Prof. William M. Epstein
University of Nevada, Las Vegas | UNLV · School of Social Work – USA

A few days ago, I received the most singular honor of my admittedly
not terribly honorable career. I wish to share it with you.

While every year at about this time, hundreds of millions of children
and even many of their parents write to Santa Klaus, I am the
only person who has ever received a letter from him.

I would like to read it to you. Those of you who believe in Santa
Klaus will be pleased to know that he is still at it. But I warn you now,
he may not be exactly what you had in mind all these years.
                                                                                                       December 1

Dear Bill,

I am sorry I could not drop by last year but some lunatic on the ground took a shot at Rudolph and blew up his nose. Blitzen went berserk and the other reindeer stampeded.

The trip back to the North Pole was a dark nightmare of looming radio towers and of terrified reindeer losing their lunch all over North America. People on the ground were either dropping to their knees in prayer over the new type of weather or rushing for their guns.

That imbecile Prancer kept charging off in the wrong direction. I would signal left and this hamster of a reindeer would turn right. We would try a right and the herd retard would try a left. This was not the first sign of Prancer’s stupidity and all the way back I kept thinking that he has a fixed destiny as pot roast.

Because of the rout back to the North Pole, I neglected to make some of my promised deliveries to the so-called „nice“ boys and girls. But then again, maybe it was all to the good. Many of these kids are nasty, self-centered little brats who might learn a better lesson from disappointment than from their addiction to the world’s generosity. God, I am sick of these greedy piglets; they sit on my lap, spraying my face with their puny virtues and trivial deeds:

„Oooh Thanta, I helped an old lady croth the thtreet. Oooh Thanta, I took out the garbage. Oooh Thanta, I thang in the choir.“

So what? Big deal. Who cares?

And their parents beam with fat, immobile pride as their sweaty tadpoles squirm through their moment of celebrity, lying like used car salesmen and evangelical preachers.

The prospect of spawning kids like this was more than I could bear. I confess, just a short while after I began this lousy job, I sneaked out for a quiet vasectomy.

Well, I didn’t tell Ethel but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Actually, considering her age she still looks pretty good…no kids to stretch her out. But then again maybe believing for these many years that she is barren has eaten her up. It has probably been the cause of her awful nagging.

Good God, never a pleasant word. Not a moment’s peace. Not the faintest sigh of satisfaction or even of grudging acceptance that I am only Santa Klaus and not a big-shot tycoon. She never lets me forget my paycheck, „The Snow Queen has a new coat. The King of the North took his wife to Florida. But my husband, Mr. One and Only Santa Klaus, can’t even take his one and only wife out for dinner. „

Ethel is a bitch, a bitch, a bitch.

In truth, I would dump her frail bones even now, after all these years of marriage, but the North Pole is not a Las Vegas dating service and elves and
reindeer do not tempt me anymore.

One Christmas Eve, some considerate soul might have the decency to improvise on the strict tradition of setting out a glass of milk and a cooky for Santa. I could really use some scotch and nooky. I’d put an extra toy under her Christmas tree. A nice one. Not some crap from China.

This Santa Klaus business began badly and it has kept up the theme with fanatical consistency. I was out of work in 1936 and Ethel and I were living on some money she had inherited from her mother. There it was one October, an ad for a permanent job as Santa Klaus. They were looking for an
easy going Christian with some management experience. And the advertised pay looked pretty good at the time. In the Thirties anything connected to money looked reasonable.

I told them that I was Baptist — God forgive me — but I did have the other credentials: a jolly seventy-five pounds bouncing above my belt, a pair of cheeks that lit up like cathedral lights when plugged into a half bottle, and a raucous laugh that made even psychotics feel at home. But living all these years as a fake Christian is wearing on me. I worry that I have apostatized myself. While I have not lived as a good Jew should, I still want to be buried as one, although I must admit, it is more to spite the pious bastards who preach the virtues of Santa to their children than to please my mother, may she rest in peace.

I tell you, I needed the job. And that is what it is: just a job. I would like to scream this at the lunatics who think that they are born into the care of a personal guardian angel. „Santa Klaus is a business. Santa Klaus is a business.“

And it is a rotten business. Who in their right mind would voluntarily spend decades locked in the North Pole ice box. And the noise is enough to make a dead man think that the hair across his ass is the Brooklyn Bridge. Ethel is bad enough, but her whining is virtually lyrical when weighed against more than 55 years trapped with elves who never shut their squeaky fucking mouths.

Once, a long time ago, I lost it with the elves. I shrieked out exactly what I thought of them in minute detail. How stupid they were. How ugly. How sloppy. Well, when I stopped, it was so quiet you could hear a rat piss on cotton. It made me real antsy looking into their red, hate filled eyes. I backed off and apologized. Bill, you do not mess with elves.

myself. While I have not lived as a good Jew should, I still want to be buried as one, although I must admit, it is more to spite the pious bastards who preach the virtues of Santa to their children than to please my mother, may she rest in peace.

Everything about the job is awful. The accommodations are pathetic. Santa’s Home at the North Pole with candy-cane door posts and ginger- bread roofs is not jolly at all but rather damp and musty with an inescapably nauseating sweetness that seeps into every corner. Santa’s home is a sullen mausoleum of long-gone Santas‘ pathetic tries for immortality — their names whittled into the dusty roof beams alongside the lonely scratches of their service…pleading and pitiful memoirs…a few untended graves. They all learned the bitter fate of Santa: once stuck up here, prospects of a return to life are frozen out. The Santa Klaus job is not a good career move for any except the unemployable.

I want to retire now and spend my few remaining years in a barka-lounger watching I Love Lucy and the Munsters…a few bucks on the football games…a little poker…a bit of whiskey… some good times with the other old farts.

But, dammit, what a mean nation I have to rely on. Each year, I try to get through the US as quickly as possible. It is immensely rich and immensely cheap. I have put in a lifetime of toil and all I have to show for it is the little I was able to steal:

One pound Christmas chocolate boxes were frequently one ounce short. I took a small percentage on sales of North Pole picture post cards. I skimmed a bit here; I scarfed a bit there; I put my hand in the till when I could.

Yet it was still not enough and Ethel drank up her savings.

I have been thinking about a few things to do to pick up some money after retirement. Psychotherapy comes to mind; it even seems a natural for a retired Santa. But I hate its rigidities. People who have to depend upon the goodness of psychotherapists would be better off if their therapists lived like 12-cylinder human beings who loved, laughed and lied to each other with deep hedonistic joy. Unfortunately, therapists seem to have gotten stuck on the lying, even exaggerating it to its worst form — self-deception.

A second idea for retirement seems more promising. A few days ago, a blister on my foot burst. I put on transparent ointment to kill the bacteria and some white stuff to kill the fungus. However, someone should have rehearsed my foot for the drama of cure; apparently the bacteria ate the fungus gel and the fungus ate the antibacteria ointment with the result of producing a completely new lifeform: fungteria. I am the only human being currently suffering from it. I may be able to make a living as the nation’s spokesperson for safe foot care.

Unfortunately, I realize that these are only reveries. The world is very tough and acts with senile forgetfulness toward Santa except when someone wants something. There are not ten people left who wonder how Santa Klaus feels or if there is anything that the old gent might need in his final years or if their letch for some toy might burden the gracious saint. No. No concern at all. The world is populated by a bunch of egomaniacs who never care about Santa Klaus.

Yet the worst part of the job is that I have never met my boss. No phone calls. No notes in my pay envelope. No interim evaluations. Just accusatory stares from those miserable elves whenever things go even the slightest bit awry. They have a labor union but all I have is a ton of work and a vague sense of never satisfying anyone. I tell you, if there is a God, she has a lot to answer for.

Well, Bill, if you are home this year, I shall drop by for a nip. But not that rotgut you drink and no more jokes. They are not at all funny and you have a vocabulary from the sewer.

t is just about time for the third shift at the toy factory. Gotta run. Please excuse my bitterness. I am just an old, work-weary man who can’t afford to retire.

As ever,
Meyer Berkowitz
a.k.a. Santa Klaus

Oh yes, one other thing, please pass on a message to your students. I have been following their recent voting records and this Christmas morning they should not all rush down to the Christmas tree. Many of them are not going to get shit.

Now, I know that you are asking yourselves, why did Santa write to me?

Well, I shall tell you the truth: I actually made up the whole letter myself. Still and all, in the end, there really is a Santa Klaus and I had to blow the whistle on the crude, misanthropic, bad-tempered, self-centered and self-pitying, macho-crazed, anti-Christian son of a bitch.

But please do not tell your children. I may yet run across one of them and she might look up at me and say,
„Oooh, you thtinker. Bad man. You thkunked Thanta Klauth.“