Kick Me Read Free Page A

fit
him,
” my father said, frustration rising in his voice. It was Sunday, the only day my father closed his store and the vision of himself passed out in his chair with the Sunday paper lying uselessly on his stomach was obviously dancing in his head as he tried to unlock the fashion mysteries of the North Pole workforce.
    I don’t know why my parents didn’t try to find a book that had a picture of an elf in it that they could have used for reference. Maybe it was pride, or maybe it was the fact that my parents had no real use for the accoutrements of Christmas. My father always bought our tree at the local YMCA but that was about as far as Christmas decorating went in our house. The same red spray-painted foam balls with macaroni glued to them that I had made in preschool adorned our trees until I left for college. My mother had no patience for decorating, so one rather moth-eaten-looking Santa doll she had won in a Kiwani-Queens bingo game became the sole representative of holiday cheer in our house. My father spent most of my childhood telling everybody at Christmastime, “Christmas is a holiday for kids. Anyone over eighteen who expects to get Christmas presents should have his head examined.” This Scrooge-like theory stopped at his store’s cash register, however, since he still made lots of money off Christmas surplus shoppers, scary people who liked to buy old army helmets, bayonets, and dummy hand grenades as presents for their loved ones. But whatever their true feelings about Christmas were, my parents felt they could pull an elf costume out of all this former soldier gear. And I had no choice but to trust them.
    We came home that afternoon with a bag full of army issued goods. The search for elf shorts resulted in my father’s grabbing a pair of olive drab (or “O.D.,” as surplus hipsters called it) green U.S. government boxer shorts and two black nylon straps. These straps were usually used to lash down an ammunition box but were now going to serve as my merry suspenders. The question of footwear had stumped all three of us, and so a long pair of O.D. green socks and a lengthy piece of foam rubber had been harvested in the hopes of approximating an elf shoe.
    “Okay,” said my father with determination, “let’s get to work.”
    He and my mother went about constructing my elf outfit. I put on a white button-up shirt from my closet and stepped into the army boxers, which my mother then hoisted up, practically lifting me off the ground and giving me an army-issue wedgie. My father took the black nylon straps and taped the ends inside the front and back of the boxers, creating a suspender-like effect.
    “What the hell do elves’ feet look like anyway?” my father asked, staring at the long army socks.
    “They have shoes that curl up,” I offered.
    “I think it’s their
feet
that curl up,” my mother said, as if the idea that only their shoes curled up was an absurd notion.
    My father thought for a second, then grabbed a knife and went to work on the piece of foam rubber from his store. He cut two large banana-shaped curls that were almost a foot long and then stuffed one inside the toe of each sock.
    “Here, put these on,” he said, handing them to me with a look that said he was convinced he was almost finished with his costuming task.
    I pulled the socks on and stood up. My feet now looked like two dark green pontoons. Instead of curling upward, they gently rose at about a fifteen-degree angle. In addition, my feet were now each about twenty-four inches long. My father looked at my “shoes” for a couple of seconds, then nodded his approval.
    “Those look like elf feet to me,” he said, satisfied with his creative skills.
    My mother pulled the watch cap down onto my head and then she and my father stepped back to inspect me. Their stares made it quite clear they had no idea whether I looked like an elf or not.
    “It feels like there’s something missing,” my mother said, hand on