Santa Frauds
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Spring 2025
From the “Ingrid Cite Society” column.
Dear Ingrid Cite,
You asked for extraordinary holiday confessions for your column. So, here’s mine.
I was eleven years old when I mapped Santa. I was completely ready. He came down the chimney. I had my cards and spellbook ready, and whoosh, I mapped him. He didn’t even know I did it. He was the second cryptid I added to my book (the first was one of my dad’s co-workers, Wendell, who was actually a cryptid disguised as an actuary).
So, after the real-deal Santa was long gone, I would call out my mapped version and ask for details about his operation. It’s all very modern, you should know. If you heard how he decides who goes on the naughty list, you’d flush your phone and erase the hard drive of your computer like it was a drunken weekend to be forgotten. He’s also got some real opinions about fat shaming, and he thinks a guy named Gwenn was the best movie Santa ever.
But how to monetize Santa became the real question and my main objective. Big corporations do it. Why couldn’t I?
Enter Chestnut Point Mall.
I graduated from high school last year—Go Zig-Zags!—and I desperately wanted to go to college, but a word I’d learned in Latin class was my life’s definition: impecunious. Go ahead—look it up. I can wait. I was so broke, my bank was sending me sympathy cards. My credit applications were being rejected before they were even opened. So, I needed to “compensate to educate,” and I needed to do it quickly, before the next semester started. (Ironically, I wanted to study economics.) And Santa was my ticket.
I touched his card and brought him out while we were still in the car, and we walked into the mall together. People looked at us. I took him to the seasonal hiring office and introduced him as my uncle.
“The older he gets,” I explained to Barbara, the bored middle-aged woman interviewing St. Nicks, teenage elves, and photographers for Chestnut Point’s Santa Village, “the more he believes he really is Santa Claus.”
“Ho, ho, ho,” Uncle Santa said. His eye did that stupid twinkle thing it does. “Does Barbara still hope she’ll get a Teddy Ruxpin for Christmas?”
I had no idea who that was. But my mapped Santa has all the same charisma and aura as the real thing, so name-dropping, eye-twinkling, and cult of personality combined to convince the future Mrs. Barbara Ruxpin to sign up my cryptid with hardly any questions. He even came with his own costume. I used all my own information on the employment forms (and direct deposit numbers). And I wrote down that Santa could work twelve-hour shifts all at straight time, if they needed him. Bypassing overtime laws? That’s a holiday pop-up business’s dream. In no time, my mapped version became the sole Santa at Chestnut Point Mall, working seven days a week.
“You seem a little downtrodden for someone whose uncle has so much Christmas cheer,” Barbara said.
“Believe me, he has enough cheer for both of us,” I told her.
Each day, I sat in the little “workshop” behind Santa’s throne where I drank Iced Brown Sugar Oatmilk Shaken Espressos until my hands shook from the caffeine (which took about eight Grandes, FYI). I had both my laptop and my spellbook with me—the former to apply for student loans or check enrollment possibilities, the latter to keep my mapped Santa’s card within easy reach. I didn’t have to concentrate too hard once I called him out of the card—so, while he sat and met kid after kid after the occasional snarky teenager or squabbling pack of siblings who could not smile simultaneously if their survival depended on it, I could work toward my future. All the while, I was banking fifteen dollars an hour, 84 hours a week. Really. Nobody asked a thing about his long days. Santa was making over a thousand dollars a week for me. He never got tired; he never complained. He never needed a bathroom break or a snack. And because he came with all the spirit of jolly old St. Nick, the kids absolutely loved him.
“They’re complaining over at the Springfield Mall,” Barbara marveled to me one day. “I guess people are driving over from their mall just to see our Santa.”
“Springfield Mall’s Santas,” I said, “wear fake beards.”
Barbara nodded. “And they’re scary. Your uncle just draws them in.”
I believed that. Sometimes I would peek out the little fake-frosted windows of Santa’s workshop to see kids lined up by the score. They were waiting for him when the mall opened, and they were still coming even when the mall stores started pulling down their gates at night.
“We should talk commission next year,” I suggested to Barbara, who looked both crestfallen at the idea of shelling out more money but relieved that we might be back next season.
We were decking halls with boughs of dollars until the day I overslept.
On December 24th, just this last winter, I experienced an epic caffeine crash trauma and mental overload. I had applied to Carnegie Mellon and spelled it “Melon” every single time in my application letter. So, I went from sixty to zero in 5.5 seconds and slept for fourteen hours straight. In my clothes. On the floor. I woke up feeling like someone had reinstalled my spine upside down and with the taste of sour oatmilk in the back of my throat.
Santa needed to be at the mall in fifteen minutes.
My parents’ house, where I still live, is twenty minutes from Chestnut Point Mall.
I got us there three minutes early.
I dodged the two elves and the thirty-some-odd kids behind the velvet ropes so I could get into the little workshop and get my act together. I could feel my heartbeat in my kneecaps. My kneecaps, for crying out loud. I don’t even think there are veins in your kneecaps. I set my laptop aside, opened my spellbook—the gentle sound of pages turning was a diesel horn in both of my ears—and slapped my hand down on the page to put Santa out there on his throne to greet the little darlings. In that moment, I wouldn’t say I hated those kids; instead, I found their needy greed for trading cards and Bluey 3-in-1 Airplanes to have all the charm of a deranged possum eating Halloween candy left out on a neighbor’s porch.
For what it’s worth, when kids scream, it might be out of joy…or terror. They sound pretty much the same. I only knew there was a problem when the elves started screaming, too. That was when I stuck my head out of the workshop to see what the problem was.
I mentioned my dad’s co-worker, Wendell, who was the very first cryptid I ever mapped. Wendell was a lizard person disguised as a human, in his case as an actuary at Marcus Brothers and Company. When I looked out at Santa’s throne, there crouched Wendell in full lizard form, fangs clicking as his long tongue slithered in and out of his snout, his tail wrapped around the back of the chair. His eyes flickered back and forth between the two elves—I didn’t know their real names, but their name tags read “Peppermint” and “Chocolate Chip”—and the children who were already high-tailing it across the mall. They ran in half-circles and changed directions often, sometimes accidentally rushing back toward the village before catching themselves, screaming with their arms up in terror, and veering away like airplanes. I would have laughed if I didn’t think my head would explode as a result.
I looked down at my spellbook and realized that I’d touched the wrong card. I mean, they were right next to each other, so it was an honest mistake. It could have happened to anybody; it just happened to happen to me.
I squeezed my eyes shut, my headache popping like bubble wrap, and willed the lizard man away. When I opened my eyes again, Chocolate Chip was squatting with her hands over her tucked head while Peppermint was chattering away, panicked, on her phone. I realized I had stopped Wendell just before the cookie was crumbled.
The oxymorons that comprised the Chestnut Point Mall security team were huffing and puffing toward Santa Village, so I calmly called my mapped Santa. I told him he knew nothing and to charm with his cheer. He seemed good with that.
It probably goes without saying that they shut down Santa Village for the season—it was already Christmas Eve, anyway, and the mall let its own security try to figure out what had happened instead of calling the cops. It was like watching somebody guessing how to make eggnog. Again, it was a laughing matter, but I didn’t have it in me to rise to the occasion.
So, after a couple of hours of security questions that always began with “Uh, um, so…” I went home. On the 26th, the Chestnut Chronicle, our local paper, ran this headline:
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Lizards!
Santa Has Claws at Chestnut Point Mall
They had quotes from Chocolate Chip—whose real name is Renee—and a couple of kids who said they saw a T. rex and/or a Transformer in Santa’s seat. One of the security guards representing the mall reassured the public that “we found no large, dangerous reptiles anywhere on the premises.”
So, next Christmas, we’ll try our luck at Springfield Mall. They have a pet store at Springfield, so I figure if anything goes wrong, it’ll be Pets-a-Plenty’s fault. And maybe by then, I’ll just be home from college for the holidays.
But probably not from Carnegie Melon.