The name of Oleg Batluk is well known to many mothers and fathers. But not because he gives advice on the upbringing, education or health of children. But because he is a dad himself and writes wonderful columns about life with children and memories of his own childhood on his page on the social network. It always turns out with humor and very kind. Recently, the publishing house AST published a new book by Oleg Batluk – “Memoirs of a Baby”. With the permission of the author, we publish an excerpt from it.
In our modern urban tropical winters, Santa Claus has long been a comic character.
Well, what a Frost, really. Rather, Grandfather Thaw. Or Grandfather Slush. Or Grandfather What Dork Spilled This Salt Again. True, the last name is quite exotic for Grandfather.
Nowadays, due to global warming, these two are in a chronic antiphase: Santa and Frost are found only in cartoons.
But in my Soviet childhood there was both – grandfathers and frosts.
My parents tried to make Santa Claus come to me every New Year. “They tried” – not in the sense that they put hallucinogens in my food. They were dressing up. They cosplayed Grandfather, as we would say now. For us, Soviet children, Santa Claus had a familiar face, because this face usually belonged to one of our relatives.
For the first time Grandfather Frost entered our house when I was three years old. On the eve of the solemn event, I was so nervous, waiting for the grandfather announced by my parents, that I could not fall asleep. Mama read a book at the bedside of an aspiring neurotic at midnight. It was a collection of stories for children about Lenin. In them he was called “grandfather Lenin” through a line.
Do you remember?
Therefore, when the next morning my father appeared at the door of the apartment, disguised as Santa Claus, and the relatives who had gathered for the occasion asked me in chorus: “Who is this, Olezhka?” I answered without hesitation: “Grandpa Lenin!”
At the age of six, weak signs of intelligence began to break through in me. According to my parents, on my last New Year before school, they were seriously concerned about the plausibility of our ritual mysteries with Santa Claus.
Dad, who had obediently played this role for many years, suddenly refused. “I have outgrown this image a long time ago! I am not developing! This is an actor’s death! I want to play Macbeth, Svidrigailov! ” He shouted.
Okay, I didn’t shout. But he refused to freeze me … He told my mother that, in his opinion, I was beginning to suspect something. Stirlitz has never been so close to failure, said the Pope, quoting an anecdote. And he demanded a replacement for himself.
All these doubts came to my dad very in time, five minutes before going on stage. I was already sitting in the room under the tree, waiting for the routinely magical doorbell. (At the age of six, some of my peers had already thrown drinking, and I was still waiting for Santa Claus under the tree – this is so, the touches to the portrait).
Mom had a table.
“On my table!” – Mom exclaimed and ran into the kitchen, bending down and pulling her head into her shoulders, as if the table was on her not in a figurative, but in a literal sense.
There were two left in the corridor – dad and grandmother.
In one minute, dad persuaded grandmother, for the second he put on her a Santa Claus costume, for the third he shortened her huge red sheepskin coat, for the fourth he handed her a bag with gifts and in the fifth minute the father solemnly pushed grandmother out the door. This grandmother was my mother’s mother, that is, my father’s mother-in-law. Therefore, it is possible that at that moment one secret dad’s dream came true.
Once the Kremlin tree was like this
Finally, the doorbell rang. I ran out into the corridor.
Santa Claus 2.0 performed by grandmother was two times shorter than the standard standard Santa Claus.
Grandmother tried to minimize the femininity of her voice, so Santa Claus 2.0 spoke like an alcoholic who burned his bundles with technical alcohol. To top this fiasco, the fake beard turned out to be too big for my grandmother. Therefore, the beard of Santa Claus 2.0 began right from the eyebrows, which made him look like Wii, which, fortunately, I did not know about in those years.
But the grandmother played selflessly, more than compensating for the failure of the costume designer.
It seemed to my parents that I had not noticed anything. Everything was going well. And then mom and dad noticed that I was somehow strangely mowing at the feet of Santa Claus. They looked closely. Dad shortened her toe loop too much for my grandmother. On her feet, accessible to everyone, flaunted house slippers. “Branded” grandmother’s slippers with large pompoms, which she always wore around the house.
Everything is just like in that stupid children’s joke, again about Stirlitz: nothing in Stirlitz betrayed a Russian intelligence officer, except for Budennovka and balalaika.
While the parents tried to predict my reaction to their treachery and measure the depth of the trauma inflicted on the child, I continued to accept gifts and dance around as if nothing had happened. According to mom’s recollections, dad whispered to her then: “He, apparently, is in shock.”
And now another home theater for young people came to an end, and we headed into the corridor to see off the fabulous guest. There I asked Santa Claus to bend over to me and whispered something in his ear. Santa Claus patted me on the head in response and went out the door. And I ran into the room to sort the presents. A few minutes later, the werewolf grandmother sneaked back into the apartment in her human form.
The parents immediately rushed to her: “What did he say? What did you say?” Grandma smiled and answered. The parents began to smile too. And dad even added: “Here it is, the power of art!”
In the corridor, at the front door, I whispered in Santa Claus’s ear: “I know that you put on your grandmother’s slippers. But I won’t betray you! “