Six Years of Santa Claus
On being a herald of joy
2018 was a really weird year for me. On Labor Day weekend of that year my wife of 22 years went housesitting for a friend, and from there announced she was leaving. She never came home. It was sudden and traumatic, and a long story that is relevant here only insofar as it meant I found myself, for the first time in a very long time, alone going into the holidays.
The church congregation to which I belonged took great pains to keep me connected. It would have been easy for me to slide into being the old hermit. Most churches have one of these guys: his attendance is spotty and he walls himself off emotionally from everybody else. He’s solid when he’s active, but his activity can’t always be counted on. My fellows in faith, though, tried hard to keep me supported, and looking back I am thankful for that.
The biggest thing they asked me to do was be Santa for the church Christmas party. This was logistically a smart move, even if it had weirdly insensitive overtones if I had been inclined to get offended: I didn’t have a family I would be with at the party, so if I left to change it wouldn’t be noticed by the various kids in attendance. It would have been easy to feel a little pigeonholed there, but one of the men’s-group leaders talked it way up, bought the suit, and otherwise kept me on board. It gave me something to do, and something others were depending on me to do. That’s got value.
Then I got a look at myself in the mirror. And it was showtime.
Playing Santa isn’t something everybody does. Not everybody gets asked to do this, and I think I get why. You have to be able to drop your own pretensions and just be jolly. Not everybody can do it. I mean, there’s Trump or drag queens or unrest in the middle east or illegal immigration or systemic racism, and maybe your wife left or your kids hate you or your day job is drudging scut and the Dodgers keep losing. Being happy in today’s world can feel like a betrayal of “what’s important,” things that the world demands everybody be perpetually Very Concerned about, lest you by your lack of concern become part of the Very Problematic Problem.
The concept of Santa is not immune to this. Every Christmas season sees a resurgence of a pretty hoary old debate over lying to kids and setting unrealistic expectations, and materialism and reverence, and demands for side-taking over temporal trappings and spiritual meaning. But when a five-year old little girl just throws her arms around Santa, a totally spontaneous and unironic eruption of joy, all the overthinking sounds pretty pointlessly Grinchy.
So it was in 2018. I didn’t even go to the dinner part of the evening. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull it off. Nervous about how to manage the costume, I showed up after the event started so there would be nobody in the halls, and spent the whole time in a men’s room with a convenient “out of service” sign on the door getting changed, psyching myself up, and waiting for the text from the bishop that it was time to get in position. Then it was showtime. I appeared during the evening’s closing prayer. I stepped in a side door and Santa was just standing in the room when everybody said Amen and opened their eyes.
My stance on how to explain Santa to kids has always been to say that everybody is Santa at some point to somebody. Sometimes your parents are Santa. Sometimes your friend is Santa. Sometimes you are Santa. Any time you give a gift, expressing unsolicited good will and glad tidings, you are Santa. That makes Santa real, though not in the way you might think.
And right there at that Christmas church party in central Oklahoma, for a little while I stopped being Loren Dean, the older divorced guy in the congregation who needed to stay connected. I became Saint Nick, the herald of unashamed and unironic holiday joy. It was magical for me as much as it was for the children. Being able to just laugh with kids (I’ve got a pretty good genuine-sounding ho-ho-belly laugh I now cultivate) is awesome. It doesn’t really matter who hates who when Santa’s in the house. Everybody loves Santa. There’s a commonality and community there that matters, even if we only experience it for a few minutes before “Santa has to get back to planning for the big night!” and the jolly old elf disappears once more.
I gave the suit back later that December, and it felt a little sad to let it go. I had touched something there that was good. I filed it in my memory and figured it would provide me a nice little nostalgia moment at future Christmases about my 15 minutes of holiday cheer fame.
Just over a year after that fateful Labor Day, In November 2019 I left Oklahoma to move back to the land of my people (Riverside, California) to remarry and really start a new chapter of my life. I arrived and started re-acclimating right at the holidays, and part of my conversation during that period was to tell my Santa Claus story and talk about what a fun memory it was now.
Then came 2020 in California, a time of unhinged fear and unimaginable darkness. Lockdown hysteria in California was easily a match for any overreaction anywhere in the country. Schools were especially devastated, and I got to see the useless brutality of Zoom school by looking over the shoulder of my new wife, who was herself an award-winning elementary school principal with almost three decades of experience in education. Even she, who had seen pretty much everything, was pushed to the brink by the utterly insane demands of school closure. It was a hard year for her, and I was glad to be able to be there for her to help in whatever way I could.
“Whatever way” took a very specific turn as December 2020 approached. My wife, ever trying to reach for normalcy for the children in her charge, decided to try something very ambitious: a schoolwide craft project. Once a week, the various families of the school would drive to the campus, forming a long line of cars to pick up packets of lesson material from the teachers. Lockdown rules dictated that nobody could get out of the car, but the school staff could hand work packets through an open window as well as load a box of food (the free-school-lunch kids still got a distribution) into the trunk and so forth. My wife’s plan was to be at the end of the line at a particular delivery day in December, where she would give out little baggies of supplies with some instructions for the kids. Those instructions included Zoom-meeting information so all 500-odd children at the school could tune into a big virtual assembly where they could make a holiday craft with the principal. It was a cool idea (and the kind of thing only she could pull off), and then she thought of a way to really sell it: Santa Claus.
So in December 2020 there I stood, at the end of the weekly distribution car line, next to “the principal” in a newly-bought-off-Amazon Santa outfit, waving at the kids who had ridden to school to pick up the week’s stuff, ho-ho-hoing at the astonished kids who hesitated only a moment before eagerly rolling down the windows to hang out of the car and wave back at me like they were signaling a rescue plane.
Every battered Grand Caravan and dented Corolla and dusty crewcab Silverado dutifully waited in line to pick up their weekly supplies, and listen as “the principal” explained the special Christmas craft everybody would be able to do next week. And then it was on. All lockdown precautions disintegrated. Everybody pulled over in whatever spot was available, pack after pack of kids erupting from back seats to throw themselves joyfully at Santa.
I laughed with kids, patted kids clinging to my legs on the back, and repeatedly declared that I loved Pikachu and Nerf guns too as part of a running string of patter I kept up for over an hour. I got handed a baby so his (I think) mom (I think) could get a picture. Kids ran back up the line to drag their teachers over for a group photo. The end of the weekly supply-distribution line turned into a joyful mob scene; new kids refreshed the delightful chaos as their moms finished navigating the line and cut them loose even as the moms of a few minutes prior finally got their kids corralled back into the car to head home. For over an hour all the fear that had sat on 2020 like a smothering weight was simply shrugged off. Santa had arrived, the herald of unashamed and unironic holiday joy, and fear simply evaporated in his presence.
It was a religious experience. I choke up a little thinking about it even now. Being a public school student during the California lockdown was hell for children. For an hour, I was there to part the clouds and bring a light to that bunch of kids. For that hour, I was giving a gift of unsolicited good will and glad tidings. For that hour, Santa was real, because he was me.
And looking back now, for those kids I was probably the only one. The California lockdown curtailed all the mall-Santa, corner-Santa, party-Santa action that usually provides the annual photo ops and gleeful hugs for moms and kids. Santa was largely absent from Christmas 2020 by virtue of the fact that nobody could gather to hang out with him. Except for over an hour in that elementary school parking lot. I treasure that.
By 2021 a critical mass of people had determined that the fear was causing nothing but harm and it was time to rediscover gathering. So I semi-volunteered to be Santa for my new church congregation’s back-from-hiatus Christmas dinner party that year. There I got the photo that is still the funniest one I’ve been in. Many kids rush Santa for a hug. But not every kid.
By now it was fun, and I was getting good at getting changed quickly and anticipating things like how I was going to sit so kids’ moms could get a good picture angle. And I started embracing the idea that this was a thing I could do now.
I suspect there’s a moment for any longtime Santa (and I invite them to weigh in on this in the comments) where you realize that you’re shopping for real boots or a real belt, and that means you’re part of an unofficial semi-secret society now. You’ve been bit by the bug, and you kinda dig being Santa. It brings too many people too much unashamed, unironic joy for you to quit. Which is why 2022 was such a blast.
In November of 2022 I got a call from a buddy of mine, who had a BIG favor to ask. He was slated to be Santa for the town Christmas parade in Calimesa, California, but he was sick and was going to have to bow out. He had a suit and I was about his size, and he knew it was a lot to ask, but would I please consider being super-clutch and riding in the parade?
“I’m going to tell you something and you’re going to laugh,” I said on the phone. He hesitated a moment, thinking.
“You’ve already got a Santa suit, don’t you?” he guessed. And laughed.
“Yes. Yes I do.”
My wife and I showed up at the combined offices of the Calimesa News Mirror and Chamber of Commerce, and I was greeted by one of the ladies stringing lights on their company golf cart.
“Hi there, I’m your Santa tonight.”
She looked me up and down (I’m a big dude, so it’s not hard to imagine) and laughed, “yeah, you sure are!”
I got ushered to a room to change. There’s something very cool about emerging from a changing room as Santa. You don’t walk anywhere as Santa. You roll. The showtime vibe almost makes you imagine you’re in a Michael Bay movie, walking in half speed straight at the camera in a scene tracked with quasi-rock from Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Santa’s got presents and presence. It felt like that walking through the newspaper office and out into the parking lot to climb into the back of the truck they had rigged up. I settled into character the moment I sat in that throne, and waved and laughed and complemented people’s hats and jackets all through the setup/lineup shuffling, riding around in the back of that truck, and was the grand finale feature of the parade. Santa spent some time in Calimesa that night, and everybody smiled about it.
We have a niece who lives in Calimesa, and she and her four kids got to stand on the route with their neighbors and see Great-Uncle Santa wave and laugh and bring unashamed, unironic joy all the way through town on a Saturday night in December 2022. They got to experience it, and got to hang out in the staging area afterward to get personal pictures with the big guy.
Kids want to believe. They’re not sure what they’re believing in when it comes to Santa, but they know there’s joy there. There’s something there that’s innately good, hopeful, and kind; they cling to that. For five years, starting at a simple church party and culminating in a full-on parade, I spent some time every Christmas season helping kids cling to that. It’s some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.
I write this in the week after Christmas, 2023. What was I doing this past month? I think you know.
Next year I might try pop-up Santa-ing, like dressing up to go through a drive-thru or shop for groceries. It’s too much fun to quit, and the joy is too important not to preserve.
Thanks for this Santa’s eye view. I will now look at Santas quite differently.