Encyclopaedia of Tiny Facts

A colorful Christmas-themed amusement park located in Sky Forest—a tiny San Bernandino Mountain community near the ski resort of Lake Arrowhead, California—Santa’s Village opened on Memorial Day weekend, 1955 (over a month before the opening of nearby Disneyland); the 15 acre, Technicolor dreamland of Santa’s Village—with ginger bread houses and toy shops—felt like a real world approximation of the Burl Ives narrated, stop-motion classic, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; of course, the inexplicable giant mushrooms that dotted Santa’s Village also gave it the appearance of Japanese psychedelia, as if Mario and Luigi traveled to the North Pole; earlier this year, I found myself knee-deep in a “bad patch” of Odyssean proportions; I was not much good to anyone; to riff on “Laid,” the mid-90’s, minor hit by the British band, James: I was so depressed that I was becoming a bore; my friend Kate wanted to cheer me up, so she asked if I’d like to take a trip to her childhood home—Lake Arrowhead; I did; this was my first time visiting Lake Arrowhead, and I was excited; I had known Kate for a couple years, but in that time, it had always been a peripheral friendship; I felt like I knew the shell—not the yolk—of her personality; Kate has a gentle demeanor, full of smiles and laughter and skilled, subtle evasive tactics that allow her to leap-frog over any conversation topic that is even vaguely personal; Kate and I left after lunch and arrived in Lake Arrowhead in the mid-afternoon; Kate told me, “I lived in 18 houses before I was 18 years old”; I was given the full tour of this fake Bavaria—which evoked similar theme-towns like Solvang and Helen—from Kate’s childhood homes to the lake, the mini-golf course, and Rim of the World High School; Kate was a fine tour guide—it felt like she’d given the tour many times before; as the sun set over Lake Arrowhead, Kate lobbed a bomb: “On the outskirts of town, there’s a place called Santa’s Village. I went there a ton during my childhood, but it shut down ten years ago. Then it burned. Now it’s abandoned. There’s a lot of melted plastic reindeer and stuff”; I insisted that we go there immediately; fifteen minutes later, we parked our car in the parking lot of Santa’s Village, which was being used as a lumber yard; with the twilight sun peeking through the pines, we tip-toed into the abandoned Village; it was stunning: buildings made of candy and ginger bread, an anthropomorphic Bumble Bee monorail—all filthy, rusted, and overgrown with weeds; this place resembled the North Pole—in the middle of a Nuclear Winter; location scouts for horror films need look no further than Santa’s Village; then, when I thought it could not get any more surreal, Kate opened up; “My parents met here,” she began; Kate, who had revealed of all two or three childhood details in the years I had known her, continued her story; Kate’s mother moved to California with her twin sister when they graduated high school, and when her sibling began stripping in Los Angeles, she left for the mountains; with no friends or family in Lake Arrowhead, Kate’s mother took a job at Santa’s Village, tending the reindeer; she soon fell in love with a fellow employee—a local boy who sold hot chocolate—and within the year, she was pregnant; Kate’s father had a cheating heart, and before Kate turned five he was kicked out of the house for numerous affairs with women and men; he caught hepatitis C, went to prison for robbing liquor stores with a 10-guage shotgun, and died in his cell; meanwhile, Kate suffered through her mother’s numerous abusive boyfriends, who made a habit of paying the rent—but also raping the pre-pubescent Kate and occasionally holding her down so their teenage sons could learn about sex; Kate still has a problem with people touching her armpits and shoulders; Kate’s mother moved to Apple Valley, found God, and married a Pentacostalist; Kate spoke in tongues until she was 15, when she promptly emancipated herself and caught a bus for Los Angeles; Kate got a fake ID and began stripping in Hollywood as well as finding work on the Renaissance Fair circuit as a “wench”; with money in her pocket, Kate set her sights on a childhood dream of acting and working in a dentist office; with no formal education, Kate worked as a dental assistant in Sherman Oaks, occasionally drilling cavities and putting silver fillings in the mouths of patients; Kate also declared herself a vegan and started an animal rescue business, living in an apartment with two other strippers and a half-dozen feral cats, dogs, and a tropical parrot; I knew none of this when I met Kate; to my knowledge, she was an actress with a couple pets; with the sun disappearing behind Santa’s Village, the shadows multiplying, Kate finished the story of her life, and we walked back to her Kia; we didn’t say much on the drive back; “Tusk,” by Fleetwood Mac, played three times before I turned if off and opted for a hip-hop radio station; I thanked Kate for the tour of Lake Arrowhead, but didn’t mention her story; when she dropped me off, I gave her a hug and said, “See ya soon”; I slept badly that night; I wasn’t sure whether I was more shaken by Kate’s story or the ghostly Village, which felt suffused with the collective emotions of four decades of eager, joyous children and their parents, now all adults (or dead); after searching the internet the next morning, I found an image of an early-1960’s postcard from Santa’s Village that shows a group of attractive, female “elves” waving at the camera, the candy-cane headline reading: “You’ll lose your heart!”; Santa’s Village was famously open 364 days a year—every day except Christmas; you can learn a lot about a person by how they celebrate the holidays.

~ by tinyfacts on November 5, 2008.

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Tags: 1955, Apple Valley, Bavaria, bumble beer, Christmas, Disneyland, Fleetwood Mac, God, Helen, hepatitis C, Hollywood, James, Japanese, Laid, Lake Arrowhead, Los Angeles, Luigi, Mario, Memorial Day, North Pole, nuclear winter, Odyssean, Pentacostalist, psychedelia, reindeer, Renaissance Fair, Rim of the World, Rudolph, Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, San Bernandino, San Bernandino Mountains, Santa Claus, Santa's Village, Sherman Oaks, Sky Forest, Solvang, stripper, Tusk, vegan