FINDING SANTA...

Everybody takes Santa for granted.

He's usually some nice guy who likes kids and doesn't mind pitching in over the holidays. And it doesn't hurt if he's a little big in the beam and happens to have gray hair...

And while today’s elusive Santas may have been taken for granted in the past, the same is not true today.

The big question is why.

The fact is that the Santas of the world are becoming a rapidly disappearing species like the Unicorn or that special mysterious woodpecker who keeps popping up only to disappear again!


But there's a good reason for the disappearing Santas.

. First of all, most parents today tend to slip and slide over the issue of discipline. As a result, kids are no longer bound by conventional rules of behavior meaning that the sky is the limit.

Therefore, were anybody naively volunteering to help out, they would discover quite early in the game that it doesn’t hurt to have a Special Ops background with a major in survival skills.

And the wisdom is that one does not take on the mantle of Santa without being prepared for anything. Kicks to the shins. Pokes in the solar plexus? Routine, I’m sorry to say. The truth is that today’s kids tend to be much more creative in the punishments they dole out to unsuspecting Santas whose training for the most part hardly got beyond a kindly Ho-Ho-Ho!

Sadly, such demonstrations of conventional child-Santa relations seldom prevail in the Lord of the Flies scenarios that seem to describe most Christmas departments in this day and age.

No, being a Department Store Santa is no walk in the park.

Especially if you forgot junior’s super powered sled last or the toy rocket "you" promised. Be prepared. Always wear a codpiece.

But if the think the job of being a Santa is bad, try recruiting one four weeks before the big event.

The hard reality is that nobody wants the job. I'm convinced of that. Why? Because I've spent the last few weeks trying to recruit one. You're asking me how I got that choice assignment? Well, I had been asked to help out because my bosses figured that I am friendly and like kids. But unfortunately for them, I was already committed to a job. So, no big deal I figured. I would recruit their Santa in the blink of an eye with one or two phone calls at most.

I began with my perfect choice for Santa. But it turned out that he was a cancer survivor and had to watch his immune system I was advised. Okay, I can buy into that.

Next, I tried another friend, another good bet.
However, he told me he'd rather work from dawn to dusk schlepping around heavy rolls of felt and eight foot sections of plywood than sit down on a throne all day to be poked and prodded by kids with attitude.

That's what I ran into all day. A lot of grown men totally terrified of facing a line of kids with rapacious greed and consuming hunger in their eyes.

But this was the coup de grace. One friend, who I was convinced would take on the task, said, "no way."

I rather dejectedly asked why. He said that he could get in trouble if he were accidentally to hold the kid in the wrong way; he said he had seen it happen. In this litigious world, anxiously seeking out villains everywhere, it behooves an erstwhile Santa to hedge his bets.

Eventually, I suspect that the ideal solution will take the shape of an android Santa, impervious to everything from Death Rays to a knee to the groin. Certainly, the risk to life and limb will be reduced and insurance premiums should be virtually nonexistent; moreover, you never know, this might serve as a creative source of new jobs to offset the jobs that fled to other countries with strange-sounding names.

Les Aaron