Christmas Eve, 1966….It was a cold and snowy Saturday…..so snowy in fact that there were near blizzard conditions, and “thunder snow”…..something I’d never seen before. I was out delivering bread that day with my godfather, Uncle Frankie, and looking forward to the eventual evening’s feast of fish…..which, since I was only 15 at the time, still hadn’t grown to appreciate. In fact, I still don’t. It never made any sense to me how anyone could make a salad out of seafood that gave off an odor so foul that it lingered in the house for days! But…well, that’s neither here nor there!

Part of the evening’s tradition involved the eventual visit from Santa Claus. Now, you’re probably thinking, “….if you’re 15 at the time, you can’t possibly still believe in Santa?” Well no, I didn’t….but I still had my kid sister and my cousin that did…..and even if they didn’t, it was still something of an event when Santa came to the house. A cowbell would clang, someone would rush in screaming, “…I hear banging on the roof….I think he’s here…..it’s Santa”…and then Santa himself, or someone in a Santa outfit would scurry in…bellowing in his best “ho ho ho”….practically throwing our gifts at us so as not to be identified by us wiseass kids. After all, you didn’t want the kids to identify which of the older cousins was playing Santa…that would spoil the fun! Besides, everyone by then knew it was either one of my uncle’s nephews Tommy or Joey. C’mon, who where they kidding? You couldn’t pull anything over on the wiseass kids from East 4th St.!

But that year, Tommy and Joey, and my Uncle….collectively known at the “Reindeer Club”…were all snowed in! Uncle Frankie had the Santa outfit in a closet a block away…Tommy and Joey….well, who the hell knew where they were, and that night it was still snowing so hard, they would never have made it out anyway. This presented a problem…..who was left to distribute the toys to the kids? You guessed it…..me….all of 115 lbs soakin’ wet! And the real cool thing was that now I’d get to be a part of that elite group known as the “Reindeer Club”. Not that it had any special privileges or anything….it was sort of a “coming of age”…..like a bar mitzvah, only for goyim! “Today you are a man…..just don’t tell your cousins who’s playing Santa!” That was the initiation….I think they do something like this when they initiate you into the mob!

Anyway, once we trudged through the snow, and made it to my Uncle’s apartment, I was outfitted with the Santa suit. 4 pillows later and a lot of eye makeup to make me look scary enough so that the kids wouldn’t get too close to me…and we were off! Dashing through the snow….without the one horse open sleigh….exposed to the elements…and the Ave U wiseasses who took the opportunity to bust my chops wanting to know what Santa had in the bag for them. I could have said something like “o’gotz”, but that wouldn’t have been too Santa-like…so I let Uncle Frankie handle it.

First stop was Grandma’s apartment over the bakery. The usual characters were there… aunts, uncles, cousins, and my biggest pain in the ass cousin….Dominick, who I thought was gonna heave up a lung when he saw me….that’s how loud he laughed! But the best reaction was the one Grandma had...sheer terror, as she cowered in her chair gazing up at this figure that, to her, looked like the grim reaper, all the while saying in Italian….”chi e’ sandi claus?" (Who is Santa Claus?) There was no way I was going to convince her it was me.

It was easy to convince the group in the next round…..they were a little bit older…..my Aunt Grace, and O’ Zi’ who lived upstairs from us. Aunt Grace had a voice like sheet metal being ripped…..”ohhh, is that Ray Ray”…..she kept saying over and over between puffs of a Pall Mall.

But the real acid test came next…..downstairs….the Rossi house….and this was “showtime”, because here is where the kids were! One bad move and Santa would have been outted. Uncle Frankie kept going over the line with me……..”no, it’s ho, ho, ho (deeper), and whatever you do, don’t look at any of the kids, ‘cause they’ll know who you are.”

So in we go, Uncle Frankie ringing the cowbell, somebody else screaming, “...he’s here, he’s here”, and in I go. Chrissy, Frankie Boy, who gets a bike, who gets a doll, bam, bam, bam….who’s laughing, and all the while I’m worrying that my “ho ho hos” would be adequate. I’d say we were in and out in 2 minutes! We had thieves in the neighborhood that would have stayed longer!

I’d like to tell you that Santa would have hung around for the traditional milk and cookies before being whisked away by the reindeer and the sleigh….but that wasn’t to be. It was a 63 Pontiac that took him away….ever so slowly back to Uncle Frankie’s and Aunt Fran’s to shed the Santa suit…so that I could return to my life as a 15 year old and maybe get a piece of my mother “migliaccio” (cheese cake) before everyone else glommed it!