I AM SANTA

Alright. We’re getting to the end. Time to start divulging crazy family secrets. Why not? As far as I know, the internet is an ancient Sumerian God that requires us to ruin a certain amount of lives every day. If we don’t, it turns its back on us and leaves us scrounging for distractions from that miserable morass we call “reality”. I’ve been able contribute my distractions for a year now. The God is pleased. If I’m going to quit, I need to leave Internetalon with something it can really chew on.

When it comes to spilling family secrets, I’ve got two options. I could shotgun some scattered scandals at you to, you know, whet the appetite, let you pick and choose which interesting nugget to pocket away or just drop one big drama bomb all over your gossip-hungry faces. I say we go with the latter, because that makes good TV.

Okay. Here goes. Deep breath.

I am Santa Claus.

Okay. Obviously I’m not everyone’s Santa Claus. This isn’t a Tim Allen vehicle. Sadly. What I meant is that I’m Santa for my little sister. I play Santa for her. I’m the Santa to her… child.

Don’t tell her. She doesn’t read this, so I feel comfortable saying it here. She’s seven, and we think she’s still into the fat old elf, but there’s no way to be entirely sure. We can’t be like, Do you ever get the impression that Santa isn’t real? Doesn’t work that way. You have to wait until some asshole sixth grader spoils it for everyone and then sit her down and patiently explain that sometimes parents lie to their children because that’s tradition. That the role asshole sixth graders play in our ecosystem.

Still, we’re pretty sure she’s onto us. This year her Christmas wish list is: clay, cardboard, and olives, so it’s entirely possible that she figured it out a while ago and is just fucking with us. Either that or she’s the weirdest kid on the planet.

My reign as Santa began three years ago, when I was drafted by my stepmom while drinking my fifth or sixth beer by the pool. It was during one of our annual extended-family Christmas parties, which we’ve stopped having these parties since, opting instead to spend the night with people whose insanity we know and enjoy, as opposed to strangers who are far too ridiculous to even get a bead on, and who we only put up with because they just so happened to share a genetic link with us. We scaled down, trimmed the fat. Now we save a lot of money on rolls.

Anyway, my first year as Santa, I was understandably tanked. When my stepmom handed me my little sister’s note and asked me if I could take care of it, I muttered that I wasn’t sure I was up to the job. She said it’d be easy: all I needed to do is eat the cookies and carrots, then respond to the note in the style of a thousand-year-old saint who delivers goodness and happy times around the globe on an annual basis. Easy. Use Meisner.

By the time the party was over and it was time for me to do my job, I was even drunker than before, so I handed off letter writing duties to my ex-girlfriend, who happened to be enjoying the party and was giving me the gift of not making me feel like a selfish asshole for a night. She wrote a really nice letter back, very expansive, but perhaps a little too feminine for my tastes.

Santa is a guy, I said. He’s not going to talk about feelings and stuff. He divides the world into Naughty and Nice. That’s the way his brain functions. Cut to the chase. You were good, here’s your reward, time to hit New Mexico.

The next morning, I re-read the letter she wrote and discussed some of the finer points with my little sister. Wasn’t Santa really into your personal life? Weird. It was interesting to see what she got out of it. Despite some creepy language, she went along with everything we came up with, even while we were fine tuning the Santa myth to amuse ourselves.

In the years since, I’ve made sure not to be too fucked up for my Santa duties on Christmas Eve. It shouldn’t be that hard a promise to keep to myself, but I’ve noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to go to sleep sober. The night before Christmas, my head used to be filled with anticipatory dreams of material things, now it’s just filled with bad songs from the early nineties.

One year, I can’t remember which, I bagged Santa’s cookies and brought them to my friend’s house, where, in a dazzling example of reality subverting expectations, we all got stoned and ate them while watching late night Christmas specials. This year, we snarfed them down while getting drunk in a hot tub.

Could my little sister even begin to imagine when she wrote her letter to Santa that the response would be penned on the back of a college biology textbook in a smoke-filled drug den? Could she foresee the cookies she baked being destroyed by four full-grown men in swim trunks, or that her brother is responsible for the dreamlike spree of non-sequiturs in his letters?

I doubt it. But one day, the truth will come out, and all the Christmas mornings of me asking a few too many questions about what Santa wrote will make as much sense as it doesn’t. I’ll have to hang up my hat, give up my part as the willing accomplice in the greatest ruse ever pulled on a seven-year-old adopted Chinese girl living in Phoenix, and go back to tricking full-grown women into thinking I’m someone I’m not.