Carol Klaus Tells All
as told to Lars Din
My name is Carol Klaus. I’m Santa’s evil little twin brother. We were born a few years ago, in 354 AD, the same year pope Liberius proclaimed the nativity as an official Christian holiday. Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is we look nothing like the fat guy on the coca-cola bottle. That guy is the invention of illustrator Haddon Sundblom in 1931, who was likely inspired by drawings Thomas Nast made for Harper’s Magazine in the 1860’s, including the one commissioned by Abe Lincoln as propaganda to demoralize the south; it showed a jolly fat Santa fraternizing with Union troops—an early example of psychological warfare. Boy you Americans love to make up stories that have nothing to do with reality.
Nobody knows about me, which is fine with me, cause I got the girl. Hehheh.
We grew up on the family ranch above the arctic circle, not exactly at the north pole, but close enough that we saw Sir Franklin, and Andree and their ill-fated expeditions. We found it kind of funny actually. Being part of the half-crazy Klaus clan, we find death more amusing than tragic, like the excellent punch line to a long joke. You try living for 1650 years and see how seriously you take death.
Our place is shaped like a horseshoe, with the stable on one side, the workshop on the other and the kitchen in the middle. We sleep in lofts over the kitchen. There are about 300 of us in the family.
Santa’s great love was a Laplander named Ruin. She had red cheeks and a smile like the northern lights, mysterious and spell-binding. Santa was never able to figure out how to be her lover. Let me back up. We both met Ruin when we were in our hundreds (that’s about 40 in human years) one winter afternoon ice fishing. She came skiing along with a reindeer carcass slung over her shoulder, hands and mouth covered in blood. At sixty, she was an awe-inspiring sight. We hardly talked to her that day, but our conversations for days after revolved around that meeting like sparks over a fire. We explored a thousand questions about her: was she straight? Did she like ice-fishing? Was she already married, or otherwise occupied? Could she handle living with a couple hundred rambunctious children?
It turned out she was a loner, having outlived her first three lovers, two men and a woman. And now lived alone. Her two surviving kids had moved to Petersburg. She had also buried two. Santa began bringing her presents: reindeer pate, schnapps, and bowls of the little red ice-fruits the Klaus clan ate for longevity. She never asked what they were, but we figured she knew they were magic. It’s a drag falling in love with someone and they die long before you do. Santa hung out by her cabin a lot, or cruised by at a distance just looking at the plume of smoke from the chimney.But he could never be himself around her. It was sad really. He is an incredibly funny man. Tells the best version of the Franklin expedition of any of us, but she never got to see that side of him. I could tell she began to think of him as nice but a little unstable, looking at her too intensely, the way a wolf watches a rabbit hole. Wanting her too much, or for the wrong reasons, maybe, like she could justify him, direct his jolly wildness. She was classy, in a rowdy way, and comfortable with who she was, whereas Santa was this fairly young (by our standards) prankster, with a taste for hard liquor and dancing. My favorite prank he pulled back then was the time he mixed up all the kids’ shoes. They were all laid out carefully under the enormous kitchen stove and he just as carefully rearranged them. Imagine 280 children wanting to go out and play in the snow and not being able to find their boots! Papa Klaus was not amused, and strategically disappeared into the workshop for the rest of the day, but us older kids thought it was hilarious, the chaos and screaming and broken pottery. There were shoelaces in the oatmeal! Many of them ran out in their striped stockings and came back with frostbite. Mama said, you just wait till you have kids…
When Ruin and I started seeing each other, Santa was despondent. His pranks took on a morbid bent. When it was his turn to chop firewood, he’d bring in whole green trees and set them up in the kitchen or workshop, dangling reindeer intestines all over them. He fed ice-fruit to the reindeer, many of which had allergic reactions to them and died. One notable exception was Rudolph, whose nose just turned fluorescent red.Papa Klaus suggested I leave. So Ruin and I moved to Peru, where we lived for many years on MountE—where Ruin had heard of a potato festival. The locals there farm a rare and ancient potato variety of vibrant colors, which change from year to year. The harvest week is a mountainside lit with bonfires and song—the only time of year these austere descendants of the Incas abandon themselves in what they call the frenzies. This week of fasting and uncontrolled drinking leads to a suspension of traditional mores, with often-random outdoor sexual congress. It begins with the harvest of that year’s potato crop, which color becomes the banner color for that year. It wasn’t the arctic, and I missed the changing seasons, the way the sun dies for several months in the winter, and hangs around like a party guest that won’t go home all summer.
Well, you asked how Santa became the Santa you know. When Ruin and I left the arctic he was in rare form, laughing and teasing our younger brothers and sisters. Earlier in the week he had pulled off his biggest stunt yet. It must have taken months, but he had made and wrapped in shiny wax fish-paper over a thousand ice-fishing hooks with seal bait, and stuck the little noisome packages in the socks of theKlaus kids. Most of them didn’t know whether to be excited about getting their first hooks or disgusted by the smell in their socks. In case you didn’t guess, when it gets warm, seal bait stinks.
Anyway, when we left the ranch, he was jolly and conversational, except for one moment when he locked his gaze on Ruin and said in a low voice, I will never forget you. It was a little weird. Mama Klaus covered for the awkwardness by going into a worried harangue about whether the canned ice-fruit would break on our journey.
The next year, when we were settled in Peru, I got a letter from my brother Hord. He wrote that Santa had transformed the workshop--which was mostly used up to that point for fixing reindeer harnesses and other ranch equipment—into an engineering lab. Santa thought he could find away to make reindeer fly. At the end of the letter Hord told a long joke which ended with “Mama and Papa just died.” I had a good laugh over that one, although Ruin thought I was seriously disturbed. I guess I’ll never understand why other people refuse to see death as a good way to die.
I told you I was Santa’s evil brother. And I guess I haven’t told the whole story. I haven’t really told you about our relationship; all the things I told him and he believed me. About how he was the reincarnation of Poseidon, how as a baby he only breastfed on alternate days, and fasted on the others. How he could talk a thousand languages. How peace on earth was just a question of charity, when even then I knew that giving things isn’t enough. How confused he was between wanting things to be right in the world and wanting to be Ruin’s partner. I didn’t tell you how gullible Santa was, and still is, and how I always thought that that gullibleness was a gift that I’d been denied. I was a voracious reader when we were growing up. But knowledge is a liability without action. Knowledge alone is the initial viral stage for despair. And Santa was always the active one. He didn’t care if he was using the wrong bow for hunting walrus; the pleasure was in the hunt, in the long cold walks with frost on your nose and icy lungs. He didn’t even care if we made it back that night, whereas I couldn’t wait to get back to my books and my ideas, and my absolute certainties of how the world works. He didn’t mind being lost, and I guess I resented him. We had nicknames for each other: I called him Sailor; he called me King W, I forget what the W stood for, probably walrus.
Not long after Hord’s letter, the Christmas presents started coming. The locals in that area are nominally Christian, like many rural people with a history of other Western countries controlling their resources. And everyone was tickled by the mysterious appearance of a hoe, or book of matches, or new coat, in their houses. I had a clue about what was going on. The first gift Ruin got was a silver necklace that disappeared in the daylight. It weighed next to nothing, but could illuminate a room by reflection of a candle, or even firelight.
I confess. I’m a jealous man. After Ruin and I first began seeing each other back home, I nearly got Santa drowned for something nice he said about her. I’m not proud of my jealousy, and Santa is not stupid, just gullible. So I guess he figured he had the perfect plan, to give gifts to all the children of the Christian world as a cover for sending Ruin a reminder that he still loves her. That was the winter of 1822, the year a Boston dentist, named Clement C. Moore, wrote that ridiculous account of a visit from Santa Claus, with all its inaccuracies, including his physical size, and the number and the names of his reindeer. For the record, according to Hord, Santa rides ON a reindeer, with the presents suspended in a litter between 12 others. He’s a fucking cowboy. While I’m at it I should mention that the bombing of Iraq 12 years ago nearly took him out on a trip to Turkey—not that that will have any effect on future bombing raids that may or may not take place during so-called holy times.
Ruin died this year. We’d been living in north Florida for a few years and she developed a severe allergy to mercury. We had gone swimming in the Itchetuckneeriver the month before and I don’t know maybe that’s what killed her. I nearly also died, laughing about it all, life and death, charity and hypocrisy. This afternoon I paid a visit to Starke, Florida. And was disappointed by your local culture here, which thinks so little of death that you condemned a very likely innocent man to die by the electric chair at 6 p.m. tonight. Amos King: rest in peace. He’s the lucky one, maybe, for he won’t live any longer locked in a cell, and with the knowledge that the biggest holiday of his country is fueled by the heart-broken efforts of a skinny man, who believes that charity and not justice will bring peace to the earth.
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