THE CHRISTMAS PUMA

a postal Christmas poem

Like so many great Christmas stories, this one starts with a ripoff
at Costco, where I bought Christmas cards—several boxes.
When I got them home and opened them I saw what had been
hidden by the packaging: where the stamp should go, a little rectangle
that bore the dreaded message, “May require additional postage.”

I had already bought a hundred Christmassy-yet-inoffensive stamps
in four patterns that could not be incontrovertibly linked with any
religious interpretation of Christmas but had everything to do with
winters in northern climates—but even that only if we accepted
the business in the background of each as snowflakes rather than,
say, mosquitoes, or perhaps the gnats that drove Joba Chamberlain
from the mound in Cleveland. The four patterns, were, respectively,
a bear, a snowman, an evergreen, and an antlered deer—possibly
a reindeer—all in renditions suggestive of rather primitive woodcuts.

I went ahead and wrote the cards and stamped and addressed
the envelopes, hoping that “May require additional postage”
meant, “But only if you stuff each card with large numbers of bills
in small denominations.” I brought my cards to the post office and alas,
no, “May” meant “Does, every time.” I would need additional postage
for a hundred envelopes. So I ordered another hundred stamps to make
up the hundred differences. But the post office didn’t have any even
vaguely Christmassy stamps in the denomination of the difference,
all they had were vicious puma stamps.

Now when I say “vicious puma,” don’t get the wrong idea.
I’m doing it as homage to Tommy Smothers, who once
used the phrase on TV repeatedly, to great comic effect.
The puma on our stamp doesn’t actually look especially
vicious: it isn’t snarling; its mouth isn’t rimmed with blood.

But it gazes out at you from its stamp with an appraising stare
that’s colder than all the snowflakes on all the woodcut stamps
put together. You can’t see the puma’s tail, but you know it’s
twitching. This puma isn’t looking at you asking itself whether
you’re food, it already knows you’re food and is wondering
whether it’s hungry. So yeah, vicious puma works for me.

I brought home the vicious puma stamps and stuck them on
the envelopes next to the more or less Christmassy ones.

When I stuck a vicious puma stamp next to an evergreen, I could
sort of imagine the puma taking shelter from the snow beneath its bows.

When I stuck it next to a bear, I thought, as Michael
Vick might have thought,“Could be an interesting match.”

When I stuck it next to the reindeer,
I felt like I was feeding the deer
                                            to the puma.

But when I stuck it next to the snowman all I could think was yellow snow.

That’s not the worst part though. The worst part came
when I ran out of woodcut stamps and had to stick
the vicious puma next to the Madonna and Child.
I felt like the Antichrist.
                                            Until I ran out of Madonna
stamps and went back to the post office and they
were out of Christmas stamps of any description
and I had to settle for flower stamps, which make
no sense at all with the vicious puma.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Jack McCarthy
December 2007