Nothing, it seems, can stop humorist, columnist and novelist Drew Magary from publishing an apparently daily torrent of topical and timely copy about sports and culture for Defector, SFGate and other outlets. The only interruption to his ceaseless flow occurred when a 2018 brain hemorrhage put Magary in a coma for two weeks, and even then, he wrote a book about it, his sixth, The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage. The 47-year-old Minnesota native lives with his wife and three kids, ages 17, 14 and 11, in Bethesda and tells us a vital life lesson he learned decades ago—as Santa Claus.
In elementary school we had a Christmas pageant and they asked if anyone wanted to be Santa Claus, and I was already an attention whore, so I was like, “Me, me, me, me,” and the teachers said, “OK, you get to be Santa, and you get to run down the center of the aisle when the kids are singing ‘Here Comes Santa Claus,’ ” and I’m thinking, This is going to be great, everyone’s going to see me and they’ll love me.
So I got a pillow and I stuffed it up my shirt and I lined up in my Santa suit and waited in the back of the auditorium and they start singing ‘Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus,’ and I start running down the aisle. But…I had not secured the pillow inside my Santa suit, so five seconds into running down the aisle it starts coming out, and I’m grabbing at it to keep it from coming out and everybody starts laughing—all the kids are laughing. That’s how I remember it, because when you’re a kid, it’s the end of the world. No kid ever wants to be embarrassed; it’s the worst feeling in the world.
The truth is, now I write things that end up being wrong and make me look silly and I’m glad that I got over my fear of embarrassment. I think Americans in general are too afraid of being embarrassed, particularly online—nobody wants to look bad online, which is hilarious because it’s online. No one will remember it 30 minutes after it happens; it’s ephemeral. But Americans are constantly in fear of being embarrassed and being made to look silly, and that’s funny, because it’s OK to look ridiculous. But people get very self-conscious about it anytime they get embarrassed. They feel it defines their public image, because in the internet age everyone has a public image now and everyone is very, very careful about grooming it on Instagram or anywhere else on social media. Everyone is fussy about their self-branding.
If you’re always afraid of embarrassing yourself, well, then you’re really just infantilizing yourself. You’re going back to me, in second grade, embarrassing myself.
If you asked me to be a Santa now, I would go ahead, and I would run down the aisle, and if the stupid pillow fell out, I would just roll with the punches. I think we’re sort of unlearning how to do that in the internet age, how to be vulnerable. And that’s bad. There’s a lot of good that happens from those moments if you’re willing to see them that way.
This story appears in the January/February issue of Bethesda Magazine.