“I Was a Teenage Mall Santa”

by Reverend James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

December 12, 2004

            It was not a job I ever expected to take.

            I was taking a semester off from college, and I didn’t have any money to buy my family any Christmas presents, or any money to do anything else for that matter, and that is how I became a Mall Santa at the Fox Valley Shopping Mall in Aurora, Illinois. I took the job hesitantly, but not too many other part-time jobs were paying $8 an hour, and the requirements were few. The Santa Manual I received stated that Santas must bathe every day, not show up for work drunk or high, not smoke on breaks while wearing the beard because it was flammable, and memorize the names of the reindeer.

            On the days I worked, I walked un-noticed through the mall to the Santa dressing room, tucked away in the corner of the mall. There I would whiten my eyebrows with make-up, put on my suit, and beard, and hat, and then fully dressed, walk back to the Santa chair in the middle of the mall near the food court. As I walked past the Footlocker, The Gap, and the Body Shop, parents with young children in tow would point and say, “Look, it’s Santa,” and the parents and children both would wave enthusiastically. Some other parents would point and yell,  “And if you don’t shape up right now, I’m going to march right over to Santa and tell him that you were bad this year.” I was tempted to yell back, “Don’t worry, kid! I’m bringing you a pony.” But I figured this would just make things worse. The funny thing was that adults without children would wave and say hello too. Perfectly sane looking adults would look up enthusiastically, smile, wave, and say, “Hi, Santa!”

            When I arrived at my chair, there were often lines and lines of children, waiting to sit on Santa’s lap. Now anyone could sit on Santa’s lap, and if parents had their own cameras, they could take their own pictures. Otherwise, there were picture packages ranging from $6.95 to $29.95 that one of the elves would explain to the parents. This, of course, was the point of it all - - picture sales!

            (It’s a somewhat strange feeling to know that several thousand people probably still have pictures of me and their children or grandchildren now hanging on their living room walls.)

            I often wondered if the elves resented Santa. Nobody ever shouted, “Look, Mom, an elf!” as the elves walked through the mall. And hundreds of kids lined up to see Santa. Nobody lined up to see elves. The elves were also the ones who had the grunt work. They were the ones who talked up the different picture packages, filled out the paperwork, and took the pictures. At particularly busy times, they even provided protection for Santa when it was time for Santa to leave his chair, forming a phalanx around me as they escorted me back to the dressing room, preventing parents and overly anxious kids from mobbing Santa in front of Florsheim Shoes. It was kind of like Santa’s Secret Service, though to tell the truth, I never felt terribly protected being surrounded by elves.

            The elves had it hard, but the Santa job was not as easy as it looked, either.

            Between the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, I had 6,000 children, teenagers, and adults sit on my lap and tell me whether they had been good or bad and what they wanted for Christmas. It was tiring work. The Santa Suit was extremely hot, and the beard itched. I don’t think I had ever looked forward to Christmas Day so much, even as a child.

            Truthfully, though, I enjoyed it.

            My favorite part was holding the infants. There is something special about holding infants at Christmas time.

            “How old is she?” I asked one mother as she placed her tiny baby in my arms.

            “One week,” the mother answered.

            I gently cradled the infant in my arms as one of the elves took our picture.

            Not surprisingly, the toddlers were the most difficult. Parents of toddlers often wanted a picture of their two-year-old with Santa whether the child wanted to sit on Santa’s lap or not. I would try to hold the child, screaming and struggling, long enough for an elf to snap a picture. A mother once shouted, “Just grab’em around the neck, Santa.” 

            Most children, though, were eager to sit on Santa’s lap, and they were prepared. It was as if they were going to make a corporate presentation. They not only had lists, but drawings and charts of the toys they wanted, and maps to their houses - - of course, all done in crayon.

            “Have you been good this year,” I asked one little girl. “Yes, I’ve been very good,” she said,  “so I should get lots of presents, but my brother Michael hasn’t been good at all, so I don’t think you should bring him anything, or maybe only one or two things, but definitely not as many toys as me because I’ve been very good and he hasn’t been good at all.”

            The children asked questions too. “Where are your reindeer?” a little boy asked. “On the roof,” I said. “Oh. Where do they poop?” he asked. “Mmmm, that’s a good question,” I said, thinking to myself that there was nothing about this in the Santa Manual. “I think one of them pooped on our car in the parking lot,” he said. 

            Sometimes a child would be too shy to say what he or she wanted for Christmas, but since the last 37 four-year-old boys had wanted Power Ranger action figures, it was a pretty safe bet that the boy sitting on my lap had probably watched the same toy commercials and also wanted a Power Ranger action figure.

            “Would you like a Power Ranger action figure?” I asked, and out of the corner of my eye saw the mother nodding vigorously. The child looked up amazed, as if I looked deep into his heart and discovered his innermost desire. “Yes, Santa,” he said. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll put it on my list.”

            As I’ve said, it was not only young children who sat in my lap. Teenagers and adults sat on Santa’s lap, too. The Aurora East High School basketball team wanted a picture with Santa. These guys were all over 6 feet tall, and they all wanted to be in the same picture. I had guards on both knees, two forwards learning on my shoulders, and a center leaning over my head.

            I had not told my family about this job, so when my 16-year-old step-sister came to sit on Santa’s lap, she had no idea who I was.

            “What would you like for Christmas?” I asked, in a very deep voice.

            “Well, I don’t know...” she said.

            Now I knew my step-sister did not want a Power Ranger Action figure, but she had been asking for a new, red Honda Accord, since she turned 16, with very little success.

             “How about a new car, maybe a shiny, new red Honda Accord?” I asked. The look on her face was amazement, the same as the look I had seen on the four-year-old’s face. It said without words, “Santa, I believe!”

            “Have you been a good girl this year?” I asked.

            “Oh, yes. Very good,” she said.

            “Really?”

            “Oh, yes.” 

            “What about borrowing your mother’s car last Friday night without asking?”

            The look of amazement on her face turned to one of guilt and shock. Then she looked very deeply into closely into Santa’s eyes.

            “Is that you?” she asked. 

            “Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s Santa Claus!”

            The adults who sat on Santa’s lap were the ones who puzzled me the most. Why did all of these people want to sit on my lap  and talk to Santa? The young children I could understand, but the older children, the teenagers, and especially the adults, made me wonder. Of course, I knew that many of them just sat on Santa’s lap for fun and to have a picture taken that they could show off at home or at work, yet there were others who took it more seriously.

            I asked the adults the same questions as I asked the children. When I asked the adults if they had been good that year, most laughingly said, “Yes, I’ve been good!” and a few joked, “No, I haven’t been very good at all,” but a few others leaned in and whispered seriously in my ear, “I wasn’t very good this year, but I’m going to be better next year.”

            When I asked the adults what they wanted for Christmas, many of them talked about expensive gifts that they were hoping for, especially if family members were  within earshot. Some, however, leaned closer and whispered in my ear, surprising me with what they said. A middle-aged man, whose teenage daughters had coaxed him into Santa’s lap, leaned over and whispered into my ear, “I want to find a job that I like.” A young, somewhat plain looking single woman told me, “I want to find somebody who really loves me.” A middle-aged woman in a fur coat, whispered into my ear, “I want my son to graduate from high school.”

            When people told me these things, I sometimes had the urge to say, “Hey, snap out of it! Grow up! Don’t you get it? I’m just a teenager in a Santa suit getting paid eight bucks an hour. I’m not really Santa Claus. I don’t have a sleigh with eight reindeer on the roof. I’ve got a ‘73 Oldsmobile station wagon that barely runs parked in front of Sears.”

            But I never said those things.

            I slowly realized that when I put on that suit, and beard and hat, I became something else in people’s eyes, something more than a teenager dressed up in a Santa suit making eight bucks an hour. What was I for them?

            Children wish and dream and hope for all of the time, and one of the pleasures of adulthood, is sometimes having the power to make some of those wishes come true. But as we have journeyed from childhood to adulthood, many of us have been taught to face the stark realities of life. We have been cautioned against wishful thinking, against hoping too much. We deny ourselves the experience of wishing for something for fear that we will be disappointed, but instead sometimes end up living lives filled with cynicism and despair, or at least living with a limited vision of what our lives or the world in which we live could be like.

            When I think of those adults who sat on my lap, I think Santa represented someone who knew their heart’s deepest wishes, their soul’s deepest longings, and the possibility that somehow those wishes and desires might come true. I think Santa re-awakened within them, perhaps only for a few moments, a sense of hope, sometimes forgotten since childhood, that makes living more tolerable.

            Were they foolish to share these hopes with a teenager dressed up as Santa Claus? Were they simply experiencing some temporary regression to childhood?

            Perhaps. But in the several years since working as Santa, I’ve come to believe we could all use a little bit more hope in our lives.

            Here I do not mean a belief in fantasy or in totally unrealistic expectations. I do not mean the kind of false hope that encourages us to play the lottery or makes us believe a sick relative or friend will miraculously get better when our reason tells us that most likely will not be the case. Rather, I mean the simpler hopes that I believe each of us has, whether we recognize them within ourselves or not. I’m talking about hope for change within our own lives, the hope that each of us might become more of the person that we each want to become. I’m talking about the hope that we may have for a family member or close friend, who it would be very easy to give up on because their problems seem so beyond the ability of anyone, including themselves, to solve. I’m also talking about the hope that one day there really will be peace on earth and good will toward all. I’m talking about the kind of hope that can lead to real change if we embrace it.

            As the Unitarian Universalist minister John Buhrens says, “Hope is not a matter of knowing that everything will turn out all right, either for oneself, or even for all of us on Earth together. It is more like directing your life toward a point on the horizon beyond which none of us can see, but toward which we all have to journey if there is to be a worthwhile future for any one of us.”

            And when it comes down to it, re-awakening the hope that lies within each of us is a big part of what I believe this time of the year is all about. Whether we do this by talking about the return of the sun on the longest, darkest night of the year, or by telling a story about a lamp burning miraculously for eight nights when it only should have burned for one, or by telling a story about a child being born as a savior to his people, or even by sitting on the lap of a teenager being paid eight bucks an hour to dress up in a Santa suit and believing that somehow it will make a difference, I don’t think it really matters.

            I know this now. I think I even knew it then, working at the mall.

            My last day at the mall, Christmas Eve, was a pretty slow day for Santa. Shoppers were scurrying frantically all over the mall, but most of them were without children. Santa spent most of the afternoon chatting with the elves, glad to have his lap to himself for a while. Late in the afternoon, not too long before the mall closed, a middle-aged woman approached the Santa chair.  The elves weren’t even around. They were off smoking cigarettes in the break room.

            This woman didn’t have any children with her, and I noticed that her clothes didn’t really match, and her hair was a bit disheveled. The terribly politically incorrect phrase that popped into my mind was, “not quite right.”

            “Merry Christmas,” I said, as she came closer.

            “Merry Christmas,” she said.

             “Listen,” she said, “I know you’re not really Santa.” I nodded, a bit relieved. “But could you give a message to the real Santa for me?” she asked.

            I hesitated, then said, “Sure. What would you like me to tell him?”

            “I live with my mom,” she said, “but we don’t always get along. Sometimes, we fight and argue a lot. But I really, really love her, so I just want one thing for Christmas.”

            “What would you like for Christmas?” I asked.

            “I’d just like to get along with my Mom on Christmas Day. Just on that one day. That’s all. That’s my Christmas wish. Will you tell the real Santa that for me?”

            “I’ll tell him,” I said, “and I hope you’re Christmas wish comes true.”

             “So do I,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

            . “Merry Christmas,” I said as she turned to walk away.

            Soon it was time for Santa to go home.