Mama's boy, yes; sissy, no. Villages don't allow much leeway for contrarian nonconformists, despite T.R. Pearson's endearing eccentrics in his masterfully comic A Short History of a Small Place. It's much more like one of my favorite musicals, The Music Man, with the pickin' anda talkin' old hens clucking over Marian the Librarian's classic authors and her elderly benefactor. Growing up in a small town is how I learned the best disguise is to look and act like everyone else, short hair, shaven, neat, clean. Then your head can quietly go where it wants to. But I was a perfectly normal little boy going to Sunday school, climbing trees, sailing homemade boats and squishing in the mud after torrential thunderstorms flooded the saucer-flat lot in front of the town hall and flooded the streetside ditches. The other boys and I had slingshots and Daisy BB guns, my boundaries for when and what I could shoot at far stricter than theirs. We mainly played racist Cowboys and Indians with our cap-gun pistols, taught by our western movies (nobody wanted to be the Indians), despite the northern edge of town being technically the southern boundary of the Santee Sioux Reservation, despite my always going to school with Indians, Santee Sioux and Ponca, and getting along just fine with them. The other town boys, particularly Jim M. and Stan E. who lived nearest, and I also played noisy vroom-vroom cars in the dirt, performed Aztec sacrifices on earthworms--guess who was the only one widely read enough to know about those--and put firecrackers in anthills. We skinnydipped in the Bazile Creek, far deeper then than it is now after farmers' dams have depleted it, and rode our bikes everywhere. (I had a paper route, like the U.S.P.O., "Neither rain nor sleet . . . .") I was Whittier's "Barefoot boy with cheek of tan" in the summer despite the hazards of nasty nails and resentful bees, and I always had a dog, my best buddy and my bedmate, like a Rockwell cover. Mom made me empty my pockets of rocks when we boys came back from tramping around the high hills encircling the town before they could clatter in the washing machine. I loved winter more than summer and spent as much time outside as weather permitted, enough to be tanned before I ever knew about fashionable ski resorts for that look, sleigh-riding down the Schoolhouse Hill, ice-skating on the Coulee Creek or the ice rink Dad made by flooding that flat-saucer lot in front of the town hall, playing fox and geese. I even got a pair of cheap skis one Christmas and learned to be stoic about burning frostbite.
So my Santa terror must have been some quirk to go along with my fear of the dark, the nyctophobia that led me to write an A+ term paper on phobias for junior college Psych class that led the teacher, a psychiatrist out at the Norfolk State [Mental] Hospital, to ask me in a marginal note if I wanted to talk about it, for free. On the other hand, I have seen other children, kindred spirits, scream at the sight of jolly old Saint Nicholas. Exactly. I'm still not sure if I didn't like Santa because of the beard or I don't like beards because of Santa, and I'm not going to chicken-egg it. But that man sent me into quivering hiding the way Jason and Michael Myers and other horror film maniacs do their victims.
Now the United Church of Christ, the Center Congregational Church's foyer has two doors, the one to the right leading to the back room, the one ahead leading into the nave. When Santa made his visit to pass out bags of candy to all the children at our Christmas Eve--usually--programs, Marilynn P., my surrogate sister--more to keep me company, I suspect--and I fled and circled ahead of him, back room-foyer-nave, as he tried to chase us down, reversing when necessary. Another option was scrambling under the pews. No amount of adult coaxing ever got me within ten feet of Ol' blustery Merry Christmas-Ho-Ho-Ho.
On the Bloomfield farm Grandma usually arranged for a surprise visit from Santa as a Special Treat. This was well before the disgusting days of contemptibly profiteering consumerism that starts selling Christmas before Halloween. It's merchants' best season because it's their longest, for pete's sake, two and a half months. Digression: I was familiar with this before it became the SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, of Greed, Inc. Working at Tom's Music Store, I knew we had to have Christmas music in before the teachers' conventions in October for them to order in preparation for their Christmas concerts and programs. The length of carol exposure was toxic the year between my junior and senior college years--I had to drop out twice working my way through college and have very mixed feelings about that building character--especially since I had to work right up to 5:30 p.m. Christmas Eve. It was the only year I spent a mere hour or two with the whole family at our grandparents' in Crofton and sullenly went home to Center to watch TV and go to bed early. So I really resent what merchants do in forcing children to deal with dozens of Santas from October forward, as well as maliciously teaching them to be proper little future consumers.
Back to Grandma's. Her buffet, a standard fixture in dining rooms then, was by the main entry. We seldom used the side door into the living room, the dining room the social focus anyway. The nanosecond I heard those damned bells and "Ho-ho-ho," I was under the buffet, hiding in the darkness, though sobbing doesn't help much for that. Mama in her placating soothing peacemaker role didn't help either, and Uncle L. finally had to take off his fake beard so that I could see, gee, it wasn't Santa Claus after all. It was Uncle L.! I should've kicked him hard in the shins, but I was a good little boy.
Ironically, decades later I was considered a very good Santa Claus for the prep school where I practice taught on Wayne's campus (the students unable to identify me because I refused to talk), for my old hometown church (the children's not knowing me by then), for a faculty party, etc. I hated Billy Bob Thornton's Bad Santa, not even vulgarly funny, with an excess of That Word, but I'm still betting that some cash-hungry producer makes a horror film with Santa as the mad slasher. Poor Santa.
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