Memories of a Psych Hospital Santa
Just as there are Santa's at shopping malls and at your local fire station’s Christmas morning pancake breakfast, there are Santa's in psych hospitals. At least, there was at ours.
I first started playing Santa Claus at the psych hospital in 2012. I had been working there for two years by that point, and I had twins at home who had been born the year before, on December 15th. I don’t remember how I got the gig — an addictions counselor had played Santa the first two Christmases I worked on the inpatient unit. Maybe he’d gotten tired of it and didn’t want to do it anymore, maybe I cajoled my way in because I have a theatre background and a slight penchant for attention-seeking behavior/missions. Maybe it was because I was Jewish and, consequently, always volunteered to work on Christmas Eve Day and Christmas to make that time-and-a-half cheddar and was, thus, available.
“Because, madame,” Antonio Salieri says to Frau Mozart in Amadeus, “I was at hand.”
Whatever the reasons(s), for a few years, it was me under that itchy, white beard and beneath all those poorly-installed pillows meant to widen my then-angular frame. And why not?
At our facility and, I guess, at facilities like it, there were mass discharges just before Christmas Eve Day, because only a covering psychiatrist would be on-duty during the holiday…