This year, however, upon jostling open the old wooden door with its beveled glass panes, I managed to trip over a beach-ball-sized white sphere, a little too plain to not be suspicious in such a melee. I picked it up in order to inspect it, and maybe even discover it's purpose in my living room, lying on the floor between the elliptical machine and the African spiked sword hanging next to the front door. I found that it was trailing a stretch of red material coming out of a black plastic trash bag. I continued pulling the ball up until my hands were over my head, and I figured, at about five foot seven inches of me, plus my arms in the air, this thing had to be about six and a half feet of fuzzy white ball and red felt, but the red cloth was still filling the bag. I abandoned the ball & started pulling on the cloth until I came to a fuzzy white band about a foot and a half in width. I was holding the largest Santa hat I had ever encountered. Most likely the largest Santa hat anyone had ever encountered.
So I did what any sensible person with a nine or so foot Santa hat slung over her shoulder would do. I threw it over myself & started doing a cross between the robot & the sprinkler. The potential for tripping over the extraneous material at my feet was monumental, so I stuck to mainly flailing my arms around until I could no longer take the heat (that many yards of felt get stifling) and began searching for a way out.
The next day family & friends would be coming to our house for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of spaghetti & meatballs. It's traditional in my family anyway, turkey & gravy be damned! Mom wanted to move the elliptical machine to the garage so that guests would not have to navigate around it's hulking presence. I had a better idea. The giant Santa hat fit nicely over this most recent instrument of torture masquerading as exercise & completely blocked the view of our front table brimming with Christmas cards, yet-to-be-paid bills, Dwell and Vanity Fair magazines, and solicitations for donations from my high school and college. The tepee sized mass of red felt also created a more festive mood considering that the living room lacked a Christmas tree.
My dad later informed me that the Santa hat's intended recipient was the seven foot tall brick sculpture of a serene head, with eyes closed and a slight Mona Lisa-like smile, that we had helped install two years ago with the artist James Tyler. He had sculpted the head out of clay, then cut the clay into bricks and fired batches at different temperatures. This made some of the bricks appear glazed almost blue while others were standard reddish brick color. The sculpture is equipt with speakers and motion sensors so that when pedestrians stroll past, the sculpture starts making any one of a dozen random noises, from honking cabs to saxophone serenades. It's a surprising din for a head with such a calm expression.
Dad's plan was to install the hat on the head and gather our family on one side of it for a "calm amidst the consumer storm" family Christmas card. The day after Thanksgiving my mom and I ushered the family dog, Star, into my brother's miniature, red gas-sipper and drove downtown to the sculpture site to meet my dad & brother in order to orchestrate this Christmas scene. Mom & I were taking bets on how long the hat would remain on the head since dad's plan was to leave it as Christmas decoration once our photos had been taken. My theory was that such soft, extensive amounts of felt would beg to be stolen and used as a sleeping bag for one (or more) homeless person(s). Fortunately, when I returned to Indy for Christmas, this had not come to pass, and the hat, soggy and slightly off kilter, was still in place upon the statue.
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