Mad Santa

I am not a fan of Christmas.

1. Shopping in cold weather is not fun.
   
   
2. Having to do regular errands, like buying mailing envelopes, dishwashing liquid, and return a malfunctioning storage drive means no place to park and long lines no matter where I go to do it this week.
   
   
3. No one in my family has small children, so Christmas is adult-oriented. Adult presents cost more than children's presents, and you're shopping for people who already have everything they want. When money is tight, the person who ends up not getting a gift is my husband. That doesn't seem right.
   
   
4. Did I mention neither of us got a raise this year? Well, neither of us was laid off, either, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
   
   
5. I have a double set of in-laws, since my husband's parents are divorced and remarried. That means double in-law presents. Double road trips over the river and through the woods...
   
   
6. I have never been able to establish any family Christmas traditions of my own because I've never been able to have a Christmas at home with just my immediate family. I have been on the road for 29 years, a visitor to other people's traditions, except for a six year break between husbands when my Christmas tradition was happily home alone with my own turkey and dressing, and three movies, Coal Miner's Daughter, Manhattan, and When Harry Met Sally. I was never sad to be alone.
   
   
7. Sometimes I just want to cry. And then the bills come in January and I really want to cry. (When I worked at the Times-Dispatch, back in the newspaper prosperity days, they used to give you a Christmas bonus of a week's salary. That was very helpful. I'm pretty sure they don't do that anymore.)
   
   
8. I don't put the tree up because then I would have to take it down. Or I could be like some of the people in the Fan District who leave their Christmas lights up all year.
   
   
9. Aren't I pathetic. Grinch has nothing on me.
   
   
10. My favorite holiday is Martin Luther King Day. I get a three-day weekend and I'm not expected to do anything, not even have a dream.

Google-Blocked from Mr. Christmas

You can't get to Mr. Christmas with Google maps.

My caller had the most unimaginative, been-there, done-that photo assignment this week for a local publication, to get photos of people enjoying over-the-top Christmas displays. I consulted the T-D's list and emailed him a few addresses in his neighborhood, then told him to come get me and I'd drive him to a few places in my area of town. I knew the streets, I thought, and it'd go quick with me behind the wheel. He refused. (I guess it has something to do with not wanting to be seen with your mother, or something.)

Instead, I had to provide directions over the phone. The first place went okay, then I provided directions to the famous house of Mr. Christmas on 2300 Wistar Court. Since he was coming from the highly decorated houses of Pine Grove Drive, I instructed him via Broad Street. Right turn off Broad onto Wistar Street, four blocks down, left on Wistar Court. I am looking right at Google maps.

He calls back and says the street dead ends on Biscayne. That's not what the map says, I tell him. I'm right here, he says. Well, I can't tell what your situation is because I'm not there and the map says....and then he shouts at me that I purposely misdirected him because I wanted to go. But the map says....

Next night, as I'm getting ready to go to the boring office Christmas party, I see the Crazy Lights show on TLC and there's Mr. Christmas. I know it's an old show because they interview Cynthia McMullen in her messy little Times-Dispatch cubicle, and she's gone, but surely Mr. Christmas is still there. His street wouldn't have disappeared like Brigadoon. All I can think of at the boring Christmas office party is leaving early and finding out what happened on Biscayne Road.

We get there, and sure enough, Wistar Street dead ends at someone's driveway, which has a street sign on it that says Wistar Street. (Who ever saw a street sign at the end of a driveway?) We turn the brights on and can see Wistar Street continues right on the other side of this driveway, but there's a metal barricade keeping you from driving on the driveway, over a little stretch of this house's lawn, and back onto Wistar Street. We go up and down Biscayne but cannot find another street that will hook us back up to Wistar.

Back at home, I Google-map it again, ask for directions, and Google Maps innocently draws me a route right through this person's yard. On the map, Wistar Street goes right through to the end from Broad. In reality, you can't get to the end of it with the Wistar Court and Wistar Place cul-de-sacs unless you enter from Skipwith. And here in this conundrum is where Mr. Christmas abides, ever elusive to those of us Wise Men coming from the North. That just ain't right.

The Santa Lie

It all starts with the first great lie, Santa Claus.

We have lost faith. We do not know whom to believe. We do not know whom to trust. Our parents, our ministers, our teachers, our politicians, our lovers, our car dealers, our anchorman--who among us is worthy of our trust?

And it's all because of Santa Claus.

Who can't remember when they first realized there was no Santa Claus?

For me, it was when I discovered a secret cache of gifts in a closet. I carefully unwrapped the end flaps on one, read the lettering on the side of the box and re-taped the package. On Christmas morning the card on this same box said it was from Santa Claus. How could Santa have brought this from the North Pole just hours earlier? And if there was no Santa, who was devising this elaborate hoax, who was drinking the milk and eating the carrots I left out for the reindeer? Who was leaving me thank you notes written in a feathery Santa hand?

My parents? My own parents were doing this to me? The same people who had selected my religion, mandated my moral values and set our standard of ethics?

Herein lies the crux. In our formative years, two similar controlling factors are presented to us, God and Claus. They both see you when you're sleeping, know when you're awake, know if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake. They both reward you for faith and sterling behavior, and punish you for lack of both, one with fire, brimstone and eternal damnation and the other with a mini-version of the same thing, a lump of coal. When Claus is revealed as a fraud, can God be far behind?

Some of us desperately need to believe in something. I dealt with the loss of Claus. But I clung to the big Santa in the sky. When I became a parent, I decided not to tempt my own child with a similar crisis of faith. I would make life easy for him. I would tell him upfront there was no Santa Claus. I explained very carefully, or maybe very vaguely, it was just a Christmas game. I met direct questions about Santa head-on. Is there a Santa Claus? There are lots of Santa Clauses, Santa Clauses in every mall.

Unfortunately, in the end, it didn’t work. Whereas I continued to cling to the Santa in the sky with diamonds, he rejected everything I believed in. Did it all stem from the original loss of Claus, even as careful as I was to prepare him for it?

The Santa Claus conspiracy is the first conundrum we encounter on a lifetime journey of losing faith, and that's the only thing in life you can trust, the true and certain knowledge that you can’t believe in anything.

(I originally wrote a longer version of this about 15 years ago, and ever since, I keep seeing it floating around on the Internet, usually attributed to The City Paper, which never bought it from me, so I hereby lay formal claim to my own essay.)

Traumatized by Bass Pro Shops

I had forgotten a couple of things in my enthusiasm to go see the Bass Pro Shops on Lakeridge, a redneck Disney Land of sorts. I am creeped out by animals that were once live and now stuffed, and big, grey fish with mouths that can swallow your fist.

Background: My maternal grandparents had nine children and no jobs. They lived off what they grew and butchered themselves. Then they converted their house into a hunting lodge and my grandfather let men pay to shoot on his property. And sleep in his house, which must have gone over great with his six daughters. There was a twin bed or a cot in every space of every room of that house except the kitchen.

And there was no privacy. The house had no hallways. Each room opened up into the next one in a square, with the closets and storage rooms filling the center of the house. Part of the kitchen was converted into two adjoining bathrooms with curtainless shower stalls. (A luxury since before that there was an outhouse.) But they didn't have a proper door with a doorknob. They had three-quarter swinging doors with hook latches. By the time I was four, my grandparents had died (both at age 56) and the hunting parties ceased.

My youngest aunt kept the house just as it was, with all the beds and the creepy, curtained walk-in closets. If you wanted to change your clothes in private, you had to go into one of them, and every one had a mounted deer head on the wall (with eyes that saw me). This spooked the heck out of me, and I didn't like sleeping outside that room either, knowing that head was in there and could float out at any time and get me. I had to spend two weeks of every summer in that house until my aunt had the good sense to burn it down for the insurance.

Back to the Present Day: Bass Pro Shops has a lot of stuffed, mounted deer heads. On stuffed mounted deer bodies. All over the place. Everywhere! As well as turkeys, and birds and other stuffed stuff. I got to the point where I just kept my head down, but not before I saw the stuffed baby bear. Not a stuffed teddy bear. A stuffed baby real bear. Ahhhhh, that was too much. My husband tried to claim it was fake. "They wouldn't stuff a faun." Because, ohmygosh, there's even a stuffed Bambi's mother and a stuffed teenager Bambi. Thanks for pointing that one out, honey. Now I need therapy.

Look at all these guns. This is freaking me out. And whereas I usually like to look at brightly colored tropical fish, a tank full of evil gray fish with whiskers and big gaping mouths...well, I am going to see that in my dreams. Sheeeesh.

The place was packed. My husband doesn't eat fish, so we weren't planning to wait the hour to 90 minutes for the restaurant part, and there were a boatload of kids in there anyway, even sitting at the bar in front of the giant aquarium with friendlier looking fish. Right after stuffed deer and big fish, I don't like restaurants full of kids. Santa was there, too. (Not in the restaurant. In the boat section.)

The Nascar driving simulation looked very fun, though, and was only $5, but my husband didn't want to try it. We watched one car repeatedly slam into the virtual wall and spin around in the grass before crossing the road again, only to slam back into the wall. When it was over, two preteen boys got out of that car. How many years before I'm sharing I-95 with that driver? Two?

The one thing I thought about buying, a tin frog on a stick (don't need it, but it was a good price, $4.95), I didn't because most of them were already broken by obliging kids who had pulled the bobbing frog tongues out. And I almost bought a bag of marshmellows labeled "Snowman Poop," but then I couldn't think of anyone who would appreciate such a gift. It sort of puts you off marshmellows.

So that was my holiday outing this year, although there's a possibility I might get a free Tacky Light tour next week. I assume there will be no stuffed deer along the way.

Mystery of the Missing Portrait

In 1969, a VCU freshman named Janet Johnson, who lived on the 8th floor of Johnson Hall, painted this picture, which amazed us all because she wasn't even an art major, so we took a picture of it.

She dropped out mid-semester because she never went to class. She got her days and nights mixed up and was up all night and slept all day. I think she was originally from Northern Virginia. She was very tall and liked to wear short, fluffy wigs. She also liked to party at Andy's, which was on Grace Street near the Mister Swiss, a few doors down from Lum's.

A few years later, someone told me they saw this painting for sale at Arts in the Park. That was almost 40 years ago. I wonder what happened to it.