His eyes--how they twinkled! His dimples--how...

His eyes--how they twinkled! His dimples--how merry! --Clement C. Moore

*

I’ll be in the front row at 7:30 p.m. Monday when Anne Panofsky-Eisenberg of Brentwood Psychotherapists lectures on “How to Cope With Holiday Stress: Don’t Eat Your Heart Out” at 11973 San Vicente Blvd., No. 211 (admission free; reservations: (310) 472-4648).

It isn’t easy being Santa Claus anymore.

Time was, I landed in snow-spangled New England villages, like John Cheever’s St. Botolphs, where children could reasonably expect me to slide down all their chimneys in a single night and supply them all with toys out of my capacious sack. It seemed prudent for them to care whether I thought they were naughty or nice. A hint of religious mystery still clung to me--the ghost of Christmases past.

Then things changed.

I’m not blaming red-nosed Rudolph, or even that song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” What would Santa be without a sense of humor? And I’m certainly not blaming Mrs. Claus for washing the suit that was “tarnished with ashes and soot” or telling me long ago to get rid of that “stump of a pipe” or she’d get rid of me.

But somehow, over the years, I’ve dwindled from mystery to parody. An army of shopping-mall clones and uncounted TV commercials will do that to you. The world grew bigger and smaller at the same time. Now city kids know that my yearly task is both more and less than magical; it’s logistically impossible. If I still exist in America today, it’s as a chain of toy stores and a network of credit cards, 800 numbers and computer hookups, bits of data whizzing faster than Donner and Blitzen, as multitudinous as snowflakes.

In places like Bosnia, I don’t exist at all.

Right now, the spirit of giving survives most clearly in the form of U.S. Marines escorting food shipments into the Horn of Africa. This is so schizophrenic an image--Santa packing a gun!--that I wonder what Ms. Panofsky-Eisenberg would think. I’ll have to ask her.

Still, that’s who I am this season, if I’m anybody--a young, beardless hardbelly who busts up barrooms for recreation (or likes us to believe he does) and who uses language that would make Mrs. Claus blush. I’m crossing a snowless desert not unlike the desert the Wise Men crossed 2,000 years ago. With one hand I hold the gun; with the other I offer life to children whose dreams aren’t of sugarplums but of a crust of bread, a bowl of rice, a drop of milk.

Holiday stress? That’s my middle name, right between the “Kris” and the “Kringle.” I don’t know how this mission will turn out. I don’t know whether the youngsters whose form I’ve borrowed, or the oldsters who ordered them to Somalia, are wise men or not. But I do know this: Their gift is gold. And frankincense. And myrrh.