It's the day after Thanksgiving and here I sit, enthroned at the center of the Mall, prepared to confess (or prime) the greed of children. I'll do this for the next 30 days, in countdown ("only fifteen more shopping minutes until Christmas!"), under conditions only slightly less hectic than Beirut in a shoot-out, while a photographer in a green elf costume snaps over-priced picture for harried parents. I wear a red velveteen suit with white trim that has mange. The beard, luckily, hooks over my ears -- no spirit gum -- and the wig of white polyester sits on my head like a splattered meringue under a melted dunce cap. The children don't know that I'll probably lose their confidences as easily as I lose sleep at night, at a rate slightly above minimum wage. Ecce homo.
As I ready myself and watch the Mall fill up I wonder how many of the people have a sense of this movement of the seasons, the powerful coming-together of the death of nature and the birth of salvation? I know I don't; I'm too busy to acquire the habit of awe and reverence. I don't think they're much different.
In fact, I suspect that the anxious verve with which they prosecute Christmas is an attempt to recover a feeling of sacred witness to mysterious, even impossible, events, an attempt, in a hobbled sort of way, to make life special. People who moan about the commercialism of Christmas have it all wrong. The problem is not that we buy too much, or that we miss the true spirit of the time (whatever that is). The problem is that we don't know how to give well, how to present things, because we don't know one another very well. We try to overcome our ignorance with the ritual of given things, recover the mystery through formulas of generosity. We're inept at it, but we've always been inept at it, we creatures with egos as large as the universe. It's a wonder we pause at all in our individual daily races against death to give to someone else something we think they might need.
I ask the photographer if he's ready. He grins and uncaps his lens. I get out of my rickety gilt chair, turn on the tape of tinny Christmas music, and unhook the orange nylon rope that separates the magic kingdom of Santa from the milling millions. Even as my rear-end hits the chair I have a child in my lap, his as-yet-unladen parents in the background. While he chatters on about G.I. Joe and Thundercats, and the elf clicks away, I listen and smile. The beard won't show it, unattached as it is to my skin, but the smile is there nonetheless, and as I give him his release, there is another child, and then another. So many children, so many chances. Grace will come from such multitudes.
Where I Live: Manchester NH
In Praise Of Weirdness