My grandfather played Santa Claus for more than twenty years, purely, I liked to believe, out of the goodness of his heart. His annual ritual was completely a volunteer effort and a solo undertaking.
This was in a small town in the Midwest, and every November my grandfather would build a tiny candy-striped cottage in his front yard. In the evenings in December he’d sit out there after dinner waiting for the neighborhood children to stop by.
My grandmother played a plump and largely unenthusiastic elf for the first several years of her husband’s long run as Santa Claus, but she eventually expressed the opinion that the experience was depressing and ruined a perfectly good holiday. My grandfather soldiered gamely on without her. He was a rail-thin Kentucky native with a pronounced twang and eccentric habits (including a crackpot streak that compelled him to write regular, not entirely coherent letters to the local paper) that had long made him an arms-length stranger to most of the people in town.
He was working from a pretty serious handicap, then, right from the beginning, but in the early years of this annual undertaking neighborhood families seemed to get a kick out of the whole thing. There wasn’t another Santa in town in those days, so my grandfather actually managed to become something of a holiday tradition for a number of years.
Then the neighborhood got older, and those kids who might have had fond memories of the Santa on Sixth Street grew up and moved away, and my grandfather found himself being increasingly rejected by subsequent generations. Every year there were still a few visitors, but it became more discouraging each December, and for years local teenagers had been spreading the rumor that my grandfather was a pervert.
In reaction to this increasing indifference, every year my grandfather built larger and more elaborate Christmas displays in his front yard, hoping to capture the attention of the town’s dwindling number of youngsters. He’d actually work the entire summer building a hill right in the middle of the yard. He trucked in tons of dirt and terraced the thing carefully to avoid erosion, and the hill was eventually so large that it literally obscured much of the house behind it.
My grandfather had a fierce and constantly evolving vision of his Santa Shack (he called it the "Castle"; it was always "Santa’s Castle" to him) that was perched atop this hill. He also imagined scores of local children, walking hand-in-hand with their parents and winding their way up the long path –"Candy Cane Lane"– to visit Santa Claus.
Loudspeakers mounted on the roof of the shack blasted Christmas carols out over the neighborhood.
It was this hill (and this music) that eventually turned much of the neighborhood against my grandfather, and one year the city council actually deliberated shutting him down. A young and smirking local newspaper reporter took my grandfather’s side –"Santa Claus vs. Joyless City Council"– and the story was picked up by news services and television stations all over the state.
The town was inundated with mail, virtually all of it supporting the beleaguered local Santa Claus, and my grandfather was eventually allowed to carry on his increasingly escalating holiday spectacle. All this new attention ultimately succeeded in making the Christmas Village on Sixth Street a destination for road-tripping young ironists from all over the area.
These teenagers –many of them clearly stoned– would drive in from towns all around, and were alleged to leave beer cans in the street and urinate in yards up and down the block. My grandfather was so caught up in this new and unexpected wave of attention that he was apparently oblivious to the streak of ridicule that was predominant in these young visitors.
The last year I went home for Christmas I was appalled by the marked decline in my grandfather’s original, pure vision. The place looked almost perverse, part third-rate theme park, part used car lot spectacle. The actual house was now completely hidden behind the huge hill and the outrageously festooned shack that sat upon it.
My grandfather had by this time spent several years working –or eating– toward what he considered the proper level of obesity for his annual turn at Santa Claus. There was, however, nothing proper at all about his arrived-upon corpulence. He became monstrous; his naturally thin frame was obviously ill equipped to carry so much excess weight, and he now walked with a pronounced, staggering limp and sweated profusely. I was horrified to see my grandfather in such a clear and dangerous state of mania. He must have weighed in excess of three hundred pounds, and eventually had to be assisted on his painfully labored trek up the path to "Santa’s Castle."
That year, I noticed, two, and even three, drunken teenagers would pile onto his lap while he gasped out his congested ho-ho-hos.
Eventually, of course, even the young ironists abandoned the old Santa Claus, and my grandfather was left with his unreliable memories and lingering fantasies.
My grandmother had inherited a considerable sum of money some years earlier, and she reluctantly –ever more reluctantly as the years went by– allowed her husband to appropriate increasingly unconscionable sums of this money to subsidize his annual Christmas displays. The utility bills were almost too much to be believed, and as my grandfather’s morbid obesity and mounting health problems no longer allowed him to contribute anything in the way of actual physical labor to the elaborate and protracted set-up procedures, all the work had to be contracted out to local laborers.
The city had also become increasingly tough in enforcing any and all pertinent codes, and there were constant battles with the inspectors and neighbors.
The visitors to my grandfather’s Christmas Castle finally trickled to a very few annual regulars, mostly the confused or frightened children of the occasional local who still retained some fond memories of their own childhood visits to the eccentric small-town Santa.
Most evenings in December my grandfather would sit alone in his shabby Santa suit in his little shack on the hill, listening to Andy Williams or Robert Goulet or the New Christy Minstrels drifting out over the neighborhood from the speakers on the roof. He would read tabloid newspapers and drink straight from two-liter bottles of RC Cola.
That last year I visited I could see that a sad ending was taking shape for my grandfather, a sad ending for the whole family, really. He had worn us all out, and what had started as a sort-of cheesy, harmless, and charming holiday tradition had spiraled out of control. The rest of us weren’t really properly equipped to understand the fierceness of my grandfather’s vision, or his motives.
Perhaps I alone actually made some attempt to figure out what drove my grandfather to such extremes of fantasy. My grandfather had always been an oddball and interloper, and had long had a reputation in the family as something of shiftless character. He’d had a checkered job history and was a pack rat. It seemed clear enough that my grandfather wanted desperately to fit in, to have his neighbors like him and accept his children. He had grown up poor, and I suppose there was something generous and magical in the image of Santa Claus that appealed to his lingering sense of insecurity. He had been in the military for a number of years before he married my grandmother and settled in the small town in Illinois, and this long part of his life had always been a mystery to everyone in the family. It was something he resolutely refused to discuss.
At any rate, the Santa Claus suit, I had come to believe, was a disguise for a man who desperately wanted to be disguised. What more puzzling outsider was there than Santa, the exotic yet entirely benevolent other, eccentric but completely non-threatening? I think my grandfather hoped he could get to the parents –win their approval– through their children. And the whole thing worked –sort of– for years, but eventually, when it morphed into a full-blown and ultimately destructive obsession it negated all the good will and largely turned the town, and even his family, against him.
The year after I made my last visit my grandfather’s health declined. He was in and out of the hospital, and was eventually moved into an assisted living facility. My uncles finally got around to bulldozing the hill and restoring my grandmother’s front yard to a proper lawn.
If you visit that town now and can manage to locate the local historical society (which is located in a Quonset hut at the county fairgrounds) you can see my grandfather’s fully recreated Christmas Castle hidden away in a back room. They also, I am told, have a number of vintage photographs from the archives of the town’s newspaper.
Though I’ve been back there several times in the intervening years, I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to pay a visit. I’m not quite ready –I fear it would break my heart– but I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to it, by which time I’m hoping it will flood me with appropriately happy memories.
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