W hen I was asked to play Santa Claus at an unnamed business in the weeks leading up to last year's Christmas, I couldn't decide whether or not I was being told I'm fat. Now, skinny I ain't, but I couldn't help but feel just a little insulted. On top of that, I was house-sitting for my friend Elektra, and I'd grown accustomed to whiling away the days with a cat or two perched on my chest. Still, the offer of a couple hundred bucks didn't hurt (gifts for friends that year included and were limited to two-line poems I had written that were like, "I like you and you like me/ha ha ha and tee hee hee") and since my mother happens to work at a costume shop, I figured that it would be a fairly sure, fairly painless way to pick up some extra holiday bucks to impress my friends and loved ones. However—with hindsight being 20/20 and all—I can now say with confidence that I should have told my friends and loved ones to go to hell, because I'm pretty sure I've never had a more depressing experience.
Anson Stevens-Bollen
The fake beard itched (and attached itself like Velcro to my real beard), the pants were several sizes too large and kept falling off, and the glasses pinched my nose in an obscenely painful way. My hand tattoos were clearly visible through the thin white gloves, I'm sure I reeked of cigarettes and abject depression, and the whole damn ensemble was so sweaty that I started to panic about passing out. Awful thoughts filled my head like, "What if the kids don't buy it?" or, "What if somebody I know comes in here and recognizes me?" I couldn't bring myself to make the voice without feeling like a complete asshole, I mentally and physically refused to "Ho ho ho," and I found myself praying that no one—as in No, period, One, period, would come in at all.
But God hates me, so by the end of the first hour I had met several dog and cat owners who wanted photos with me holding their pet (not kidding) and exactly two children who were, by the way, visibly disappointed with my bullshit version of Santa and whose parents were clearly going to throw away the candy canes I had given them because I'm sure I looked like some kind of child poisoner. Really, I can't blame them as my performance could, at the very least, be described as wanting.
Still, even though playing Santa was one of the worst afternoons of my life, some of the guys who get into it around the holidays are real pros. There are, in fact, schools that teach folks how to be Santa. The oldest and most popular of which being the Charles W Howard Santa Claus School in Midland, Mich. Formed in 1937, the nonprofit is the longest-running Santa tutorial program on earth because, according to its founder, "He errs who thinks Santa enters through the chimney. Santa enters through the heart." Perhaps I might have learned a little something from their three-day program, given that they specialize in the history of Santa and St. Nicholas, how to dress and apply makeup, how to learn the secret Santa sign language (what?!) and even how to wrangle real live reindeer. The program is so thorough that it has been covered by many major news outlets and has even been referred to as "The Harvard of Santa schools" by CBS News' Bill Geist.
Other schools like the International University of Santa Claus take the whole thing even further and host classrooms all over the globe. According to their website, head honcho Tim Connaghan is the first recipient of the Charles W Howard Award and is a "full-time professional Santa." This leads me to believe I may have let down the proud tradition of people who love Christmas so damn much that they'd get up in the morning and teach or take classes on this stuff despite the hard truth that more kids are afraid of the home-intruding, cookie-thieving bastard than not. It's enough to make me wonder if they have a class in how to offset the shame that comes with playing such a demeaning role. As it is, all I can say for the experience is that pet owners are crazy, and that visiting Santa seems to be more for parents than children…and that y'all can send me cash this year if you were curious about what to get me.
