The Mask of Christmas

Modern children have it easy at Christmas. The modern version of Santa arrives as that jolly old soul, cherry cheeks, robust laugh, nothing sinister or hungry. Santa is merry. Santa is round as a beer barrel (I’m not insinuating), filled with rollicking cheer, or beer. By my holy witness there was once another kind of Santa Claus … not so merry. Not even close.

This Santa version was less Santa as he was the masked man, the mask with a frozen expression that wasn’t jolly. This Santa had no deer (to suspect he ate them), no candy canes (he ate them too). No presents. As for his red suit, it was less velvet and ermine as Fleet Farm long underwear, likely bib overalls as smelled at close range of barn chores.

Behind the mask was our father, our uncle, the hired man who played Santa and was paid in potatoes, cabbages and rutabagas to do the part. It was this Santa’s job to perpetrate a pre-Christmas visitation at the parlor window some early winter evening. Less a visit from Santa as a haunting.

The mask worn at this performance we discovered years later tucked away in the secret closet of the farmhouse. Farmhouses actually had such places designed to hide contraband: beer and whisky in the case of Methodists; spies if you were a Commie; runaway slaves meaning children of potato farmers. It was a small chamber behind a sliding panel at the back of the closet leading to a tiny room beneath the stairs, quite obvious when you think of it.

Most contractors simply walled off the site. A few more imaginative, if perhaps anticipating a Communist invasion sometime soon, created a CIA-worthy chamber to be used as the household chose. To hide things: skeletons of hired men; kids too stupid to live; gold bullion; incriminating letters; French postcards.

In our case that hideous super-secret mask of an ardent ritual known as the country version of Santa Claus. The one who was not merry.

To be perfectly blunt, it was a hideous mask. Its intent and design was hideous; less visage of The Night Before Christmas as Boris Karloff’s Tales from the Crypt. The mask was stiff gessoed cotton with big, carnivorous lips and squinty little eyes in sockets that looked sinister as well as hungry. The nose was sorta stove-in, probably from the struggle with the last child consumed for crimes of general naughtiness. Any child in the presence of this Santa who believed they were potty-trained was proven wrong.

To the way we understood the Christmas story, Santa was probably a cannibal, an accomplished one who took out cuisine contracts on kids with behavioral problems. As for the cuisine business, he was, as the French put it, “brut.” He ate ‘em raw. We were so certain of this assessment that his name among his victims was not Santa Claus but Santa Claws.

Never mind there was that storied jelly-belly Santa in the village – to the rural parts was another kind. No ho-hoing, crisp-as-a-cracker Santa Claus, but a decidedly thin (if not emaciated) figure who darted furtively, sneaky as a chicken fox, who snarled and hissed rather than ho-hoed. And as for toys, don’t even go there.

As for Merry Christmas, please dear God let us just survive this awful occasion, farmkids were known to vanish – “disappeared” was our term for the business. Kids who didn’t do their share of chores, didn’t pile firewood neatly, didn’t rise in the morning without a second call, didn’t clean the calf pens without complaining, they “disappeared,” just like that … gone. Consumed whole, including the bones, on the spot. The same way snakes eat, that was Santa Claws.

It happened on a dark night, always moonless when this horrid Santa appeared. This stealthful Claws appeared when you least expected him. Suddenly there he was. You might be tending the young stock in the straw barn only to notice a momentary nervousness among the cattle and there he was, the ancient one staring at you. The masked Santa Claws. As instantly as he appeared, he vanished.

A wise kid would have spent some effort to look for tracks, perhaps noting the shoes he was wearing, recognized the bib-overalls, to guess a neighbor playing the part. Shock and awe don’t work that way. As magically as he materialized, with a twist of his prizefighter’s nose, he dematerialized and vanished to the night. Besides, did you ever track deer in a barnyard?

What this Santa inspired was not toys and gifts of socks and bags of candy but the pure bliss of being left alone by that whole Christmas thing, if only, “Please be to God, keep that Santa away.”

In years since, I have talked with friends who were raised in Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, London, Milwaukee, Dallas … none knew of a character like our Santa Claws, the one from Satanic Verses, this version of Santa seemingly ignored by Christmas.

Claws did not come down the chimney. No red velvet suit. Instead, decidedly grimy and smelling of timothy and bag balm. No sleigh, no reindeer, no elves (as he probably ate them too). Same for the deer. This Claws didn’t bound; he skulked, he slithered, he prowled. He never flew. If he scurried, it was in a reptilian manner. Allergic to sunlight. Known to cause blight in potatoes.

We spied him sometimes, hunch-backed and darting. He seemed always to be stalking something. We think we saw him consuming barn sparrows for there were feathers leaking out his mouth. No proud crimson Santa was he. Instead a well-traveled logger’s coat smelling heavily of Babbitt bearings. No toy sack, no bells, no “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

Instead he seemed partial to Kentucky plug, the kind sawed off with a Bowie knife. We checked where at the window we saw him. There were claw marks on the sill board, the kind that bobcats and cougars leave. He coursed the farm buildings like an Iroquois warrior intent on scalps. He wove among the trees. He kept to the shadows. He darted. He weaseled. He slunk. Reminding us of a wolf the way he loped. He needed no reindeer, except a recipe. He could clear a chicken yard fence at a bound. He needed no deer to fly; he almost flew himself, if reminiscent of bumblebees.

His eyes could pierce children to their marrow, how good or bad we were, plain to see as the soft bones of our skeleton. He always looked hungry. He muttered, never out loud, not Christmas carols but oaths and omens.

“Woe to the wicked

Hex on the bad

Be early to bed

Listen to your dad.”

To leave little wonder in whose employ this Santa Claws was.

We quivered and shrank under the weight of Santa Claws, the odor he left behind like a mink farm, rank and heavy. Where he spit in the snow it glistened of green slime, melting the snow to bare ground. Never again would we sass our mom, his verse in our ears:

“Forget not your chores

And wipe your feet

Hasp the cattle shed door

Pick up neat.”

His carols were always chore-detailing, sung in the key of W as stands for woe to any who failed to comply. It would be years before we next complained all because of the passage of this unco Santa and his uncouth ways. This, the Santa Claws who asked whether we were good boys and far too wise to trifle with toys.

He came, he went, he merged with the dark. He howled like wolves. He pranced like some Ice Age creature left behind, saber-tooth comes to mind; he chortled, he snickered, never laughed.

Out of the darkness came his creepy doomful voice, “be good or else.” Good or else, we did not seek legal counsel. With a slap at his side he was gone, the specter vanished. We ought have tracked him but thought better of it, thinking he was out there waiting for us to investigate, this carnivore of children.

Only later did we realize the ruse. This Santa Claws invention dreamed up by the men of the feedmill gang to cure children at that formative stage. Cured of Christmas too grand, too pricey, too toyed, for what economics can bear that? We were tutored early not to dream extravagantly, to think kindly of barn chores, to resist the consumer’s disease, for that is how we were to thrive against greater odds.

A cruel lesson was Santa Claws. We feared offending that he might snatch us and take us away to a soup plant where disobedient farmkids go. He passed eventually into the mists, this Santa Claws, displaced by the jolly kind always so happy dispensing credit cards and payment plans. The happy shopping Santa Claus who has reigned supreme against that dour farm country Claws, the one who sang out from the winter night

“Woe to the wicked

Hex on the bad

Be early to bed

Listen to your dad.”