A Prayer for the Off-Peak Hours Mall Santa

The one doing the Lord's work.

Photo by Jesson Mata on Unsplash

Mall Santa is a tough gig at 1:37 PM on the Friday before Thanksgiving. The mall in question is a not a bad place per se, not dead, maybe not even dying, but still not—how do we say?—robust. There’s a Coldwell Banker office there and, well, nothing against them but it’s not a store; it’s not drawing in business—not the mall kind, at least—and I take it as a poor omen for the future of the whole mall endeavor. There’s a gym, too—a nice one, well-regarded but still, not a store—occupying what definitely should be an anchor tenant space—a Macy’s or a JCPenny or, in a different lifetime, Sears—but now it’s just full of rowing machines and free weights and abs that are tighter than mine and smoothie counters and you don’t even have to enter the mall to access it. Seems like a design flaw, really. At least try to save this dying breed of shopping experience. Anyway, Santa’s there all the same—on the less popular second floor, mind you—and now it’s 1:38 PM and, to be fair, the place is doing alright. There are people around eating first floor pizza and ogling the holiday trains and—well, it’s still November, and do you really want to see Santa before you have a turkey and stuffing? It’s just not on my radar yet, but there’s a J.Crew Factory store that is and it’s worth stepping in—just for a moment, mind you, I don’t need another sweater—and that’s when I see him: sitting there all alone, save for a half-hearted elf. Santa! The man himself! Red suit, white trim, long face. A kinda sorta replica of maybe the waiting room in the North Pole, like where Santa receives cold calls and the folks who want to know if he’s thought about getting a free quote on his roof. But you have to pay for a photo and, well, I’ve only got the one kid with me, can’t buy the Santa photo sans one-half of the kids. And anyway, do I look like the kind of guy who pays for a Santa photo? You can be honest. But before I can disappear into J.Crew, less-then-jolly old St. Nick spies my little four-year-old and lights up. She does, too. Just joy all around, like someone flipped a switch and powered on Christmas. “Holy shit, it’s Santa!” she screams—or, that’s how we’ll choose here to remember it because I was honestly out of earshot. Santa is so excited and waving her over now, right on past the “Please give your money here” signs, and she’s beside herself and there’s not a living soul on the second floor of this not-quite-sad-but-not-quite thriving mall and so what am I going to do? “Sure,” I say. And she sails right over like a sleigh cutting through a crisp November sky and Santa says what Santa always says: “What do you want for Christmas?” And, again, it’s November and my kid is just not prepared for this question. And so the old elf starts rattling off a few name brands she’s not familiar with and then mispronounces both “Anna” and “Elsa” and we can’t even take a photo because the younger elf is watching and, you know, we don’t want to trip our way onto the naughty list by breaking the mall Santa code of ethics. But Santa seems genuinely happy to have a tiny soul to talk to: He’s all smiles and high fives and Merry Christmas’s—even though we’re really zeroed in on Thanksgiving—and I mean, good for you, dude. You’re doing your best. You’re doing the Lord’s work, even. In silence and fortitude and staring out at an empty mall, you’re determined to bring a giggle to a little girl, even though it’s still November and no one seems to know this mall even has a second floor. And I wonder if that’s not what Christmas is all about.

We talk about Christ coming like the starship Enterprise is going to beam him down into mangers around the world at precisely the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve when really he’s been sitting there the whole time, like the mall Santa of mid-November, with a smile and a hope and a great desire to bring us a just little peace and delight if we but have the wherewithal to stop and notice him.