Aaron Richter
Santa Claus was nursing a beer at an uptown dive bar. The neighborhood was gentrifying, and management seemed eager to accommodate—there was scented soap in the bathroom and twenty-two-dollar lobster rolls. But the place couldn’t outrun the regulars. They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender.
Santa—Billy—was fiftyish, with a modest gut, gray hair, a lustrous beard, and a caddish gaze that followed the bartender up and down the rail. He was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. For the price of three beers, he told me his story.
As a young man, Billy had come to New York to be an actor, but over time he began to feel like an extra in his own life, watching it happen without any control over its direction, the way a person does sometimes. These were bad years, shameful even. He lost his job. He lost his wife. Lost touch with his young son too. He was overweight and undershaved. A friend had a weird idea: Billy could try playing Santa Claus at Macy’s.
And that’s what Billy did.
For the first time in years, people were glad to see Billy. The kids’ smiles weren’t for him, exactly. They weren’t for Billy, the person. They were for Santa. But somehow that didn’t matter. The gig provided a variation on exposure therapy. Instead of making him face down a phobia in short bursts, it gave him those smiles, which accumulated—some gap-toothed, some nervous, every one of them happy—until eventually they made him happy too.
He switched from vodka to light beer. He started booking two-hundred-dollar-an-hour corporate Santa gigs. He reconnected with his son and even employed him as an elf.
The easy explanation would be that playing Santa Claus saved Billy and that the magic of Christmas had wrapped its warm glow around another lost soul. That’s what Billy thought. That’s what a lot of men who worked at Macy’s thought when they, too, found happiness sitting in a gold-painted chair wearing a red costume. But there was something else at work on Thirty-fourth Street. Something more profound. A better story, actually.
The 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street established that the one true Santa Claus operates out of the store’s flagship Herald Square location. After a parade float delivers him to Macy’s on Thanksgiving morning, you can find him there on the eighth floor, wedged between an in-store cooking school and a clothing department, deep in a labyrinth of Christmas kitsch called Santaland.
Macy’s has safeguarded this mystique for eighty years. When journalists ask the company who plays Santa, a spokeswoman insists again and again, like a stubborn witness giving a deposition: “Santa is Santa.” The several hundred men who have worn the red suit at Santaland likewise observe an omertà. “We have a vow of secrecy about not talking about Macy’s operations,” says Brian DePetris, who worked as Santa for twenty-one years. “When you break that, it’s like you’re betraying the brotherhood.”
... continue reading