By the early 2000s, I’d been working at A&R long enough to see the book seasons come and go: Summer Madness, Autumn Readings, Winter Warmers and Spring into Books. However Summer-themed book promotion was always interrupted by the bookstore’s happiest (& most profitable) time of year.
Christmas.
Every year, exasperated parents remark that “the Christmas promotion starts earlier and earlier every year.” As someone who was in the thick of it, they’re not wrong. Christmas was the best time for book sales; books are classy, store and travel well, are easy to wrap, and come in varieties to meet almost everyone’s taste. Even if Christmas shoppers didn’t want the usual book (I think my own family had resigned themselves to always getting books for birthday and Christmas presents by this point), A&R was at the ready with diaries, vouchers and calendars featuring Gary Larson comics or funny cats (so many cat calendars).
Which meant that while casuals waved away the summer heat and promoted books about surfing and camping, behind the scenes, a Yuletide-themed avalanche was slowly gaining momentum.
“Hey Scruffy, have you seen the box of Christmas Santa hats?” called Katherine from behind a tall stack of book boxes, with the only part of the manager visible being the streak of purple hair.
“Do we really need them?” I called back, fumbling with rolls of gift-wrap. “I mean, they’re scratchy as hell and as soon as it starts to get hot –“
“Don’t even think about trying to weasel out of this, Chris,” replied Katherine in warning tones. “And if I find out you’ve ‘dropped’ them somewhere I’ll-”
“I think I might have seen them in the staffroom,” I replied meekly. “They were probably stored there for safekeeping.”
“I don’t believe a word of it, Scruffy, so don’t give me any bullcrap,” said the middle-aged manager, giving me a knowing smile as she emerged from the piles of books and boxes crammed into the upper room of the store. “Now, go and give them to the all the casuals to wear – and that means you too – then get them started on putting up the decorations.”
Resigned, I put on the scratchy cotton Santa cap and wondered off to find the other casuals. Dan accepted the red and white hat with an eye roll and pulled the cotton cap over his head.
“You know this looks embarrassing and fake,” he said accusingly, folding his arms like a jolly bouncer waiting in front of Santa’s workshop. Anton was also unwilling – the slightly round musician was also a devout Jehovah’s Witness and not a fan of Christmas in general, simply taking the red and white hat with a quiet frown.
Denise however was easy to convince, throwing on her cap and beaming at everyone. Lana, surprisingly, took hers without any complaint.
“I thought a Santa hat would be a bit too mainstream for you,” I remarked, struggling to poke my errant fringe back into the red and white promotional cap.
“Are you kidding?” she replied. “Christmas was originally a pagan festival! It involved drinking, blood sacrifice, feasts and a ton of ritualistic sex.”
The short young woman threw on the Santa cap, letting the pompom fall down in front of one eye as she smiled wickedly at me.
“So am I ready for Christmas?” she asked, stretching languorously. “What do you think?”
I think I need to say some Hail Marys and have a cold bath, I thought to myself.
“Uh, yep, you definitely look the part – or something,” I muttered. “I’d better go and find Elaine.”
I’m fairly certain I heard Lana laughing as I left, but I eventually found the last member of the casual staff. However, Elaine had already donned her own Santa hat, complete with tinsel and a tiny Santa’s sleigh. It was the most garish, hideous piece of Christmas kitsch I’d seen, even more so since it was on the head of the most fashionably elegant woman in the store.
“That, is, well-” I started, but the bronze-skinned young woman waved at me in excitement.
“Wait! Wait! You haven’t seen the best bit!” she said happily. “Watch this!”
Elaine fumbled underneath her red and white cap, and a moment later the tinsel lit up, highlighting some cheap stitching that spelled “HAPPY XMAS!!”
“I’m not going to lie to you, Elaine,” I ventured, scratching my chin thoughtfully. “That is… just awful.”
“Christmas is supposed to be fun,” said the young woman in exasperation, taking off the novelty item and shaking her long wavy hair free as she switched off the lights. “Don’t be such a snob.”
“I’m not a snob!” I protested. “Although I do think Christmas is over-commercialized.”
“It’s all part of what makes it special,” shrugged the young woman. “Are the customers still going to have a visit from Santa this year?”
I tried not to roll my eyes. The year before, A&R had done it’s best to compete for the Christmas dollar by hosting “a visit from Santa,” (one of the life staffers in a cheap costume and a pillow shoved down their pants), as well as putting up a huge Christmas tree in the front window of the store. I’d sighed and simply gone along for the wildly inaccurate winter themed presentation, but Elaine in particular had loved every second of it; being a dazzling Santa’s helper, singing to the carols played on the store’s sound system and hand-making a gold wire angel of intricate design for the A&R tree.
“Yes, I’m sure Jolly Old Saint Nick will be eager to put on his $5 costume and stand out in the summer heat,” I replied. Seeing Elaine’s crestfallen look, I hastily added “Look, I’ll go and check that the Christmas Tree is going up, ok?”
“Make sure they use the angel I made!” called Elaine as I headed back up into the storeroom on the upper floor. There, hemmed in on all sides by the stacks of boxes and Christmas-themed merchandise, was Dan, with a worried look on his face.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “Elaine’s angel is missing.”
“What d’you mean?” I asked incredulously. “It’s gone?”
“No, I mean it’s called in sick,” came the sarcastic reply. “Yes, I mean it’s gone.”
“Well it’s not like it can just sprout wings and fly away,” I snapped, before hesitating. “Well, I mean, technically – look, where do you think it’s gone?”
“I don’t know!” said Dan despondently. “I packed it all up last year, and marked up the side of the box, but – well, see for yourself.”
Shaking my head, I took the box from the muscular casual that had the words “Christmas Crap” scrawled haphazardly on the side. Sure enough, the interior was packed with cookbooks that were now a year out of date.
“Oh God, this is bad,” moaned Dan, rubbing his forehead. “Elaine is going to kill me.”
I followed the worried figure down to the basement counter, where Elaine and Denise were putting up strings of stars and tinsel.
“We’ve got a problem,” said Denise, the tall, tawny-haired young woman frowning.
“How did you know?” replied Dan, amazed.
“Know what?” asked Elaine, her eyes narrowing.
Dan and I shared a started glance, waiting for the other to speak.
“Ah, why don’t you tell us what your problem-“ I said.
“The problem,” interjected Dan.
“Yeah, tell us what the problem is,” I finished weakly.
“Matthew has called in sick,” replied Denise. “So we don’t have a Santa for the children’s Christmas storytime.”
“That sucks,” I nodded slowly. “But perhaps we can find a stand-in.”
“So what problem did you want to tell me about?” asked Elaine, raising a perfectly sculpted eyebrow suspiciously.
“Perhaps we can find a stand-in right now,” I added, shooing Denise out from behind the counter and heading back to the stairs with her.
Dude! mouthed Dan, spreading his hands in a silent motion of betrayal.
I’m sorry! I mouthed as I backed away. As Dan’s and Elaine’s voices began to carry up the basement stairs, Denise turned to me with a look of confusion.
“Remember that angel Elaine made last year?” I said. “It’s gone missing. Dan must have put it in the wrong box.”
“Yikes,” replied the young woman with a frown. “Elaine really poured her heart and soul into that angel.”
The voices drifting up from the lower floor began to get sharper, and Denise shook her head.
“Well, we can still find a replacement Santa,” she said brightly. “That’s bound to cheer her up.”
“And I’ve got just the person in mind,” I replied with a smile.
“Absolutely not,” said Anton flatly. “Nuh-uh. Not going to happen.”
“But think of all the happy children!” I pleaded. “Besides, you’re perfect for it!”
“And why would that be?” asked the tousle-haired music student coldly, folding his arms.
“Well, I mean, you’re, uh – ” I stuttered, waving vaguely at Anton’s slightly round frame.
“I’m what?” he growled.
“You’re… Christian?” I finished lamely.
“And you’re a Catholic, you do it,” he snapped.
I looked hopefully at Denise, but she just shook her head.
“Fine,” I muttered, and trudged back upstairs to the storeroom. After fishing out the cheap cotton Santa suit, I slipped it over my work uniform and tried not to think about whether the red and white suit had ever been washed.
“It’s not that bad,” said Denise, trying to adjust the folds of the baggy outfit.
“Are you kidding?” I protested. “This is hanging off me! My hands barely reach the ends of the sleeves – I look like one of the elves trying on Santa’s clothes!”
“I’ll admit it makes you look a bit scruffier than usual,” said Katherine, poking her head around the side of the staffroom door. “How did you go with those decorations?”
“Ah, we’re working on it,” I replied, pulling the baggy cheap cotton off. “The problem is that the angel for the Christmas tree that Elaine made last year has been put in the wrong box.”
“So what?” asked the purple-haired woman. “Which box did it end up in?”
Denise sighed and led the middle-aged manager out into the upper floor storeroom, which was packed from wall to wall with stacks of books, Christmas merchandise and the extra boxes of pulp fiction trash that A&R only sold when there was a major event on.
“Well, we know the angel is in one of these boxes,” shrugged the young woman. “Or at least, we’re pretty sure it is.”
Katherine rolled her eyes and gave a long-suffering sigh.
“Look, I can spare you for ten minutes,” she said seriously. “This is our busiest time of year, and the Mothers are lining up for someone to do the visit from Santa. “If you can’t find it by then, Elaine will just have to deal with it.”
We nodded glumly, and as the manager left Dan dragged himself up the stairs.
“How did you go?” I asked, opening boxes at random until I was deep within the stacks.
“Yeah, she’s pretty pissed,” Dan muttered, his muscular shoulders seemingly deflated from the tongue-lashing he had received. “I told her she could just buy another one, and that made her even angrier.”
“Oh Dan, you didn’t!” said Denise, shaking her head as she disappeared between a stack of books and tools of promotional posters. “You know how much she loves all the Christmas stuff!”
“I couldn’t help it!” protested Dan, the tall figure picking up stacks of dictionaries and shifting them aside with a grunt as he worked his way across the storeroom. “All of this snowy tinsel Santa crap – it’s so embarrassing and cringeworthy! Does anyone actually believe all this?”
“I do,” came a reply from the stairs. I couldn’t see Dan from the shoulder-high boxes I was sorting through, but I could imagine his expression as Elaine stepped out of the stairwell.
“Look, Elaine,” said Dan, as I heard him stomp out from his stack of cardboard boxes. “I didn’t mean it like that, it’s just-““
“I came up to let you know that the children are getting out of control,” said the beautiful young woman with polite chilliness. “So we’re cancelling the visit from Santa.”
There was a long pause, during which I spotted Denise in an adjacent stack. We exchanged worried glances but kept our heads low. Finally we heard Dan sigh.
“Alright, look, I’ll deal with the rioting kids, you, I don’t know, do-“
“I already have something that I’m doing,” replied Elaine, and we heard the door to the manager’s office shut firmly.
“Sooo…” I whispered to Denise, but the tawny-haired young woman just shook her head.
“Try not to judge them,” she remarked, looked through a few more boxes. We continued in awkward silence for another five minutes or so, until Katherine poked her head back around the side of the stairs.
“Alright you two, time’s up,” she announced. “Denise, I need you on the back counter. Chris, you’re on the lower ground counter – you’d better hurry, the children’s story time is going a bit haywire.”
“Good luck,” said Denise as I frowned and slouched down to the lower ground floor. However, when I worked my way through the small crowd of mothers, I heard a familiar voice over the gaggle of small children.
“And the Wild Things roared their terrible roars, and gnashed their terrible teeth, and rolled their terrible eyes, and showed their terrible claws.”
There, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a circle of children who were giggling in delight, was Dan, dressed in the Santa outfit and smiling as he read to the children. Next to me, one of the mothers nudged her friend.
“Damn,” she whispered. “Santa’s been working out.”
I stayed and listened for a few minutes, and to his credit, Dan was really getting into the part, particularly when it came to acting out the Wild Things of the Maurice Sendak story. As I smiled and turned to go, I was met by Elaine, who was watching Dan with a grin and holding a gold wire angel in her hands.
“You found it!” I said. “How many boxes did you look in?”
“Just the one,” replied the young woman easily. “All I had to do was look on the store’s inventory for which box held the rest of the cookbooks that Dan put into the Christmas box by mistake.”
I managed to stop myself from doing a silent Why didn’t I think of that? motion, and together we watched Dan continue to entertain the kids.
“So why go to so much trouble over this?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me asking?”
Elaine smiled as she kept her eyes on Dan.
“My grandparents migrated to Australia from overseas,” she said quietly. “A place where you couldn’t celebrate Christmas openly. Now I never really went in for the whole church thing, but events like this -” the young woman shrugged. “It’s a way of feeling close to them.”
To this I had no reply, and together we watched as Dan roared with laughter at the kids surrounding him and opened another book.
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