A Stand-In Santa’s Mixed Emotions

I dared them: Go ahead, break my heart.

It was easy, so easy, too easy. Five hundred letters to Santa Claus, or Clos or Clause or Clous, had arrived that morning. A hundred more, already sorted as “needy” and “less needy,” topped off two cardboard trays wrapped in jingle bells paper.

In one small room of the 74-acre Postal Service facility in South-Central, I sat shuffling through the “needy” box, scanning penned or penciled sheets of misery, despair and hope.

From Tamara in West Covina: “Last year I know you did not get to make it but I am counting on it this year, we are on welfair . . . plese plese Santa come to are house PLESE!!!”

From Damien in Los Angeles: “We write to you and Mrs. Claus every year but we never get anything I know it is because we are always on the move but would you please send us things because we dont have a chimely for you to come down.”

From a 37-year-old battered woman: “. . . a pen pal who can understand my probelms” and perhaps some day “a nice caring man who will love me and my children.”

I don’t know a chimely big enough to deliver that.

*

The Postal Service and I have an equivocal relationship. They bring me Christmas cards on Dec. 24, and 1040 tax forms on Dec. 26. They want nine-number ZIP codes when I can barely recall five. But in my small hometown, they always delivered my Santa letters to my parents, unlike these.

Once, these ended up in the dead-letter office. Now they go to a Postal Service program whereby companies and offices and just plain folks can, with the random caprice of luck inherent in lightning bolts and lottery numbers, choose whose wishes to grant and whose to leave behind in the trays wrapped in jingle bells paper.

This is the first of Charon Shedrick’s eight years with the Postal Service that she has played Santa’s triage elf, sorting the needy from the not-so-needy, the letters that ask for food from those from the likes of Rosie, who wants 17 different dolls, 11 of them Barbie variants. “It makes you appreciate,” says Charon, “what you have at home.”

Curious how the nature of a home, and a life, can be divined from a few artless lines to Santa? From a Los Angeles girl: “Santa most of all what I whant [is] my grand mother to git betor she has aids but I whant her to get betor and to liv a long time and i want a mattel twirling ballorina barbie.”

One company took a hundred letters to fulfill. Vicki of Bellflower came in Tuesday, intending to take five--one each for herself, her husband and the three kids. She left with perhaps a dozen, and those reluctantly sorted from an even larger heap.

I left with my letter, too.

*

Theirs is the last house on a ragged block of East L.A. that ends where industrial zoning sets in.

The women had tried to enliven the fenced frontyard; they had fashioned a snowman out of a white plastic trash bag. Two small dogs--mother and daughter, like the women who live inside--were gay in red and white striped sweaters made out of some fabric remnant.

The living room was festooned with the tinsel and stars given to them secondhand years ago. Along the desk, they had hung old Christmas cards, as if the postman had just delivered them.

I knocked at the door and held up the red “Dear Santa” envelope by way of introduction. The daughter put her hands to her face and cried, as if I were bringing a sweepstakes check.

They were as their letter had said--getting on in years, ailing, poor.

They had written asking for gifts for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I wanted to know what they wanted, for I had seen better-stocked refrigerators in appliance stores. I wanted to shop for them tonight. How about potatoes? Shortening? Yes. Sugar, they suggested, and beans. Then, timidly, chicken? And what about other things? Toothpaste, they said. And toilet paper. Oh yes, toilet paper.

*

It was easy, so easy, too easy.

I was angry. At myself for playing the Lady Bountiful so glibly, and enjoying it so much. At even the most benevolent of instincts caught up in the “Queen for a Day” syndrome, the most wretched story earning the goodies.

I was angry at a kindly Santa fantasy inverted into unslaked marketing and consumerism that tell a kid she is only as good as her latest running shoes or Nintendo game. At a world of houses with too many kids, too little food, at a peace on Earth holiday used to sell Mortal Kombat, at Michael Ovitz’s $90-million sweetheart bye-bye after 14 months on the job.

Angry, even, at an easily moved December sentimentality that can lie fallow the rest of the year.

The telephone number for this “Dear Santa” program is (213) 586-1457. Cut it out. Stick it deep into your Filofax, to somewhere around August 1997. Then read it again, and gauge then, when the feel-good glare and tingle of December are gone, how touched you are by their letters, and how angry.