I tried watching The Grinch (the movie version, with Jim Carrey) to cheer myself up, and found myself wondering why they bothered to inflate a half-hour cartoon that kids used to watch for free into a charmless, 110-minute Hollywood vehicle that you pay good money to see. Meanwhile, the leftover Harry Potter merchandise looms over you every time you stroll through a mall, presumably ready to do battle with the upcoming Lord of the Rings merchandise.
Christmas, quo vadis?
Maybe we all just need a goodsized laugh as the countdown to Christmas heats up. True, heartwarming holiday tales are a dime a dozen. So why is it that I find myself laughing from every orifice at SantaLand Diaries, a collection of yuletide essays by humorist David Sedaris?
"SantaLand Diaries," the showpiece of this slim collection, is one of those rare humor essays that keeps getting funnier each time you read it. It follows the narrator (Sedaris) in his search for Christmas employment, first at UPS (where he is rejected), then at Macy’s Department Store in NYC, where he is hired as one of Santa’s elves for the Christmas season.
The woman at Macy’s asked, "Would you be interested in full-time elf or evening and weekend elf?"
I said, "Full-time elf."
I have an appointment next Wednesday at noon.
I am a thirty-three-year-old man applying for a job as an elf.
I often see people on the streets dressed as objects and handing out leaflets. I tend to avoid leaflets but it breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco. So, if there is a costume involved, I tend not only to accept the leaflet, but to accept it graciously, saying, "Thank you very much," and thinking, You poor, pathetic son of a bitch. I don’t know what you have but I hope I never catch it.
It should be apparent from the above excerpt that this is not Dr. Seuss or Dickens we’re dealing with. Sedaris, who lives in Paris but hails from North Carolina, wields sarcasm like a nasty scalpel. But his acidic, bitchy prose just as often punctures his own pretensions, and that’s maybe what makes SantaLand Diaries (available at National Book Store) ultimately enjoyable.
The 41-page title essay actually has a heart-shaped lump beating somewhere within its merciless depiction of crying infants, frenzied parents, deranged Santas and last-minute shoppers. Along the way, we get a glimpse of just how big an operation Macy’s at Christmastime really is (or was: I believe Macy’s went bankrupt in ’92, though it’s still open in New York). Every aspect of the children’s visit with Santa Claus – from line management to photo payment centers – is handled by adults dressed up as elves. Being less than NBA size is something of a job requirement. There are Usher Elves, Photo Elves, Entrance Elves, Cash Register Elves, Pointer Elves (who point out various magical displays to children while they wait to greet Santa), Emergency Exit Elves, and Magic Window Elves. Forced to shuttle parents and children along a serpentine line leading to Santa’s lap (average waiting time: two hours), Sedaris explains how he finds amusement as a Magic Window Elf:
Again this morning I got stuck at the Magic Window, which is really boring. I’m supposed to stand around and say, "Step on the Magic Star and you can see Santa!" I said that for a while and then I started saying, "Step on the Magic Star and you can see Cher!"
And people got excited. So I said, "Step on the Magic Star and you can see Mike Tyson!"
Some people in the other line, the line to sit on Santa’s lap, got excited and cut through the gates so that they could stand on my Magic Star. Then they got angry when they looked through the Magic Window and saw Santa rather than Cher and Mike Tyson. What did they honestly expect? Is Cher so hard up for money that sheíd agree to stand behind a two-way mirror at Macy’s?
But while Macy’s seems like a hellish microcosm of Christmas commercialism, Sedaris peers beneath the costumes to recognize that his co-employees are really just normal, regular folks placed in an extraordinarily stressful situation (i.e., Christmas shopping).
Elsewhere in SantaLand Diaries, Sedaris’s aim is less sharp. "Season’s Greetings To Our Friends and Family!" takes the form of a family holiday newsletter, the kind dashed off on home computers and batch-mailed to unsuspecting friends and relatives. Its increasingly shrill, angry tone (and undercurrent of racism) can be read as satire, but it’s less inclusive – and thus far less funny – than the title essay. "Based Upon a True Story" and "Christmas Means Giving" also fail to transcend their one-note concepts. In the former, a slick TV producer tries to convince a town of yokels to surrender their cherished Christmas miracle story as a vehicle for a TV movie. In "Christmas Means Giving," two yuppie couples try to outdo each other at being selfless and giving, with predictable results.
Much better are "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," and "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol," the latter of which was read aloud recently by Sedaris on Dave Letterman’s Late Show. In this one, Sedaris portrays a small-town theater critic who focuses his withering beam of scorn on grade school productions of A Christmas Carol and Come Blow Your Horn.
Actually, all these essays are meant to be heard aloud, not just read. Sedaris is a commentator for National Public Radio in the US and has read most of these pieces over BBC Radio 4. (His latest book, Me Talk Pretty Some Day, details his efforts to learn French.) He’s a short, gap-toothed, openly gay character who writes plays with his sister Amy and essays for Esquire and other publications. Kind of a happier, less-serious cousin to Truman Capote, if you care to imagine such a thing.
Will SantaLand Diaries make your holiday blues go away? Maybe. At least, for the hour or so it takes you to read it, you can remind yourself that there are people even more stressed out by the holidays than you.