Famous Last words

I sneezed glitter at work the other day.

Excuse me, did I say glitter? I meant snowflakes. I sneezed glistening snowflakes. Well, I shouldn’t say that I sneezed snowflakes; it was more like I sneezed and glitter, excuse me, snowflakes, came out of my nose and onto my tissue. But you understand.

“God bless you!” A little voice said. The child was standing right next to me in the maze.

I squatted down low to this little girl, a complete stranger, and said, “Why thank you! I knew Santa put you on the nice list for a reason this year! He can’t wait to see you!” I gave the child a high-five.

“Thanks, how many Santa’s you got working today?” The child’s mother asked with a thick Jersey accent.

There are four to six Santa Clauses working at any given time in Macy’s Santaland.

“Oh! There’s only one Santa Clause of course!” I replied in a loud voice, hoping others in the line would get it.

“Ok, but really?”

This mother was a persistent. Er, mother? I meant big kid. There are no moms, dads, or grandparents; only kids and big kids in Santaland.

“Haven’t you ever seen Miracle on 34^th Street?! Santa Clause is here and he’s the real deal!” I said, correcting the big kid. I then channeled Vanna White and made a big sweeping arm gesture with a smile on my face in an effort to kindly tell them to keep the line moving.

Two and a half hours later I was still standing in the same spot in the maze. I was positioned at Santa’s sleigh, right before entering Santa’s Village. My main job was to stop children from grabbing hold of the toys and to keep the line moving. Occasionally I’d tell children about how it was my job to load Santa’s sleigh, or I would point to the huge snow globe directly behind me, where a video of Santa waving was playing, and tell the children that Santa could see them through the globe and was waving at them specifically because he was so excited they were coming.

“Step right up! Every step is a step closer to Santaaaa!” I yelled. I was using my hands as a megaphone. My words startled the family that was using the scenery as if it was there for their personal photo shoot into moving. I had seen the mom position her three children into at least five different poses and each time the youngest child would look away at the last possible moment.

The family moved along, but I soon realized it was part of a mega group: a big extended family of nearly twenty people. The end of the line was mostly made up of 20-somethings, meaning that I didn’t have to come up with the same creative bullshit (“I know the tooth fairy”, or “Mrs. Clause designed our costumes!”) like I usually do.

“Merry Christmas!” I exclaimed.

“Merry Christmas,” a cute 20-something male replied back. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Silverbelle!”

“Well, how are you today Silverbelle?”

I could have explained that I had been standing in the same spot for three and half hours. I could have told him about how I had woken up at seven a.m. in order to get to Macy’s in time for the beginning of my shift. I could have related to him that I either was suddenly feeling hung over from the two glasses of wine I had had the night before or was possibly being let down by the caffeine high I had experienced after my large cup of coffee I drank earlier. But I didn’t do any of these things. Instead I answered, “Great! How about yourself?”

This time the man didn’t answer, instead his girlfriend chimed in. The woman said, “Well, we stood in line for an hour and a half, and now we’re being rushed through Santaland. This whole thing blows, Silverbelle.”

When Santaland reaches its peak hours, roughly one-thousand people see Santa. That means that if this family was standing in line for an hour and a half, there were roughly fifteen hundred people standing in line before them. During a trip to see Santa in peak hours you spend only about twenty minutes in actual Santaland. The other hour-and-some-odd-minutes you spend in a line that snakes through several open spaces, hallways, and all around every hallway of Macy’s Harold Square’s Human Resources department. If everybody took their grand old time in the maze around Santaland this line would be at least an hour longer. Macy’s, the largest department store in the world, cannot accommodate this.

I was trying to come up with a cheerful happy-go-lucky response, but I was saved by Nutmeg coming to take my post. I traveled the rest of the way through the maze and into the hidden doorway going toward my manager for my next marching orders. Outside the manager’s door there was a line of four or five other elves.

“It’s hell out there, isn’t it?!” one of the elves says to me.

I’m not sure which elf; she could have been named snowflake, gumdrop, or hazelnut for all I know. Whichever it was, I thought about her words, and I thought about my saga in the North Pole. It was tiresome, and the frozen smile on my face hurt all of the muscles in my cheek. My throat was dry and my voice husky from all the lies I had told about me and my relationship with Santa and the other elves. It was annoying to think about all the people who took the experience for granite.

But before I could say any of this, a funny thing happened: I remembered all the children who gave me huge grins, shy smiles, or looks of wonderment every time I told them something about Santa.

I took out a tissue from my apron and I answered her, “eh, it’s not so bad.”

And really, it isn’t so bad.

I hardly noticed the glitter in my booger as I threw away the tissue.

Really.