and Dance History. I got smarter just having coffee with her.
My husband worked nights, including that particular Christmas Eve, and Rita was a single mom, so she and I decided to get together for an amalgamated festivity we called Hanuchristmakah, which included: little gifts from the Everything’s 99 Cents! store; stockings stuffed with kosher candy; and an interesting mix of holiday carols and Broadway show tunes. Rita and I sipped wine in my kitchen, watching the kids decorate cookies with tinted frosting, red licorice strings, and sprinkles. Just before midnight, we lit our menorah, tucked baby Jesus in the manger, and set out treats for Santa. (Actually, it was more like a quarter to nine, but we told the kids it was midnight, and they believed it, not because they were gullible but because they were guileless.)
“Do your kids still believe in Santa?” I asked Rita, once the children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions surgically inserted by multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns danced in their heads.
“What’s not to believe?” she said. “He was a real guy. A Turkish bishop. Nicholas of Izmir. Legend has it, some nobleman couldn’t afford dowries for his three daughters, so one night, the bishop threw a bag of gold through the window to cover the first daughter’s marriage. Second night, he pitched in enough for the second girl. Third night, finding the window closed, he dropped the third daughter’s gift down the chimney to the fireplace, where stockings were hanging to dry, and the rest is history.”
“No way,” I said. “If a member of the unfunded gentry received gold via an open window two nights in a row, there’s no way he’s closing that window the third night.”
“Coldhearted skeptics notwithstanding,” said Rita pointedly, “the legend is in keeping with the bishop’s documented reputation for benevolence. I mean, they don’t just canonize any old fart off the street. Nicholas is the patron saint of those who love Christmas most: children, bakers, and pawnbrokers.”
“We didn’t have saints,” I said. “We had lawn ornaments. Blow-mold nativity scenes.”
“Blow mold?”
“Yeah. Those hollow plastic figures with lightbulbs inside. I’ve been searching eBay for a blow-mold holy family. Three blow-mold wise men. Blow-mold shepherds kneeling before a blow-mold baby Jesus in his little blow-mold manger.”
“You’d never put something that kitschy in your yard,” said Rita. “You just like saying blow-mold baby Jesus.”
“Well, yeah.”
“My kids want one of those ten-foot inflatable Santas with the fan unit in the base that keeps him nice and rotund. You have to tether him to a tree so he doesn’t topple over onto the plywood reindeer. And you hate for the kids to see Santa tied to a tree, but what can you do? A legend that overblown has to be anchored to something solid.”
“True that.” I raised my glass to the Gospel According to Rita Lipsitz.
We like our cultural icons big. A Santa larger than life. A Jesus larger than death. We present them as Sebastian Cabot and Fabio, though they actually looked more like Trini Lopez and Osama bin Laden. We make them white so we’re not troubled by our innate racism. We make them supernatural so we’re not pressured to live up to their example. But in reality, both these guys were about love, not magic. At the base of the grandiloquent image of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas resides a quietly persistent habit of human kindness. And nestled long ago in the real-life manger was an extraordinarily ordinary newborn boy, who inspired more than a legend when he inspired Nicholas of Izmir.
He inspired a man to become a saint. To love his neighbor. To give and give and, without recognition or thanks, give again. To hitch a sleigh to his good intentions and to brave snowy rooftops. To venture out onto icy streets behind the wheel of a powder-blue Buick he was far too frail to drive.
“Joseph dearest, Joseph mine, help me cradle this child divine…”
The battered Santa and I breathed soft clouds, waiting for the sirens.
“Schum schie… schum schie…”
How odd, in that moment, to find myself so comforted by this little song from a church I thought had scarred me. But in life’s most metal-twisting moments, we often retreat to our traditions. Dormant faith awakens to meet crushing need, and the contrast is as sharply drawn as the disparate sensations of hard ice beneath me and the warm weight of St. Nicholas in my arms.
Christmas surrounded us like a snow globe, and it was undeniably real. Cold. Lullabies. Blood. The authenticity of care, when one is caring for a stranger.
I closed my eyes and purposely returned to the dream of believing.