Santa is a big part of the Christmas tradition in my family.
We try to make his visit as comfortable as possible as per the requirements delineated in his manifesto: “Twas Night Before Christmas.” We leave him cookies and milk; we put out a carrot for Rudolf (or whichever Reindeer is the most worthy); and most importantly we open the flue in the fireplace to make his squeeze down the chimney easier.
Santa has an odd procedure for using what we leave out for him. He feels it necessary, for reasons that elude me, to leave remnants of the cookies and carrots as if to prove that he’s visited even though he just left presents under the tree. Up to fifty percent of the cookies remain as if, instead of ingesting them, Santa prefers to crumble up the cookies and snort them, allowing the Christmas Cheer a faster path to his blood stream. A thousand years at a job, and you figure out some shortcuts. Also, he leaves a mangled half-carrot next to the plate. This means he takes the carrot up to the reindeer, teases one with it, and then brings it back down into our house covered in saliva and disappointment. Or he brings the reindeer in the house, which would mean Prancer framed my dog with that Christmas morning turd on the living room rug.
Along with the presents and the powderized cookies, Santa would leave my sister and me a note. We would tumble down the stairs Christmas morning to find this message outlining why he’d found us worthy of gifts and placed us on his fabled “Nice List.” He would know very intimate details of our behavior at school and at home. Perhaps most children would be comforted, but I felt surveilled. I stopped believing in Santa when, after weeks of searching, I couldn’t find any video cameras in dark nooks or bugs in our phones. In Sunday School, I was taught to believe that only God was omnipotent, so the thought that Santa would be able to see me without a vast network of audio and video equipment maintained by a neck-bearded elf in a white van outside my house didn’t ring true. It was also a tip off that Santa’s handwriting was so similar to my father’s.
Some time in the mid-nineties, my family purchased our first home computer. We were Mac people when it wasn’t cool to be Mac people. We had a giant, whirring monstrosity that took five minutes to boot and another thirty seconds to open the primitive word processing software. It was slow by today’s standards, but back then it was amazing- and even more enigmatic to old people.
The next Christmas, Santa embraced the changing times and wrote his note on our new computer. This was a pretty big leap for Santa, I thought. My grandfather who was around 70 at the time could barely use a computer, but Santa, who was easily a dozen times that old, seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He was even savvy enough to crack the login password to my parents’ account and change the font of the note to big, swirly, Santa-esque letters. Between the spy vans and the computer skills, Santa has a super villain's resume.
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