With Apologies to David Sedaris

Welcome, folks, to my newest series, where I lovingly explore my memories of working at Santa’s Workshop, in North Pole, New York.

For those of you who don’t know, this is the very first amusement park in the U.S., founded in 1949. It's located near Lake Placid, New York. I worked there as part of the daily entertainment troupe the summer I was 17. By then, the park had fallen on tough times. Money was tight. Corners were cut. The patriarch of the family that owned the place was very old, and everyone knew it would probably be sold soon after he died.

Nevertheless, we soldiered on, with big, mostly fake smiles. Plus, let’s be honest. I was a teenager, working with other teenagers. I didn’t give a crap about any of that. I had a pretty damn fun time, despite the bleak horizon. So let’s take a look, shall we, at what the park was like when I was 17.

*************************

The entirety of the Santa’s Workshop experience can be boiled down into one feature: the North Pole itself. Oh yes, there is an actual pole made of ice, frozen all year round, located right outside Santa’s house. Every morning, the pole would be covered in frost from the frozen dew of the previous night. It was kind of pretty, if you think things like popsicles are pretty. Then, as the day wore on, visitors would make their way to the pole. Little fingernails would trace patterns and names in the frost. Little hands, already covered in maple syrup or candy remnants, would make handprints. Little tongues would inevitably lick the frost from the increasingly unhygienic surface.

By about 10:30 in the morning, the sun would hit the pole, turning whatever was left of the gritty frost into a slick, shiny, melting surface, the sharp edges of fingernail scrapings starting to wear down, the handprints dissolving, the tongue marks all disappearing into a thin ooze which coated the ice. Undaunted, children would continue to lick and touch the pole, all day long, some of them encouraged by parents, who apparently thought that ingesting the frozen bacteria of hundreds of dirty, wet hands was a great photo opportunity.

Everything in the park was like that. It looked great from a distance, but up close, the decay was more than evident. Aside from the occasional coat of paint, the park hadn’t changed much in fifty years. To add to the slightly nightmarish quality, every once in a while the sound equipment that piped holiday music throughout the park would overheat, causing the 1950’s-style jangles to start slowing down, until the music was about half as fast and twice as low as it should have been.

Try playing your favorite Burl Ives on half speed on a record player, you’ll see what I mean. Now picture yourself in a brightly colored wonderland, where every surface has been coated in untold layers of cheap high-gloss enamel, surrounded by pimply, sweating teenagers in stinky, fraying costumes. I ask you: what could better capture the Christmas Spirit?