Get Behind Me, Santa
“It’s a Claus-terfuck.”
Jason Isbell was doing some mid-concert banter between songs and describing on stage what both he and I had seen outside earlier—and why we both were feeling happy to be indoors now. I laughed at the term he’d spontaneously coined there in the moment while simultaneously chastising myself for not having thought of it first. My pun skills were slipping—that particular turn of phrase hadn’t occurred to me a couple hours earlier, but I definitely had been feeling more than a little Claus-trophobic as I wandered the Cincinnati streets in search of some pre-show dinner when what to my wondering eyes should appear but twelve thousand drunk Santas, all fucked up on beer.
They were everywhere. And not in that magical way that the One True Kringle is able to be everywhere at once on Christmas Eve—more in a way that is typically described using words like “metastasized” or “contagion” and is dealt with by setting up a Chernobyl-style exclusion zone and calling in an air strike. Downtown had seemed oddly deserted and quiet when I exited the parking garage near the concert venue, but as I turned a corner near the ballpark entertainment district of chain restaurants, I found the streets running red with scarlet fur, as though I was witnessing the realtime genocide of whatever Muppet race Elmo is supposed to be. The vast majority appeared to be college age—there were a few more fatherly Father Christmases sprinkled throughout the crowd, but for the most part it looked and sounded like a frat party at Santa’s workshop. It was barely five o’clock, but they all seemed to have had more than their share of nog already—most shouting several times louder than necessary to be heard and belting out “Wooooo!” for no discernable reason. No one seemed to be using Santa’s famous catchphrase, but more than enough of them had replaced it with a hearty “Bro! Bro! Bro!” as they competed for attention and, ostensibly, for Most Vapid Conversation trophies. They were mostly all Clauses—a few dressed as Comet; bellies shook when they quaffed, like a bowl full of vomit.
Re-routing, I crossed the street a block earlier than planned, hoping to minimize the number of stumbling elves, bellowing snowmen, and blitzed Blitzens in my path. Some had gotten creative with their costumes, but most had opted for full-on Santacon cosplay—the men pairing sneakers with their Santa suits of varying quality and authenticity; the women donning either onesie pajama outfits or the other end of the spectrum—“Sexy Santa” suits with short red velvet skirts that left them all shivering in the December cold like a group of Sexy Meth Addicts going through detox. I assumed that this gathering of cloned Clauses would be confined to the cheesy entertainment strip, so I hurried for the streetcar station to catch a ride out of there and find dinner in another part of downtown hopefully sleeping in heavenly peace.
My assumption wasn’t worth a lump of coal, as it turned out. Dozens more Santas were gathered at the station, arguing about what part of town to descend upon next and arise such a clatter, and offering such screamed holiday tidings as “McKayla! Give me a cigarette, bitch!” or “Dude! Wait for Frosty – he’s pissing in the alley!” When the streetcar pulled into the station, I could see it was crammed full of Kringles. McKayla and Frosty didn’t wait for other riders to disembark before pushing their way onto the streetcar with a holly jolly “Mmmooove-uh! and staking their claim to the handicapped seating, since the frail, elderly woman they’d nearly knocked over on the way in probably didn’t need to sit.
At each stop, we traded a few Santas for a few more Santas, and were treated to loud intellectual conversations about the guys from their Econ 101 class they were sleeping with, which Santa could do more chin-ups on the streetcar handrails (“PROVE it, Chad!”), or how a particular Santa was bummed because she wanted to wear her new leggings tonight but they didn’t go with the red fur skirt. We were all better people for the discourse. I felt bad for the streetcar conductor, who had to repeatedly remind Santas that COVID-19 face coverings were required, and educate these students of higher learning on how their noses actually were part of their respiratory systems. When my stop came up, I was horrified to find that this part of town not only wasn’t any better off than the entertainment district—it was a fa-la-la-la-lot worse. Every bar and restaurant in Over the Rhine was bursting at the seams with Santas, red suits pressed up against the windows, spilling out of doorways, and arranged along barstools like Melania’s murder forest Christmas decor. The streets and sidewalks looked like a monochromatic Mardi Gras, while car traffic came to a standstill to avoid inebriated St. Nics darting across the street or walking in the winter wanderland of downtown’s turn lanes. The shouting and “Wooo”-ing had reached a volume that made me feel sorry for the poor, misunderstood Grinch on Mt. Crumpet, and visions of migraine pills danced in my head. In every sense of the phrase, I was seeing red.
I can’t begin to hazard a guess at the number of Cincinnati Santas out that night, but it was easily in the multiple thousands, and had they all managed to form straight lines and stand at attention instead of drunkenly ricocheting through the city, the Santa army would’ve vastly outnumbered the military forces of any number of European nations. I left the war zone as quickly as I could and managed to find one restaurant three blocks away that was Claus-free. The staff informed me they were closing early to avoid the chaos, but they were happy to fit me in if I could order in the next ten minutes before the kitchen closed. I picked the first thing I saw on the menu and basked in all that was calm and bright, finding the screeching toddler at the next table a welcome respite from the red storm outside. Scream away, Gavin—as long as you’re not sucking down White Claws and telling me which nightclubs you think are “lit,” I do not mind.
I tried to convince myself not to be such a Scrooge. If nothing else, it was impressive that the city had managed to attract that many Santas to come celebrate the season and patronize local businesses that night. Obviously, the whole thing was several people’s idea of fun. To me, it felt like the North Polar opposite. Presumably, it felt that way to Jason Isbell, too. As he stopped between songs to say hello to Cincinnati and thank the city for coming out to see him, he jokingly warned the audience, “I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but there are a LOT of Santas outside. Runnin’ around, causin’ all kinds of craziness. It’s… It’s a Claus-terfuck, is what it is. And they are not giving out presents, I can tell you that much. They’re taking things from you instead… They’re taking things from all of us.”
After dinner I girded my loins for the walk back into the holiday fray and the streetcar ride back toward the concert venue. A young woman dressed as a chestnut half-apologized for her drunk nutcracker boyfriend swerving in front of me like I didn’t exist, and a guy in a Will Ferrell “Elf” suit managed a “Sorry, dude” when he realized he had just shouted “MADISON! Let’s GO! Move your ass!” to a Sexy Dreidel while standing three inches from my ear. The streetcar was still packed, and the conductor announced that her car was going out of service at the stop furthest away from my destination, so we would all have to get off there and wait for the next car. Fortunately, that stop was directly in front of a brewery, so the other riders all took their Santananigans inside and left me alone in the quiet of the station, with fourteen minutes until the next streetcar’s arrival.
I enjoyed the silent night for three of those minutes, and then bristled when I saw a group of Santas making their way toward the station. Sitting there alone in the dark, I would’ve been more comforted if it had been a street gang approaching me. They were older—possibly in their early fifties—but no quieter than the collegiate Santas making up the bulk of the Claus-terfuck. The women approached me first, reeking of Chardonnay breath and bad perfume, and gave the standard middle-age, suburban, white woman warning and advance apology for the behavior they claimed I was about to endure, because they perceived themselves as much wilder and crazier than they actually were. I knew without a doubt that at least one of them was going to tell me “We’re trouble!” before they inevitably did. Between the perfume and the wine breath and the continued pandemic, I kept inching away from them as they got centimeters from my face to talk to me. One explained (three times, actually—drunk enough to forget what she’d just told me seconds ago) that they were from all over the country, their common denominator being that they all have houseboats on Lake Cumberland and are neighbors there during vacation season, but not the rest of the year. Every December they meet up in Cincinnati to dress like Santa and “get wild” on the town together.
I could feel my eyes rolling back in my head at the predictability and lack of originality of these people who clearly thought they were unique and crazy party animals. In truth, though, they were not crazy or wild or “trouble” at all. It occurred to me that they’d been some of the first Santas that evening to be respectful and friendly to me, and they were going out of their way to ask me questions and get to know me while we waited for the streetcar. One of the husbands wore a ridiculous shirt designed to look like he was shirtless with pierced nipples and Christmas-themed tattoos, along with a red scarf and Santa hat. He had an oddly calming presence and made small talk with me while we waited, simultaneously running unnecessary interference between me and the women he thought were likely annoying me. We joked about the chaos caused by all the Santas throughout downtown that night, and I warned him about it being particularly bad down near the entertainment district. “That’s where we’re headed!” one of the wives excitedly announced.
The streetcar arrived a few minutes later and we boarded. I jumped on first and chose a single seat by myself for some quasi-solitude. As the group of suburban Santas got on behind me, each of them wished me Happy Holidays. The guy in the shirtless shirt was the last one on. “It was really nice talking to you, man,” he said as he passed by my seat and made his way to his lake friends. “Thanks for being so patient with us. I would’ve been really annoyed if I were you, but you just let us have our fun. I appreciate it.”
I didn’t tell Isbell that some of them were handing out presents after all.
***
6:07 a.m. EST
Christmas Eve. Dayton to Duluth. 838 miles with Mom and Dad in a rented Hyundai Santa Fe. If this is how it ends, tell my story.
6:34 a.m. EST
Dad nearly missed our first exit (in our home town). Mom has given a dissertation on where we can find all the packs of Kleenex she's strategically placed around the car. She appears to have brought more pillows and blankets than I have in my entire house. It’s like a Bed, Bath & Byundai in here. We are 27 minutes into the drive so far, so I can only assume we'll be making our first restroom break soon, which Dad will apologize for by saying “The coffee just goes right through me."
6:48 EST
Indiana border. I have been entrusted with the awesome responsibilities of a spiral-bound atlas (which we don’t need), printed MapQuest directions marked “home to hotel” (which I won’t use), navigating us through Indianapolis, and a polka dot change purse with funds “for tolls and whatever else.” Stand in awe of my power.
6:54 EST
Already regretting the fact that I put all my Christmas gifts in trash bags for easy transport. The bags have "odor shield" and are apparently scented. We are all high. This is what it feels like to huff a Glade Plug-in.
7:18 EST
Dad: "I'm gonna hit this next rest stop. The coffee is going right through me."
7:34 EST
Fun fact: this state has more Bobby Knight museums than people.
7:42 EST
Judging from the list of snack items Mom just announced that she has stashed in the back seat,
1) Hyundais now come with both all-wheel drive and a pantry,
2) when we slide off the road in a snow storm later it will be weeks before we have to eat each other, and
3) the candy bars and mints alone are almost certainly enough weight to be affecting our gas mileage.
7:59 EST
I-70 and I-74, despite both going through Indianapolis, do not connect to each other. Because, one assumes, there is no god. This always results in a fun 5–10-mile drive down 38th Street, past some of Indy's finest industrial parks and carnecerias, the latter of which we are unfortunately not stopping at.
8:07 EST
Highway signs indicating Brownsburg in one direction and Whitestown in the other. Suddenly making sense how Mike Pence got to be governor.
8:10 EST
Rest stop #2. Coffee and its speed through someone's tract may have been mentioned again.
8:22 EST
Sun’s finally up. Though Indiana was prettier when it wasn’t.
7:40 CST (I think. Indiana time zones are weird.)
This is why Bing Crosby went to Vermont instead of Indiana. No one dreams of a gray and tan Christmas.
7:52 CST
“That faint rattling noise” we’ve been hearing since we got on I-74 has been identified as Mom snoring.
8:01 CST
Illinois. Land of Lincoln. Thirty-four score and seven miles to go.
8:17 CST
Burma-shave-style signs advocating gun ownership:
"Spread the news…
Like Paul Revere…
Guns save lives…
Thousands per year"
and this brilliant gem:
"My gun is blue…
I am safe…
How about you?"
8:28 CST
Champaign. Not the good kind.
8:46 CST
"Trucker's welcome"
I'm hoping that is just an unnecessary apostrophe, because if it's not, I do not want to know what that's a euphemism for.
8:57 CST
A third rest stop was required even though we're stopping for gas in three miles. Mom’s using the restroom for the first time, mostly so Dad will stop asking her if she needs to.
9:04 CST
Dad’s three minutes of pumping gas in 35-degree weather has rendered him so cold that we are now riding in a hot yoga studio on wheels. Bulletin board flyer in the gas station said “Pinball machines wanted.” No word on if that’s dead or alive. Think it's my turn to drive, though. More later.
11:25 CST
Wisconsin.
State bird: the cheese curd.
State flower: Leinenkugel Summer Shandy
12:10 CST
Janesville, Wisconsin - Hello! (<—Larry King voice)
More or less the halfway point. None of us had ever eaten at a Culver's and didn't know what they serve there. Angioplasty. They serve angioplasty there. Butter burger, frozen custard, and fried Wisconsin cheese curds, and we're back on the road.
12:30 CST
Madison. We could hit all the Big Ten schools on this trip if there weren't 40 of them now.
12:33 CST
Apparently we are not stopping at the Cheese Mousehouse, despite its 20-foot-tall letters advertising "CHEESE. GIFTS. LIQUOR."
12:47 CST
...or the Cheese Chalet
12:48 CST
...or the Cheese and Fireworks Barn
12:56 CST
Someone selling machinery on the side of the highway with a sign that reads "FOR SALL"
1:16 CST
If the Wisconsin Dells are any indication, there's a good chance the "farmer" in the dell was actually the night manager at an indoor waterpark.
1:27 CST
Another rest stop. I did not ask if the cheese curds went right through anyone.
1:40 CST
Snow the rest of the way. I'm just going to plan on Kathy Bates setting my leg.
1:48 CST
Also not stopping at the Space and Bicycle Museum, despite my curiosity.
2:26 CST
Chippewa Falls, and so does the snow. Dad doesn’t seem to have noticed, as he is still doing 85 MPH.
2:35 CST
The Endurance has been crushed by pack ice, but Shackleton is convinced we can make Elephant Island if we use the life boats. Some of the men have resorted to talk of mutiny. Mt. Erebus is a distant dream now. May god have mercy on our souls.
3:07 CST
10 hours in. 10 feet of visibility. 10 times the speed that would be safe in these conditions.
3:48 CST
Mom has done so much sudoku that Alan Turing has recruited her to help crack the Enigma Code. It’s like watching someone preparing their tax return while simultaneously solving a cold case file of a series of murders. Dad is not relinquishing control of the driver's seat. I have been named Warden of the North, but am considering going beyond the wall to fight with The Free Folk. Winter is coming.
4:09 CST
A tired observation: If you can temporarily break yourself from the familiarity of hearing them a million times growing up that gives them a false sense of normalcy and listen to them like you’re hearing them for the first time, Christmas songs are the weirdest.
4:17 CST
It's starting to get dark here on Hoth. Not a single one of Mom's 17 Kleenex packs has been opened, but Dad has polished off half a cord of Snickers since lunch. There's been a strange metallic burning smell since Eau Claire, and the scent from the odor shield trash bags, while enough to give me a headache, cannot overpower that particular olfactory delight. The next sizeable town is named Spooner, but I'm too tired to make a joke about it.
4:48 CST
Late this morning, Mom asked if the car's built-in clock was still on home time or if it changed when we changed time zones. We had a conversation then about how, unlike her phone, the car clock isn't connected to internet or satellite or cell tower, so it only changes if we change it manually. Just now she asked, "Is the car clock still on home time or has it changed by now?" I'm going to tell her that the evil sprite who lives inside the dashboard changed it to Greenwich Mean Time to screw with us.
5:00 CST
Not to leave Dad out of the technical skills posts...
After the sixth time this hour of me asking, "Are you sure your lights are on?" Dad has determined that his lights were, in fact, not on.
5:07 CST
12 hours in. This has to be the most thorough test drive of a Hyundai Santa Fe on record.
5:46 CST
Mom keeps referring to Duluth Trading Company's "Buck Naked" underwear as "Big Ass Underwear."
5:53 CST
Wisconsin behind us. Minnesota ahead. Almost there, and only one of us succumbed to dysentery along the way. This is home now. We settle here on the shores of Gitchegumee.
6:06 CST
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the day,
I spent eight hundred miles stuck inside a Hyundai
For thirteen damn hours we drove to Duluth
In just as much space as your average phone booth
The dog had been nestled next to the back window
Not yet quite aware of what she’d gotten into
And Mama, in her parka, was Sudoku scoring
Safe bet soon both she and the dog would be snoring
When, one hour in, there arose urgent matters:
The coffee had gone right through Dad’s pea-sized bladder
Away to a rest stop to take care of the task
Since it’s Indiana, no one’s in a mask
Some Burma-shave signs touting guns lined a fence
‘bout what I’d expect from the land of Mike Pence
When what to my wondering eyes should deploy,
But the bust of Abe Lincoln – we’d reached Illinois
The sign said Champaign was the next thing we we’d find
I knew in a moment ‘twas not the good kind
Less rapid than turtles, the cars in our lane
And Dad grumbled and shouted and called them some names
On Bloomington! Normal! Rockford and Peoria!
Just miles of gray nothingness stretched out before ya’.
There was no conversation; the view still unmodified
I commandeered the stereo and fired up Spotify
More windmills out here than there’s deer ticks on Prancer
Let’s hope Trump is wrong that their noises cause cancer
Mom asked where we were, and I threw my response in:
“See the cheese curds and fireworks? We’ve entered Wisconsin”
Forty miles until Madison, where we would take five
Hoping that, after lunch, Dad might let me drive
Ordering at a drive-thru, not Dad’s usual persona,
But we ate in the parked car to side step the ‘rona
Two hours later, and not easy steering
Roads slipperier than Bill Barr in a hearing
Stopped with the dog for her afternoon pees
Thought she’d freeze to the ground, since it’s just five degrees
Now Dad’s doing 80 in all of this blizzardry
Taking curves like he’s trying to reenact Misery
We’ll have food to survive on, though, if we should crash
Mom’s stacked Andes mints by the gross in the dash
We’re long past twelve hours of making this slog,
Two septuagenarians, me, and a dog
It hasn’t been bad, though, albeit not roomy
And we’re just a few miles now from old Gitchegumee
We’re thankful we got here after most of the snow did
And, as far as we know, none of us caught covid
Dad’s done quite well on the icy Autobahn
Considering his headlights may not have been on
We’re getting close now – it’s been a long haul
But we may arrive before St. Nick after all
Duluth is in sight, and we couldn’t feel cheerier -
The skyline is nice, but the lake is Superior
And, at last, we’ve arrived. Maybe next year, a flight?
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night
***
It’s probably not what you want to hear but, honestly, most of the staff is sick of Christmas by the time Labor Day rolls around. We tell ourselves and each other that “It’s for the children” in order to keep focused and motivated by that higher purpose, but we’ve said it so much that it has become a joke—a mantra lobbed at each other with humor whenever the holiday planning has gotten especially frustrating, or a sentence growled through gritted teeth while commiserating about tasks we can’t muster enough Christmas spirit to feel like doing. “Iiitttt’ss forrr the cchhhiiillldren.”
For the past 49 years, the unofficial official kickoff to the holiday season in our city has taken place on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I’ve been a part of planning the last 13 of those, as an employee of the organization that makes it happen. Planning and preparation typically begin in the spring, and continue in some form throughout the year, with efforts really ramping up in the late summer and fall—we have to start so early partially because there is an incredible amount of work and number of moving parts that go into the event, but mostly because the name of the event is so long that we lose 90 seconds of planning time whenever we say or type it. By the time you’ve said “The [insert sponsor name here] Dayton Holiday Festival, featuring The Grande Illumination presented by [insert other sponsor name here] and the Dayton Children’s Parade Spectacular in Lights presented by [insert yet another sponsor name here]” three times, it’s already lunchtime and your entire morning is shot.
And those are just the overarching event titles. Each of the individual pieces and activities that make up the event has its own separate sponsor, as well, which makes our press releases read like the TV Guide listings for college football bowl games. Not that I’m not excited to watch this year’s TaxSlayer.com My Pillow Cool Ranch Doritos Peach Bowl, presented by Dockers, live from Quad Cities Health Partners Field at Jell-O Pudding Pops Stadium.
To me, “The Grande Illumination” has always sounded much more like the name of a medieval renaissance period when knowledge and art became more widely available to the masses than it does the flipping of a fake light switch to turn on some Christmas tree lights, but that’s what we call it, and people seem to enjoy it. Tens of thousands of people, actually, as they pack themselves onto the town square to witness the tree lighting regardless of cold, rain or COVID variant. I’ve also never really understood what is so appealing about that part of the event. Granted, I’ve never actually seen the tree light myself, since my duties that evening have me stationed around the corner and out of view, but I have seen the tree unlit, and I have seen the tree lit, and I can imagine what it looks like the moment it goes from one of those physical states to the other. If it were the late 1800s and we were at Tom Edison’s for Christmas, maybe I’d be losing my shit over a few strands of Merry Midget lights, but by now we’re all vaguely familiar with electricity, no?
Maybe they’ve all seen the Rockefeller Center tree lighting and this lets everyone pretend we’re New York for a moment. Or maybe it gives them something to do before the parade starts—oh, did you forget I mentioned a parade? There’s a parade. Oh, you bet your jolly ass there’s a parade. We’ll get to that in a minute.
If nothing else, lighting the tree is a fitting symbol of the start of the holiday season. It’s also hopefully a symbol of the end of the angry phone calls and emails we get each year in the weeks preceding the festival—liberal Lorax types on one side, angry that we killed a living tree and propped its lifeless carcass up in the middle of a turned-off fountain, and conservatives on the other, pissed that we dared to use the word “holiday” instead of “Christmas,” offering further, irrefutable proof of the ongoing, bloody war against their beliefs and traditions.
In the four hours leading up to the grande lights-were-off, now-they’re-on moment, we offer a host of other family-friendly holiday activities to get you into the spirit of the season. You and your adorable spawn are invited to enjoy any and all of the following:
Live reindeer! We always call them that, lest you’d think we’d welcome you to take Christmas-card-ready photos with a taxidermied or freshly “harvested” member of Santa’s convoy. It’s truly a wonder that we’ve yet to attract a PETA protest with this activity. The reindeer wranglers claim they’re treated very humanely, but judging by the looks on Donner and Comet’s faces, it seems they’d rather be touring a venison packing plant than standing in a 3’x3’ pen of hay and their own filth, letting children pet them with their sticky fingers while posing for selfies in front of a plywood sleigh. Buck up, bucks! It’s for the children.
Gingerbread houses! Do you love confectionery real estate? Sure, who doesn’t?! Come see, depending on our success begging people to make them, anywhere from three to 12 gingerbread houses on display inside a musty old courthouse! Most of the entries were received in the “amateur” and “kids” categories, so you know the craftsmanship is top-notch. Not all of them were made using kits from Wal-Mart, either – some people cut their own rectangles out of burnt cookies themselves. Be sure to note the artisan creativity in such themed designs as “house with white icing snow on the roof” and “house with white icing snow on the ground and the roof.” Don’t eat any of them, though—they may have been required to be made entirely of edible material, but keep in mind that hot glue is technically edible.
Games and crafts! We call this area the “Holiday Village” because it has slightly more appeal than “Unremodeled 1970s Office Tower Lobby.” Here you can make exciting handmade keepsakes by gluing three popsicle sticks together to form an isosceles triangle that looks like a Christmas tree if you squint at it just right and have cataracts. We also offer construction paper reindeer antlers you can wear, which always get advertised incorrectly as “reindeer ears,” which may or may not drive a certain member of our staff absolutely batshit. Children love the crafts zone, and so do the building’s janitors, who will later find every surface covered with almost as much glitter as snot. If crafts aren’t your thing, try your hand at some carnival games we haven’t updated since 1983. You can play a round of homemade Plinko if you promise not to tell CBS that we’re using the name without inquiring about the rights. Or, grab a bean bag and give it a toss at a game that we in the office affectionately call “Pooh Crotch.” Winnie the Pooh is holding his – ahem – “honey pot” between his legs, and for some sick reason, all you have to do to win is to throw that bag and hit him right in the ol’ Pooh Sticks. Oh, bother!
Dial-an-Elf! On the other side of the Holiday Village is a magical station where you can place a call to a real, live, North Pole elf and tell him or her (do elves have genders?) what you want for Christmas. Your elf will be sure to let Santa know, and will probably freak you out with a trick designed to make you believe in holiday magic—there are cameras pointed at you in a totally non-invasive way, so the elf can see what you’re wearing and comment on something specific about it, making you think elves and Santa can see you wherever you are in the world. It will prepare you for the reality that our government and Mark Zuckerberg can already do the same. Unfortunately, all this magic will be completely lost on you, since Dial-an-Elf uses red, rotary telephones that look like the ones Commissioner Gordon used to call Batman in the 1960s. You’re much too young to know that phones used to look like this, or maybe even to know what a telephone is at all, but we decided “Facetime-an-Elf” literally didn’t have the same ring to it.
Carnival rides! True, I have absolutely no idea what a rusty ferris wheel, a rickety tilt-a-whirl, and a Scrambler ride missing a handful of rivets have to do with the holidays, but come stand in line for hours to hop aboard a piece of machinery that folds up to fit in the back of the truck of the fly-by-night carnival operators who may or may not have insurance and definitely don’t have all their fingers or teeth. It may not be Christmassy, but it’s terrifying.
Vintage Window Displays! Speaking of terrifying, stop by the performing arts center to see a series of restored Christmas window displays that used to be part of the department store that was imploded to build the arts center. Each window depicts a charming winter scene, featuring animatronic elves with deformed faces that will haunt your dreams. While you’re there, you can visit with Santa himself. Pay no attention to the fact that this is the fifth time you’ve seen Santa throughout the festival grounds tonight, and that his facial hair, weight, quality of red suit, ethnicity, and relative sobriety have varied wildly each time you spotted him. Santa is a shape-shifter. It’s part of his magic.
The performing arts center is also the location of The Tike’s Shoppe. That word is typically spelled Tyke, but we wanted it to rhyme perfectly with the name of the department store that used to stand here. There’s also nothing remotely old-timey about the experience that would warrant the extra P and E added to Shop, but no one likes a six-year-old grammar snob, so suck it up, Braydon. Here, you’ll get an introduction to the world of commerce, as volunteers will lead you through a miniature store where you can buy Christmas presents for your parents. Mom will love the rubber pencil topper you picked out for her, and dammit if a plastic comb and a Pokémon sticker wasn’t exactly what Dad was wishing for. We used to require cash for these purchases, but now we take credit cards so you can start accumulating debt as early as possible.
A model train set! This once belonged to the nice, very rich old lady who started this festival almost 50 years ago. We set it up every year in her honor for you to come view. The trains just go around in an oval and none of the scenery matches up with our city, but you seemed to enjoy electricity when it lit an oversized conifer, so maybe you’ll like watching it in another application.
Horse-drawn wagon rides! No, these are not carriages, they’re wagons. Think hay ride with Christmas lights stapled to it. No, you cannot choose the wagon you like best—you get the one that comes around the corner when you’re next in line. No, the route is not particularly romantic or festive, unless you’re turned on by rounding two city blocks of parking garages and empty offices. No, you may not bring your stroller, dog, firearms, fireworks, bike, Rascal scooter, picnic dinner, or pet snake aboard the wagon. No, we cannot be responsible for any of those same items you stack on the sidewalk and leave unattended while you ride. Yes, you must procure a ticket for each member in your party before you get in line. You get them at the enormous, can’t-possibly-miss-it ticket booth that you walked by six times before asking where the ticket booth was. Tickets are only one dollar per person and that is only a “suggested donation,” so it’s not even mandatory that you pay, so please stop asking “Do children count?” or “Even if she’s just a baby?” about your nine-year-old. All of this information is posted on the literally eight huge signs that some very smart and handsome member of our staff spent the afternoon hanging for you to not read. The signs also note that ticket sales will end at 7:00 so everyone can ride before the tree lighting, so it is entirely unnecessary to throw a tantrum fit as a grown-ass adult when you’re told you’re too late at 7:38, yelling at the nice, smart, handsome man that he is single-handedly responsible for completely ruining all of Christmas for your children and you hope… he’s… happy. I assure you; he is.
Following the tree lighting is the pièce de resistors—the nighttime lighted children’s parade. Tens of thousands of Christmas lights adorn the trucks, horses, drill teams, marching bands, tiny Shriner cars, and other parade participants as they make their way through downtown streets lined with spectators. Each parade unit is unique, but the part people seem to enjoy most of all are the floats. Each one has a different theme, from Christmas classics like The Nutcracker and Santa’s workshop to some that seem like more of a stretch – a surfing-themed float, a western float with giant cacti, and a patriotic American flag float that we quickly repurposed as a salute to first responders the year our community was hit with a mass shooting, a KKK rally, and a literal dozen tornados. My favorite float of all is one that seems to have no particular theme, but has been decked out with a set of what were clearly supposed to be Sesame Street characters, but look like frightening off-brand versions of all the popular Muppets. Each one appears to be suffering from a terminal illness or melting before our eyes, and yet, somehow, the children can’t wait for a chance to catch a glimpse of Large Bird, Bart and Arnie, Snuffledownagus, and Oscar the Clinically Depressed. The float looks like it’s carrying the characters’ stunt doubles or members of Sesame Street’s B-team, but as the popular character Biscuit Demon likes to say, “B is for biscuit—that’s good enough for me.”
Each year when the festival is over, we store all the festive holiday props and signs and craft materials and lights and other décor in the basement of our office tower, smashed together in the corner of what looks like a bomb shelter and is marked with 50-year-old signage left over from the Mead corporation directing you to the “Micrographics” and “Reprographics” departments. It looks sad and unmagical stashed away in the basement, and more than once I’ve marveled at how it can be remotely possible that all that junk somehow comes together each year to create a winter wonderland. As much as we all make fun of it and get sick of it all after working on it for months, the hard work really does pay off and end up creating something incredible for our community. Yes, people like free stuff, but it’s unlikely they’d have kept coming for 49 years if our efforts didn’t provide a fun and festive kickoff to the holiday season.
We keep the floats in a place we call “The Float Barn,” which essentially is whichever empty warehouse someone lets us use for free until it becomes a development site and we have to relocate the floats to a new barn again. Each time we have to move them, we make quite a scene with a police cruiser escorting a line of holiday-themed flatbeds down the road in mid-July. A few years back, our float barn was a series of old structures that the Wright Brothers had used for the world’s first airplane factory, but now were creepy, abandoned buildings where it felt like just breathing would give you tetanus. At some point during the off-season, most of the floats were damaged, first by animals chewing through cables and decorations, and later by vandals stripping the floats for copper wire, generators, and anything else they thought might be of value. When the community found out the floats had been damaged, volunteers teamed together to help repair the floats. Families came to work on them together, a local artist adopted one float to reimagine it herself, and a team of roughneck guys from the local electricians’ union banded together and had a blast rewiring and rebuilding several of the floats. It turned out no one wanted to see a beloved local tradition go by the wayside. Something that I’m often tempted to look at as a collection of pretty ridiculous activities and weird, outdated props actually meant a lot to our community because of its traditions and its accessibility to everyone, regardless of means.
During one of the float repair days, I was walking by the electrical union guys and caught them deep in a serious conversation about which colors looked best next to the candy canes on one of the floats. “Wow!” I said as I passed by. “You guys are really getting into this!” The guys looked at me and then at each other. One of them sort of shuffled his feet and looked at the floor as he answered me. “Yeah, well, uh… y’know. It’s, uh… It’s not for us. It’s… It’s for the children.”
***
One of the trends in recent years on social media, where once-mildly-funny jokes and memes go to have all of the humor beaten out of them through relentless repetition and over-analysis, has been the annual yuletide debate over whether Die Hard qualifies as a Christmas movie. I have no official opinion on this issue—mostly because it’s an argument manufactured by people who need attention and think it makes them more interesting if they pretend to feel strongly one way or the other—but if we’re now adding action movies to our required holiday viewing, my recent reflections on this time of year have led me to develop my own, equally stupid theory:
Apocalypse Now is a Christmas movie.
When I was young, Christmas meant anticipation. The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve seemed to last forever, and I wanted to jump out of my skin from all the waiting. Time was slower then anyway, since six weeks as a percentage of a five-year-old’s lifespan is far longer than six weeks is now, so being patient while the holiday took a lifetime to get here felt impossible. I loved Christmas back then—and, maybe more importantly, I was excited for it. I was excited to help hang decorations, excited to watch Christmas TV specials (when they weren’t available on demand and only aired once per year, each one was an event), excited to hear Christmas carols, excited to see Christmas lights, and incredibly excited to get up on Christmas morning and find all the presents. My sister and I never slept well on Christmas Eve, and would wake up at four or five in the morning, gathering together in one of our bedrooms or on the landing at the top of the stairs, waiting for hours until our parents got up, ate breakfast, had coffee, read the paper, and finally told us we were allowed to come down. My dad was one of nine children in a family that grew up during the ‘40s and ‘50s when times were lean, but despite the money being stretched thin, his parents always managed to make Christmas special and provide an explosion of gifts under the tree. For that reason, it was always important to Dad to do the same for us, and we’d come downstairs to find dozens of boxes spilling out from the tree and into the living room, with still more gifts unwrapped and displayed on the sofa that were “from Santa.” It wasn’t that my parents had money or spent a lot on us—it was often more about quantity than quality, with them wrapping up things like blank VHS tapes or boxes of tissues or other small things that would increase the gift count and make the windfall look more impressive. It wasn’t Christmas until you’d watched Grandma unwrap a box of All-Bran. Opening gifts on Christmas morning took hours, and still does, since we don’t have the heart to tell Dad we’d probably prefer one big-ticket item or even cash, knowing that it would ruin Christmas for him if we took the gift explosion away. I was too young to know it then, but would start to recognize in the next few years that the anticipation was Christmas—that the day itself was fine, but the leadup and holiday season that preceded Christmas Day was what I really loved.
I don’t remember ever actually believing in Santa Claus. It’s likely that there was a brief period where I did, but I definitely had it figured out early on that he was really our parents (spoiler alert) and the gifts with tags that read “From Santa” in Mom’s handwriting were actually from them. If I did believe at some point, it certainly didn’t take much away from the Christmas magic for me to discover that particular truth. It’s a weird thing we do to kids anyway—we lie to their faces about this one thing, mostly for no other reason than to coerce and bribe them into behaving for a month, and then we expect them to trust us on everything else. “Listen, you two—how do I know everything else you’ve told me isn’t a lie? Are you even my real parents?”
By the time I reached my teenage years and could buy my own gifts for people, being Santa was my favorite part of Christmas. Sure, it was still fun to receive presents, but now I would shop for days, wandering the mall like some archeological treasure hunter in search of the perfect gift, and my Christmas anticipation was now all about the excitement of seeing people open what I’d carefully chosen for them. It was probably where my anxiety about Christmas started, since I put so much pressure on myself to find great gifts for each person, but once everything was found and wrapped, I couldn’t wait for them to be opened.
I miss all of that. I miss the anticipation and the holiday season and Christmas taking forever to get here. Mostly, I miss the excitement and the magical feeling it brought. Ever since those child and teenage years, Christmas hasn’t felt the same to me. Back then, the worst part about it all was that you might feel some post-Christmas blues that were inevitable after you’d spent a month and a half being excited for something that was now over. These days, when Christmas is over, I don’t feel blue because all the fun and magic is done; I feel empty because it never felt fun and magical at all. So often, it just doesn’t feel like Christmas, and it never lives up to what I want it to be. Most years, I’m ready for it to be over. Glad it’s done. Ready to put it all behind me. I’m fortunate in that I’ve never had anything tragic happen to me or my family during the holidays. But when I think about memories of specific Christmases past, nothing especially fun or heartwarming stands out. Instead, I tend to remember the years that were difficult or unpleasant in some way.
My grandmother had been part of Christmas morning for as long as I could remember, but by the time she was in her 90s, her mental health was declining and she’d started showing signs of dementia. The first year she wasn’t with us on Christmas morning, we decided that after opening presents we’d visit her in the assisted living facility she’d recently moved to against her wishes. We brought gifts for her—the usual All-Bran and Kleenexes, but also some more fun presents—and hoped we’d also bring a little Christmas cheer into her world. It turned out she had no idea it was Christmas and was not touched that we’d come to visit. Instead, she sat in her chair and sobbed, repeatedly crying out, “Please, God, WHY CAN’T I DIE?!” At one point, she threatened to throw herself out of the window to what she hoped would be her death but would more likely just be a bruise, given that she lived on the first floor. It was a depressing way to spend the holiday, and I felt awful for her. We tried to cheer her up as best we could, but nothing was working, so at some point we simply gathered our belongings, left her gifts on the table, said “Well… Merry Christmas,” and left.
Another year, six months after our wedding, my partner and I tried to please everyone but ended up pleasing no one. We left our new house and drove 45 minutes north to attend the Christmas Eve midnight church service with her parents, drove 45 minutes home, slept from 2:00 a.m. until 5:00 a.m., got up early so we could have our first married Christmas in our home together before our other obligations, drove 45 minutes north again to spend the morning opening presents with my family who felt we were leaving much too early when we drove 90 minutes east to her extended family’s Christmas where they felt we were arriving much too late, drove 90 minutes west to open presents with her nuclear family, and drove 45 minutes south to go home and collapse. Literally everyone was mad at us, and we hadn’t enjoyed any of it, despite our efforts.
Two years later, we were just two months removed from the first time the word “divorce” had been uttered in our home, and I was spending Christmas at my parents’ house without her. It wouldn’t be all that long before divorce felt like the right thing to both of us and we both felt okay again, but at the time it was still new and raw and miserably heartbreaking. I managed to hold it together all day through our gift opening and lunch, but lost it as I was packing up to head home. I remember feeling like there was nowhere for me to be that felt good and safe and like I was home. I knew I didn’t have it in me to spend any more time with my family, but the knowledge that I was about to spend the rest of Christmas alone in our house was more than I could bear.
Many years after that, alone was all I wanted to be. I’d had enough of the holiday season and my family and people in general, and was hating Christmas. Driving home in a snowstorm, I stopped by my favorite bar and noticed it was open, so I went in. There was no one in the entire place besides the one bartender who’d drawn the short straw to work on Christmas and me, and we sat, mostly in silence, watching E.T. on the bar’s television and drinking whiskey. I remember thinking it was far and away the best part of my Christmas that year.
These days, we typically spend Christmas at my sister’s house in Duluth, Minnesota. It’s an 800+ mile drive that typically takes us 13 hours or so, but can take much longer if the roads are bad due to snow. Riding that distance with my parents can be a slog, especially given that there usually is very little conversation and they rarely turn on any music. Many years, no one says anything at all on the drive home, since we’ve used up everything we had to say to each other by that point. There are few activities, especially with two feet of snow on the ground, that my parents can participate in at their age and physical state, so we usually spend three days sitting in my sister’s small living room, staring at each other and not knowing what to do with ourselves. No one else in my family drinks, and while I’m fine with alcohol not being part of Christmas, I’m sometimes jealous of other families whose family Christmases look like fun parties and celebrations instead of time spent yawning and hoping the dog will do something interesting so you have something to talk about.
This year, Dad was recovering from a knee replacement, so we didn’t make our usual trek to Duluth. My sister came home instead, and it was nice to not have to drive 800 miles, but that trip has become our tradition, so it was strange not to do it this year. It was 60 degrees in Ohio on Christmas Day, and I had a sinus infection the whole time, so while it was really good to have my sister home and spend some time with her, it never felt like Christmas at all. I had gotten a beautiful nine-foot Douglas Fir and decorated it in my living room since my sister would be staying at my place this year. It failed to take any of the water I gave it, and was long dead and drooping by the time she arrived, as if it was determined to set the tone for the holiday.
As an adult, the holiday season feels opposite the way it felt as a kid. Where it seemed to take forever to get here, now Christmas seems to sneak up on me well before I’m ready, and there’s never enough time for the shopping and cooking and cleaning and other preparations that need to be made. Christmas Day is no longer the incredible morning when I’d rush downstairs to see the gifts, or wait with excitement for others to open the presents I’d gotten them—it now feels awkward and forced and filled with disappointment that I couldn’t think of better gifts to give this year, despite the knowledge that it doesn’t matter much anyway, since no one remembers who gave them what ten minutes after it’s over. And the sadness that used to follow because all the fun was finally over for another year—that has now been replaced with the hollowness of the whole thing being anticlimactic, the frustration that all the work I put into it didn’t result in something magical, and the relief that it’s done and we can move on with our lives.
All that said, unpleasant Christmas memories and times I’d rather have been alone aren’t responsible for the way I feel about the holidays now. It’s not about remembering the bad times as much as it is missing the good. I miss the way it used to feel when I was young, and it’s disheartening to know that’s a feeling I’ll never get back. The worst of those past Christmases didn’t turn me against the holidays, but they did contribute to shattering the illusion and bringing the truth into focus:
The real issue isn’t that Santa is a lie. It’s that Christmas is.
The most difficult part of growing up is the loss of innocence. As we get older, we learn more about how things work and the way things really are. We see the man behind the curtain pretending to be Oz, or peek at the pro wrestlers practicing fake body slams, or catch a glimpse of the proverbial sausage being made, and the wool starts to fall from our eyes. Before long, we begin to realize that Santa wasn’t the only lie we were told. Before long, we begin to realize how many lies we’ve even been telling ourselves. And it hurts. It hurts to know you’ve been manipulated, but more than that it hurts to know you’ll never be able to feel the way you used to feel about a thing you used to love. It starts to feel like nothing is real as you build up a longer and increasingly consequential list of the things you cared so much about that you now know never really existed in the first place. Fat-free brownies. Your favorite sports team. American democracy.
Similar to what the younger generation now calls being “woke,” being an adult—especially one with critical thinking skills and a willingness to value truth over comfort—comes with no shortage of eye-opening realities and the disquieting ruination of so many things you held dear. The reality of Christmas, while arguably not as important as, say, systemic racism, can be difficult to swallow. For me, that reality has included the realization that Christmas is no different than any other day, and expecting it to be something magical just leads to disappointment. That everything about it has become commercialized and commodified and used to convince people that buying a luxury automobile without consulting your partner is totally normal if the bow is large enough. That the prettiest Christmas carols are the religious ones (hard to enjoy because I’m not religious), and the secular carols are all ridiculous and mindless and annoying. That the holiday is not a fun party in my family, but an awkward day of forced conversation and tense reminders of the ways in which we are not particularly close. That no, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, and you’ll likely need therapy to figure out why your parents swore there was. That for every person taking a beautifully staged Instagram photo of their perfect, matching pajamas family holiday, there is someone sobbing alone and asking why they can’t just die who will not be experiencing some cinematic George Bailey change of heart with Zuzu and her petals. That I can cook and clean and shop and put up a tree and try like hell to think of the perfect gift for everyone on my list, but it will never be enough to bring back the excitement and anticipation I used to feel because Christmas, like so many things we’ve been tricked into believing, is not reality.
In my high school English class on British literature, we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and then, somewhat surprisingly given its content, watched the film it had inspired: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. By way of very brief and watered-down explanation, the book/movie follows a man named Marlow/Willard on a boat journey through the jungle of Africa/Vietnam to find a man named Kurtz/Kurtz, who has seen enough unvarnished reality in the way the world works that it has changed him irreparably, arguably to the point of insanity.
A lot of the things I studied in high school have long been forgotten, but Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now and their shared themes have always stuck with me. One of the themes that stood out the most was the concept of surface reality versus truth, or illusion versus reality. 1899 and 1979 were both well before anyone was talking about “wokeness,” but the idea was mostly the same—there is the illusion or surface reality we’ve all been told and sold and participated in the perpetuation of, and then there is the truth or actual reality of what is really going on when we strip off the veneer and see what’s underneath all the decoration and dressing and camouflage. This illusion is not always purposeful or nefarious or meant to keep others from knowing the truth—sometimes it is something we collectively create without realizing we’re doing it, born out of a need to feel comfortable or happy or patriotic… or excited about something good and fun and magical.
I tend to believe that getting to the truth of things is a good thing—that we should strive to strip away the surface reality to get to the actual reality of most things in life, regardless of the sense of sadness or loss or discomfort that may come with that process—that, ultimately, the honesty and reality of it all is better than being lied to and lying to ourselves or others. It may, for example, be more comforting to believe that America hasn’t been built on racist structures that are embedded in all of our present-day institutions and systems, but admitting to ourselves that it has and is ultimately sets us all free and allows us to reckon with “the horror.”
Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness certainly seem to advocate for truth over illusion, too, but they also offer a somewhat more nuanced take on that theme. Kurtz may have had his eyes opened on his decent through the jungle chaos, and he may have discovered the ugly truths about imperialism and interventionalism, civilization and progress, and humanity’s nature in general. But his awakening to these truths and his discarding of all the window dressing and pretense of civilization ultimately drove him mad, turning him into a hollow man, ashamed of what he’d become. The book and movie, largely through the character of Marlow/Willard, if I’m remembering correctly, seemed to suggest that it is important to seek the truth, but perhaps equally important to know when to put the veil of surface reality and illusion back on, at least temporarily. That truth is good and important and should be the goal, but sometimes the lies we tell ourselves have a place and a purpose—even if that purpose is just to avoid insanity or to be able to enjoy life. Willard warned to “Never get out of the boat… unless you’re going all the way.” The world is a very difficult place, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be blind to that fact. But we also still have to get through it, which we can maybe do best by allowing ourselves a little magic. And what is magic, after all, if not illusion?
I’ll confess that drawing comparisons between an insane, murderous, special forces Army colonel and my blasé and maudlin takes on the holidays is a bit far-fetched, even for me. I’ll even admit that declaring Apocalypse Now to be a Christmas movie was mostly a joke, the potential delicious absurdity of Robert Duvall as a shirtless Santa strutting across the beach and bellowing “I love the smell of sugarplums in the morning” notwithstanding. But I do think there may be something to the surface reality theme that applies. My upriver journey through the jungle of adulthood has laid bare some stark facts about the holidays, and it’s true that I’m a changed man—I’ll never get the childhood magic of the excitement and anticipation back, now that I’ve seen through the illusion. And, to a large extent, I’d rather know the truth than be a fool still believing that there’s any real magic to the season or that it’s all joy and jingle bells. But, there’s no reason to let it make me a hollow man. No need to seclude myself in my jungle hut, losing my humanity and placing gingerbread men’s heads on pikes outside as a warning to would-be wassailers. Once you go full Kurtz, there’s no going back.
In the end, Christmas, like most things in life, is what you make of it. The balance is in keeping the things that serve you and letting go of those that don’t. It’s in holding on to enough of the traditions and expectations to prod yourself into making the effort it takes to make it special, while recognizing that much of it is made up and it’s okay to discard some of the expectations and obligations so you can actually enjoy yourself without feeling like things have to go a certain way to be a considered a success. The more we try to live up to the memory of what Christmas felt like as a kid, the more we’re chasing after the impossible and setting ourselves up for disappointment and disillusionment. The more we can adapt as we get older, make peace with the knowledge that most of the holiday is bullshit, and create new traditions that feed us and make us happy, the more likely we are to enjoy it. And a lot of that requires temporarily putting the blinders of surface reality back on for a while and pretending that magic exists. If I can still enjoy watching a football game knowing everything I know about the NFL and NCAA, I can probably find a way to make Christmas feel quasi-merry, too.
Truth be told, there are things I still love about Christmas. I’ve come to enjoy the 800-mile drive to Duluth, and actually missed it this year. Northern Minnesota is usually cold and snowy in December, my sister’s house feels like a cozy Northwoods bungalow, and the journey to get there makes it feel like we’re actually doing something for Christmas. It’s become our new tradition, and there’s something I love about it. I still try to find the perfect gift and, while I don’t usually succeed, I still feel a little excited for people to open what I got them, and try to save the best ones for them to open last. I haven’t watched as many Christmas specials and movies lately, but a few years back I started making a point of watching White Christmas every year, usually while wrapping presents. I still love Christmas lights and decorations, as long as they’re not those awful inflatable ones, and I can stomach the occasional Christmas carol, in small doses. Mostly, I love that the holidays give us an excuse to get together, to see family and friends we may not see often, to have a reason to celebrate, to reminisce about memories good and bad, to wish each other well, and to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and that anywhere can feel like home if we allow it to.
It may be a lie, but it keeps us sane. And once you’ve gotten out of the boat, that’s all you’ve got.