The Santa Suit

I remember our first Christmas. We weren't long married; about three months.
I purchased a huge Turkey, on the way home from work. I remember your face, the first time you laid eyes on it. 'Is it too big?' I had inquired. The look on your face made the question rhetorical.
You put it in our small oven. All went well, for about three hours, until you tried to baste the monster… I put the fire out, with the extinguisher that had been a discerning present from your parents.

You had wanted it all to be perfect, you told me through tears and racking sobs. It took me ten minutes to make you laugh; about nine and three quarter minutes longer than usual; thus I gauged the extent of your upset. Once the barrier was down and we started laughing, we couldn't stop; we still laugh about it now, twenty three years later.

We had two Christmases before the children started coming but one of those, was spent at your mother's house and so, almost risk-free and non counting. What a difference a child makes; how the picture takes on a new and fuller, slightly more mellow luster. With my famous disregard for patience and a complete lack of understanding, I bought the Santa suit. The baby was much to young to appreciate the significance but we found a use for it, when I wore it Christmas eve to deliver your present, which you tantalizingly unwrapped and enjoyed; so much so that another child was delivered the following September.

I remember the Christmas that I bought 'Lucky' the cat, from the animal sanctuary. He was a gray tabby, so dilapidated in looks that no-one else would touch him. When the girl at the center informed us that he was soon to be put down, you insisted that we take him. You could make him look beautiful, you bravely claimed; even Lucky looked doubtful and I double checked, to make sure that we were looking at the same animal.

We brought Lucky home. You fed him copious amounts of food, which he loved, you attempted to give him a shower, which he most definitely did not and managed to flee, in a gray blur, through the open upstairs bathroom window. Lucky may well have lived up to his name, even from such a height, if it were not for the fact that the poor fellow landed in next door's garden, where he made a very brief but equally deadly acquaintance with their pet; 'Savage' the pit-bull terrier. In the time it takes to say, 'down boy!' Savage turned Lucky into approximately three pounds of freshly washed minced meat.

As the kids grew older, the Santa suit came into its own. It paid for itself one Christmas eve, when our eldest lad at about six years, decided to find out if Santa was the real deal. Creeping down the stairs and into the room where 'Santa' was under the tree, under pressure and under the influence of too many 'hot toddy's', he crept up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. Barely avoiding a rather comprehensive bowel movement and complete bladder flush, I screamed, which frightened the poor lad so much that, he made the top of the stairs, in a time too equal the aforementioned Lucky's decent into the neighboring garden.

You came down, to find me, a shivering wreck, attempting to light a cigar, with a view to calming my jangling nerves. Removing the lighter from my trembling fingers and laughing hysterically, your attempt at providing aid, became more akin to attempted man-slaughter, when you promptly set alight my 'Keep away from fire, extremely flammable!' Santa beard. Your attempt to contain the damage of this potentially disastrous act by whipping off your flimsy negligee and throwing it over my head, only served to exacerbate an already excruciatingly painful episode, when it melted, wrapping itself around my head, like (bloody hot) cling film.

After an hour spent, with head submerged, snorkeling, in a bath-full of icy water, I emerged. There was surprisingly little blistering and even less hair. I appeared like a peeled - and slightly toasted - tomato. I had lost my tash, eyelashes, eyebrows, and ninety per cent of my hair; the few remaining tufts, reminded of a post-nuclear wasteland. When I walked into the front room, the following morning, my smile cracking the plaster like coating of dried camomile lotion, that you had delicately applied during the night, our four year old took one peek before screeching and running to hide, in the cupboard under the stairs. Our neighbor summed it up when he cackled; 'the next time you try to gas yourself, make sure the oven is off'. We managed to laugh about that too; later!

I remember just a couple of Christmases ago, when our eldest - then seventeen years - hit me, smack in the eye with a snowball. I, of course in - what was once - a flash, grabbed some snow and compacting it into a ball, let fly in reply. With the accuracy of a Blunderbuss, I missed him by about twenty yards left of target and caught instead, your mother, on the bridge of her nose; breaking her glasses and sending her staggering back inside her front door, to lie puzzled and stunned in the hallway of her house.

Not content with assaulting the poor woman, I managed to later, compound the torture:
In an attempt to temporarily fix the broken specs with Super-glue and eager to please, gave them too her to try on - before the glue was completely dry. She agreed that they felt fine but that her nose was understandably tender, due to the swelling and bruising. She decided to remove the glasses and rest for a while. As she plucked them from her nose, your mother howled like a banshee and proffering the offending sight altering appendages, offered a simple yet cutting statement; 'You Moron!'. There, plain to be seen on the bridge of her glasses and similarly missing from the bridge of her nose a not insubstantial wedge of skin…
Much grovelling, apologizing and promises of great servitude were required to dig myself out of that one.

Now we come to this year:

This Christmas past relatively quietly and no obvious disasters will stand tall in the memory of most of the family that lived through it. True, our daughter of eighteen years had moved out and set up home with her partner, earlier in the year but came to spend Christmas day with us. She sat and talked with you of 'woman's issues', which primarily consisted of how silly and immature men were and how annoyingly attractive these traits could be; a beautiful young woman had mysteriously emerged, from her girlish cocoon.

Our two younger daughters - thirteen and eleven - played at being grown up; styling each others hair and experimenting with make-up (disastrously). They also advised and agreed that boys were silly, immature and smelly. Our two little caterpillars; when, I wondered, would they begin to spin their cocoons? Not for a while yet, I thought, hopefully.

The three older lads, strutted around the house, when not playing computer games, discussing the merits and otherwise, of fast cars, loose women, drink, drugs and rock and roll - all the really important stuff! The eldest, college going 'Don' regaling his slightly younger siblings with stories of a University life, full of parties, drinking sprees and little or no real work involved; both he and they forgetting the days of half term, spent desperately researching for essays and projects, with deadlines.

That left our youngest child, a boy of nine years; the baby!
He came to me yesterday and bluntly (as is his style) informed me that he no longer believed in Santa Clause. He added that, I no longer needed that Santa suit that I had hidden, in the attic, in a suitcase and …that I might as well send it to Africa, where the poor people lived; 'only don't send that beard that Mum had made out of glued together bits of cotton wool; it looked weird!'
Then he added; 'Thanks Dad for dressing up every year for me - as Santa. It must have been a pain…oh and Dad, I think your brilliant!'

So that's it; Santa is officially dead!

Twenty years ago, I bought that Santa suit. We laughed, cried, got beaten, bitten, soaked, seduced and even set on fire in it. Seven children stood, slept or walked around in awe of it and the magic of it. For forty per cent of my life, on one very special night, every year, I shook the mothballs out of it and donned it - just in case. This year, it seems was it's last outing; its magic is gone! But the magic it gave to me, to us and all the stories and memories it holds, within the folds of cheap red cloth, can never be taken; they are burned indelibly (some literally) into our minds.

I will wrap it carefully, reinserting the mothballs and put it back in its case…and there may well be tears….but there will be smiles too.