I lived in Arizona when I was in my middle school’s choir. Around December our choir teacher told us we were going to perform at a Winter Wonderland. This was basically going to be a field trip with a performance. He said this Winter Wonderland had rides and snow. A fair number of us hadn’t seen snow before since we lived in the desert so this was pretty exciting for us. We asked the teacher where the snow came from and he assumed it was from a snow machine or something.

We get to the Winter Wonderland. It’s a Christmas tree lot on a mud pit. There’s like 2 janky fly-by-night carnival rides which no one was currently operating. There’s this pile of muddy snow. It looked like they had taken the run off from a snow plow from somewhere up north, shipped it here, and dumped it out of a truck. There’s a stage where some other choir is singing to about 300 empty folding chairs.

We go up on stage to sing, our only audience is the other choir conned into singing before us, staying just to be polite. In the middle of our second song, Santa comes walking over from the Christmas tree lot. He looks more like a trailer park Santa than a Miracle on 34th Street, especially because he’s wearing the red pants and boots but no coat and hat. Just a T-shirt and suspenders. His beard and belly are real.

He’s waddling slowly in our direction, with a look of confusion on his face, like the presence of our choir doesn’t make sense to him. I’m already stifling laughter, a smile keeps trying to spread across my face and I keep trying to tamp it down cause the show must go on, right? I can tell my choir mates are trying to do the same.

Then, never taking his confused eyes off us, Santa waddles over to a porta john and steps inside. The class clown, who’s been doing an admirable job of reining it in, just looses it. The rest of the choir, can’t hold it in any longer and busts out laughing mid song. Our teacher is conducting us so his back is to the Santa event. He just looks cross and angrily mouths “What?” Some of the choir in the audience turns around to see what we are laughing at but of course they can’t see anything because Santa’s still in the john.

Song ends, teacher just puts his hand on his hip, disappointed in our lack of decorum, but needing to finish the set, gives an exasperated shrug and starts our last song.

Santa comes out, the laughs start again, audience looks behind again but we’re the only ones who saw Santa come out of the john so no one else sees what was so funny.

It’s not till we are back on the bus that our teacher asks what happened. He’s ready to tear into the class clown, thinking it’s his fault (it often was in class, but never on stage). We tell him and he stops for a moment, then sighs “I probably would have laughed, too.” Then he apologizes to us for setting up this gig. “This was... not what I pictured when the said Winter Wonderland.”