By Hank Nuwer
Likely you’ll be reading this column about the same time you and I will be contemplating what direction the elected president will take our great nation the next four years.
Your candidate, my candidate, either won or lost. The election already is off the front page and into the next page of history.
Americans now need to move past the rancor of the political stage to come together in unity under the leader chosen by the will of the people.
Yes, unity, the kind not experienced in the USA since post 9-11, when we Americans came together as we shared our horror of terrorism on American soil. Together, we thanked, prayed for, and in many cases mourned, our brave First Responders.
Yes, unity, when Americans of both parties and all independents stood during the National Anthem at a New York baseball game after the Two Towers fell to sing the anthem’s lyrics as one voice with power and fervor.
9-11 was an emotional day for me. I was supposed to have breakfast on Wall Street with a journalist friend and then sit for a documentary interview based on my newspaper reporting of a cold case alcohol-caused death of an Indiana University student.
Instead, my intended commuter bus was prohibited from entering New York City. All the tunnels leading into Manhattan were blocked. Like you, most likely, I stayed glued to a TV set and wept as the unthinkable became reality.
All this month, I am in rehearsal for my part in playwright Ken Ludwig’s T’was the Night Before Christmas to be put on by my Fairbanks community theater. Yep, I play the role of Santa Claus.
This is the second consecutive year I’ve let my white beard grow out.
Last year, I played Kris Kringle, the lovable but addled old man who convinces one and all that there is a Santa Claus—and that he is that real Santa.
One message of that play, “Miracle on 34th Street,” was that Christmas day belonged to the children.
As Santa Claus, my character knew all languages and delivered gifts all over the world. The script said I was supposed to sing the traditional carol “Good King Wenceslas” with a Dutch refugee girl from Holland.
But my director mercifully let me sing the carol in Polish with a young Warsaw refugee child.
My maternal grandfather had been a Polish-American refugee. I could sing and speak without butchering the Polish language (as I would have done onstage with my poor Dutch language skills).
My Santa became “Święty Mikołaj,”
Where last year my character railed against “crass commercialism” by department stores and toy makers, this year my Santa Claus character preaches forgiveness.
The villain in “T’was the Night Before Christmas,” Ralphie, is Santa’s lead elf at the Workshop.
Ralphie turns renegade and steals Santa’s sleight to try to sell it to Walmart. He wants to purloin Santa’s Naughty and Nice List for profit, too, but a good elf, with the help of two precocious children, thwarts his scheme.
The disgraced elf begs Santa for forgiveness. “I was going to sell (the List). But now I see the error of my ways, and I would like to come back to the Workshop again, if you can forgive me?”
“Yes, of course I can,” my character Santa says to the contrite elf. “Forgiveness is what this season is all about. The important thing is to try harder next time.”
I address those lines to Ralphie, but the playwright meant them for the people in the audience—more than half who will be children.
“The best Christmas presents don’t come in packages,” my Santa goes on to say. “They are things like courage and kindness, honesty and love.”
Today, we Americans move forward from the most contentious presidential election I have experienced in my near four score years. Many of the Alaska local and state races have been no less vitriolic.
With North Korea now allied with Russia and China, and all Americans in need of a president and leaders who can protect our nation, we each must find in ourselves immense stores of “courage and kindness, honesty and love.”
Yes, indeed, “forgiveness is what this season is all about.”
Turn the page.
Cordova Times newspaper columnist Hank Nuwer writes professionally and acts as an amateur in Fairbanks community theater and at the University of Alaska. (UAF). His latest book is titled “Hazing: Destroying Young Lives.”