Santa: Too Big to Fail

Second Place, adults' stories

Eric Church |

12/18/2008 - 12/19/08

Santi awoke on the morning of a day in early December 2009 with a mixed delight in his status as retired philanthropist-bachelor-slash-sports-talk radio host. Mrs. Claus wanted to reconcile. Yet life in the San Luis Valley continued to suit him. He had no desire to return to the North Pole.

Santi's early 1960's model F-150 pickup sat parked out adjacent to the trailer. It still purred like a kitten, thanks to the many hours he spent under the hood on warm autumn afternoons. He'd had a few flames painted on the wheel wells and on the truck's doors at the Alamosa auto detailer. The metallic gold finish glinted. Heads turned and hands waved when he drove his truck the 25 mph speed limit down the three-block Antonito strip.

Santi had dropped the suspension another few inches in the past year. The truck rode quite low now, so that he had to drive really quite slowly on the muddy, rutted drive up to the trailer, so as not to drag the muffler. Dropping the suspension was a commitment he'd made, an embrace of his new life in the hardscrabble valley. Like the accommodations any man makes to late middle age, a natural slowing down and a dropping of the center of gravity.

With the acceptance of late middle age came a happy, quiet grace: an absence of shame in the bifocals that perched on the end of his nose, a broadening of the skill set so as to include the ability to work on a pickup and to repair broken furniture and the aging plumbing of an old mobile home, and a certain earned privilege to dispense wisdom to his homies in the mostly empty Antonito bar.

The handful of wild pintos on his small 5-acre plot ambled peaceably by the banks of the Conejos, where it cut through a corner of the property. Santi's KRZA sports talk show at drive time was the most popular show the station carried. His listeners endured the almost unbearable fake-folksiness of the syndicated Jim Hightower program and the dreadful piped-in blues program hosted by Dan Aykroyd just to be sure not to miss Santi's opening take on the valley's local hockey leagues and his pointed perception of the sad state of Denver's pro sports teams.


North Pole Enterprises was, it turned out, not seen as so vital to the world economy that it would be bailed out. No one, not Hank Paulsen, not Tim Geithner, no one from Treasury came to see Santa, as he called himself back in those days, to propose backstopping this massive philanthropic gift-giving operation. Was a responsible employer of a unionized workshop, one that brought joy and happiness to uncountable gentiles and agnostics and vague believers in "peace" and "joy" the world over, just going to be allowed to collapse?

Well, yes was the short answer.

And so, with a remarkable lack of ceremony, in Q3 2007, as they stamped the dates on the bank documents, the suits from the bank came and stripped Santa of all the assets of his previous business, North Pole Enterprises, LLC. NPE credit default swaps skyrocketed overnight, and Santa signed over the business the next day to Price Waterhouse to clean up the debt.

Santa had a couple beers at the North Pole Tavern and Grille that night, went home, had one final roll in the hay with Mrs. Claus — literally in the hay, out in the reindeer stables, because they'd been locked out of the house and the workshop. And there in Q3 2007, he walked away from the workshop, the warehouse, the reindeer stables, the various outbuildings. He put the key in an envelope and wedged it into the bolt of the lockbox on the door of the home. And just like that, with the home now worth less on the open market than could be justified by the payments on his ARM, and dispossessed of it in any case, he walked away from the house with its two oversized candy canes perched at slightly non-parallel angles framing the front door. Just walked off the whole patch of frozen tundra. The Clauses had foreclosed.

Christmas 2007 came and went, with parents the world over trying to take up the slack. Innocence was lost. Dreams featuring dancing plums and fantasies of a beneficent jolly old man bringing gifts to deserving children were shattered by all-too-real late-night scenes of angry moms repairing unraveling stockings, bitter and cursing fathers barely able to get the fake-wood-paneled station wagon to start up to go buy an overpriced tree at the exurban tree lot. Scenes, frankly, not wholly different from other years, but for the general pall that was cast over the entire season this year. It was post-Christmas morning Whoville, pre-handholding, pre-vocal harmonizing Whoville. Whoville prior to the mass dawning of the true meaning of Christmas. It was the part of Whoville where they'd discovered they'd been took, but good, and Santa had gone AWOL.

The news of the collapse of North Pole Enterprises, LLC had been in the headlines for two months. Family meetings were held around kitchen tables. The words "There is no Santa" were spoken to horrified and wide-eyed children, hard-bitten dads making contemptuous finger quotation signs around the word Santa.

Santa, meanwhile, effectively dropped off the face of the earth. He settled into a small mobile home near Antonito. He traded in his ridiculous red suit — which he'd always hated — for some flannel shirts and blue jeans and a pair of black-plastic shades. He tied a red bandana low around his forehead and bought the truck and by virtue of his deep, comforting voice got a low-level, late-night DJ job at KRZA. He began to call himself Santi. Indeed, there was and there remains a Santa; he just needs a gap-year and an alias.

Mrs. Claus, or Ginger, as she would begin to call herself sometime in Q2 2008, and Santa had decided to "take some time apart" after the liquidation of late 2007. Of course, these decisions aren't made mutually. One person proposes it, and the other person pretends to acquiesce and to be in accord and stifles disbelief and later goes home and cries in a pillow and plays maudlin pop songs for a week.

Santa reeled. It would be fair to say he was unsettled, and it would be fair to say he was drinking too much during Q2 and parts of Q3 2008. But the fact was, Mrs. Claus felt the simple need to finish her MBA at Wharton, which she'd started with an online distance program a year earlier and the practicalities of which now required on-site attendance. She did just that, and in remarkably little time. With diploma newly in hand, she promptly shorted all the right funds, mainly real estate and financial ETFs, so that in a year in which Santa's 401(k) lost 40 percent of its net value, amazingly, Mrs. Claus' very substantial portfolio was up a healthy 55 percent. The unwinding of the global financial system had only enriched Ginger Claus.

She tracked Santa down through phone calls to the radio station and came to visit him in the valley one day in December 2008. She fell in love with the simple life and the lax zoning codes. She was sick of her short stint as a trader at Goldman Sachs and wanted out.

Ginger loved the unpredictable rumbling-by of the train. She loved the bracing cold winter, the long-ago bottomed-out real estate market, the half-buried potato storage buildings. She imagined a revamped Santa warehouse being operated out of the abandoned Perlite warehouse near Antonito. She proposed reconstituting the Claus philanthropic endeavor, and she explained how she would tilt the joint portfolio toward longer-term holdings and get out of exotic derivatives altogether, perhaps keeping a stake in some of the UltraShorts. And one night after a romantic candlelit dinner and a glass of Chianti, a meal Santa had made in the trailer's simple kitchen, Mrs. Claus approached Santa with a stimulus plan.

The next day they settled on the terms of the operation going forward. First and foremost: gifts to all deserving children at physics-defying delivery rates, as before. But no more reindeer, no more animal husbandry in any form. For gift delivery purposes they'd make the Ford F-150 fly; some of Santa's vatos up at the AutoZone in Alamosa had some ideas along those lines. They'd hire a local work force, mas before, to build the toys. They happily agreed to ditch the ridiculous outfits they'd worn every year till 2007.

"Yes! Of course! Lose the red outfits forever! Why didn't we do that long ago?!" They'd buy new clothes of earth tones, sewn from hemp. They'd put in a small garden in the spring on the other side of the trailer from the driveway. They'd eat organic, patronize the farmers markets, maybe get some photo-voltaic panels, and get off the grid entirely in subsequent years. Santa would keep the sports talk show. Mrs. Claus would join the women's hockey team over in Monte Vista.

It would be their new life; like the old one, only better.