[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGE courtesy Stacy Peters “][/title]
Santa Pete notices the young woman as soon as she comes in the door, a special needs youth at the hand of her mother. As one child follows another through the line and on to Santa Pete’s knee, he keeps glancing in her direction, noticing how intently she’s looking at him.
When at last her turn comes, the girl sits on Santa Pete’s lap and the two share the tidings of the season including her request for a gift. Then, Santa Pete gets a gift of his own.
“Her mother leaned over and said, ‘This is the first time she’s sat with Santa since she was a baby. Every time we go see Santa, she says ‘No, that’s not the real one,’” he says. “She said, ‘When we walked in the door, she said, ‘Oh Mama, that’s the real Santa.’”
Except for the paunch, Stacy Peters looks so much like Santa Claus it’s spooky. Even in civvies he’s something right out of central casting, from the white hair to the curly beard to the ruddy complexion and eyes that hover around heather but could pass for blue. Meeting him at a Little Rock restaurant for an interview, one can’t shake the feeling of other tables peering over, whispering to one another. Is that…?
“It happens all the time,” Stacy says with a levity you quickly find as natural as his beard. “I remember, maybe the first year I had this look, we were at a restaurant and I was upset about something. I don’t even remember what it was, but I was getting worked up. ‘I’m going to have to talk to the manager about this.’
“My wife is just a good person, she’s just good. And she says, ‘Remember, you’re Santa. There are children watching you. They don’t need to see Santa going off on the manager.’”
Stacy disintegrates into a giggle at the memory.
“She was right,” he says. “I’m a better person because I have that.”
A group pays Santa Pete a visit during an appearance in the final, hectic countdown to Christmas, a collection of women he would later learn spans five generations. The eldest of the group, well-coiffed and tastefully dressed, insists on perching on Santa’s knee.
As she does, her daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter and great-great-grandbaby all gather around for picture-taking. As the group breaks up to go, he asks the grand matriarch how long it has been since she last sat on Santa’s knee. He was stunned by her answer.
“I remember, this was 2017,” Santa Pete says. “She said, ‘1927; I’m ninety-seven years old and my daddy took me to Memphis to see Santa. It’s been ninety years.’ I thought, wow.”
Not unlike Tim Allen in The Santa Claus where a materialistic business executive is tapped by Fate to become St. Nicholas, Stacy Peters began life as one of the unlikeliest candidates to eventually fall into this line of work. Born the son of a Church of Christ preacher, Santa Claus was conspicuously absent from his childhood on religious grounds.
“I loved my dad, he was a great dad, but it was a very fundamental household,” he says. “We did not believe in Santa Claus. That was not consistent with Christ being born; that’s mythical, that’s witchcraft.”
“We didn’t talk bad about other people. I remember my parents talking to me saying, ‘Now, you don’t talk to your friends about this. They believe it’s Santa and that’s OK.’”
Stacy admits as a child, Santa’s absence felt like he was missing out on something, but time and habit had dulled that by the time he reported to Harding University in Searcy. There, he fell hard for a pretty, straight-talking coed who paved the way for his alter ego.
“You know when you’ve been dating someone and you get to know them and you start thinking, ‘Hey, this is the one’? Well then you start thinking about deal breakers,” he says. “One of my wife’s deal breakers was, ‘Our children will believe in Santa Claus.’ Well, that was it.”
Santa Pete sinks into an easy chair and starts to tell his wife Kathy about the smiles, the cheers and the funny things that the kids did on his latest stop. It’s heady stuff being Santa, good for the ego, especially for a natural born performer who loves children as much as he does. Even the adults get into the spirit when he’s around and it’s easy to take credit for lightening everyone’s mood.
Kathy listens politely, then at the appropriate time leans in and with her trademark blend of sugar and castor, tells him what he needs to hear to maintain perspective.
“Remember, it’s not you that they love,” she says. “It’s Santa.”
Stacy’s daughter was the catalyst for him taking on the role. She’d visited a mall Santa with her children and was frustrated by the entire experience – the crowds, the wait, the lackadaisical interaction, the expensive photos. She called her dad in a lather on the way home, railing against the commercialism that deprived children of more limited means the opportunity to experience Santa.
“My daughter’s very saucy, very outspoken, very passionate,” Stacy says. “On the way home, she calls me and she’s livid. ‘What do poor people do, Daddy? Some of them don’t have a car, some of them work two jobs, they have four or five children. They don’t have the money to spend for a picture with Santa and they shouldn’t have to.’
“She says, ‘You start growing your beard right now. By next year, you could look like Santa Claus and we’ll have free pictures with Santa at church.’ Well, she’s my only daughter and my oldest child. I do what she says.”
In reality, Stacy thought the Santa gig would be a nice once-a-year ministry, but he wasn’t thinking long term or beyond the confines of his church. In the background, Kathy sewed a suit for him, which he paid no attention to until he slipped it on over the fat suit for some photos in advance of the event. One glance in the mirror stopped him in his tracks.
“I had not really been paying attention to what she was doing but when I saw myself in the mirror, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I was Santa Claus.”
Seven years later, it’s a gig that keeps growing. His weekends are booked solid from Halloween to the end of the year and by Thanksgiving, he’s got an appearance every day, sometimes five and six appearances a day. Corporate and personal visits, parades, office parties and residential drop-ins all get his signature smile and trademark look. And his itinerary on Christmas Eve rivals that of his sleigh-riding namesake.
“On Christmas Eve, I go from seven o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night,” he says. “I’m completely booked Christmas Eve and those are wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am visits. Literally ten minutes each.”
Santa Pete gets asked often why we still need him, what it is in people that still yearns for the jolly man in the red suit, even after the rational part of their brains and souls gets the best of them. “Here’s what I think,” he says. “With exposure to the media like it is – 24/7, immediate, breaking news – we’re connected to the world now. And this world is real, it’s more real than it’s ever been, even to children.
“Having something that you instinctively know is not real, it’s mythical, but it’s 100 percent good, it’s 100 percent happy, it’s 100 percent dependable is special. This guy, of all guys, is not gonna let you down. I think as a species we instinctively know that that’s valuable. It’s healthy to believe in something.”
For more information, visit santapete.org.
