Most of us at Memphis magazine cannot claim to be Santa Claus, but we've been checking our lists, anyway. Which is how we decided to re-gift you with this story from our archives, originally published in December 2017. Enjoy!
Dreamstime
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa industry.
It’s a lively seasonal business for professional Santas in the Mid-South, and a few dozen souls find that the combination of making youngsters smile and making some spending money is a pretty agreeable pursuit.
Stephen Arnold (fabledsanta.com) has been a professional Santa since 2012 and is as knowledgeable as anyone about the business. Arnold ran the Only Kids specialty toy shop for 22 years, a store familiar to many Memphians for its location at the Regalia Center.
So it wasn’t a huge stretch for him to morph into the jolly elf. There were times during the season when the Santa he hired wouldn’t show up, so the hefty Arnold would don a suit and entertain the youngsters. But it wasn’t a regular thing because, after all, he had a toy store to run at the busiest time of year.
But he cut back on the retail storefront over time, with the advent of the internet and changes in the economy, closing Only Kids in 2002. He’s still in the business, involved in several Christmas-related enterprises — a year-round Santa store with toys and Santa supplies (toysforsanta.com), an Amazon store, and he’s national secretary of the International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas and manages three Facebook accounts.
He is also a private investigator, so when he says he’s checking the list to see who is naughty or nice, well, he’s got skills. (He says he tends not to do divorces “because I have a problem looking incognito.” His work is more along the lines of background checks and genealogy searches for heirs).
How’s Memphis for pro Santas? It’s a great market, Arnold says. There are about 35 to 40 professional Santas in the Mid-South, he estimates. And they tend to develop their own followings. In addition to public appearances in malls and stores, Santas attend private parties and corporate bashes. He says he’s done events at FedEx, International Paper, and Wright Medical. “Most of us make a pretty good living on home visits,” he says, typically in the days just before Christmas.
Roughly speaking, a local pro who actively goes after the business might make somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000 in the six weeks preceding Christmas. Full-time work at the mall can bring around $35 an hour, so that will add up. Not as much as Ed Taylor, the Los Angeles entrepreneur Santa who is his own industry, claiming to get $100,000 with appearances in commercials, movies, and television (he’s a SAG-AFTRA actor) and running the Santa Claus Conservatory. But there’s plenty of work to go around for local Santa entrepreneurs.
So it helps that there’s an organization for Santas and Mrs. Clauses. The MidSouthern Santa Society was founded in 2013 by Arnold, Charles Barnett, and John D. Williams.
“These guys are professional Santa Clauses,” Williams says. “They do it for two reasons: the love of children enjoying what they do and [the ability] to turn it into a professional situation. It requires money when you go from volunteer to professional.” He says there are outfits to buy, and not the cheap ones from department stores, thank you. Classy and durable suits run into hundreds of dollars and busy pros have to keep them cleaned. There’s also liability insurance. But for Williams, it was no question when he first considered going pro.
“I said, gee willikers, I want to be like that!” he says. “They were helping Toys for Tots, St. Jude, and Make-A-Wish Foundation.”
Santas, like good Boy Scouts, must always be prepared. Children have questions and you’d better watch out, because they know whether your answers are bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
The big one is for the child who wants to know if you’re the real Santa. Now reality is something that philosophers and physicists have debated for eons, but they’ve got nothing on that kid looking at you intently and brimming with curiosity. And when you get that question, the one thing you don’t say is “Yes.” The wise Santa employs the art of deflection. Arnold suggests, for example, “I might be real or I might not. You never know. Just stay on the nice list.” Or, “If I really am, I couldn’t tell you!” If there are multiple Santas, the bewildered child will certainly wonder, so she just needs to be told, “The real one is here. Can you pick him out?” All of these answers, of course, are delivered with a requisite twinkle in the eye.
There are tougher questions and requests, though. Williams, aka SantaMontana, has fielded heartbreakers. “One girl about 9 years old told me, ‘I want my daddy to come home,’” he says. Williams asked where her daddy was stationed, thinking Iraq or Afghanistan. “He’s in prison,” she said. “My heart dropped into my boots,” he says. Williams is an unshakable believer that Jesus is the reason for the season and is quick to remind people of that, large and small.
“I said, ‘Honey, you know that Jesus our Lord is going to take care of you. Santa Claus does not have the ability to bring your daddy home from prison, but one thing Santa can promise you is that I will be praying for you during this time of the year.’ And that’s how I handled it.”
He’s had other similarly wrenching requests. One from a girl who asked that her mommy and daddy quit fighting. He gently mentioned that it would be OK to let her teacher know. And there was a 12-year-old St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital patient who wanted nothing but to get well. Williams encouraged him and, as always, offered prayers. “Not once have I told a child or adult that I’d pray for them that I have not done so,” he says.
The careful Santa also must stay aware of other serious matters. Williams says when pictures are being taken that Santa’s hands must always be visible and that parents should be enlisted to make sure children’s shirts and skirts are not inadvertently hiked up during the excitement.
And then there are the burdens that contemporary life has put on all of us, Santas included. At a recent meeting of the MidSouthern Santa Society, Williams announced gravely that the topic of his presentation that day would be “Santa, There’s an Active Shooter in the Mall.” Yes, Virginia, there is also a dark side.
Kristie Hanemann
Chuck Bohannon has considerable longevity as a Santa, plying the sleigh master for 45 years. “I’ve always had an interest in being Santa Claus,” he says. “When I was a kid, my mother, brother, and I would go to Sears at Christmas and mom always knew where to find me — watching Santa with the kids.”
When Bohannon was 22 and serving in the military, he saw his first opportunity. “There was going to be a party for kids in the hospital at England Air Force Base in Louisiana,” he says, “so I bought a suit. But the party was canceled. I was determined to play Santa somewhere, so I went to a pediatric clinic.” The local newspaper did a story on him because the reporter happened to be there with her little boy. “And I’ve done it every year since.”
In 1976, fresh out of the service, Bohannon put in his application to work at the Sears store in Laurelwood. The form asked if he wanted to work in sales, support, or other. “Here’s my chance,” he thought and wrote in “Santa Claus” in the “other” category. He got the gig, although they did have him doing other kinds of work off-season.
Bohannon, in his decades of essaying Santa, has been on the floats in the Memphis Christmas Parade, was Santa at The Peabody for 29 years, has helicoptered into and out of appearances, and, he says, was the last Santa at the downtown Enchanted Forest at Goldsmiths. He was working at the store in the furniture warehouse during the Christmas season in 1989 and was enlisted at the last minute when a Santa didn’t show. He worked until the attraction closed that last day, although nobody knew it would be the last day downtown. The store would close in 1990 due to declining sales, and the Enchanted Forest and all its mechanical elves and Yule figures would move east to Agricenter International later that year.
Considering how long he’s been at it, it’s curious that he only recently grew his beard out. “Last year I was going to do a fake beard again, but I grew it out to see what it would look like. I don’t know why it took me so long,” Bohannon says. “Now I’m Santa 365 days a year!”
There is a discussion to be had about beards. The real-bearded Santas are secure in their position that it’s the only way to grow. But there are exponents on the other side who say real whiskers aren’t necessary.
Faux-bearders have several names. They may call themselves “designer-bearded,” “fashion-bearded,” “theatrical-bearded,” or “traditional-bearded.” Whatever the term of art, these beards are gorgeous and can run up to a couple-thousand dollars. And if your heart is in the right place but your beard growth falls short, then a well-coiffed yak hair beard can be a good way to go.
While most Santas in the MidSouthern Santa Society are real-bearded, in the meetings, Arnold will brook no disparagement of anyone’s choice. The society doesn’t have a president, but Arnold is generally seen as the first among equals.
Williams says, “I am what Stephen calls the activities director, but I see Stephen as the leader and I’m his sidekick. I make out the agenda for the meetings and arrange for the speakers. I narrate the agenda and business.”
There are a couple dozen Santas and several patient wives who are Mrs. Santas.
Williams’ wife Rita is an indispensable Mrs. Claus, and he has nothing but praise for the support provided by the various Mrs. Cs. “They always make sure the beard hair is in place and we don’t have any wrinkles in our suit or any fallout on our collar and make sure we’re all zipped and tied and belted and look pretty and always give us that last word of advice,” he says. “Rita always tells me to be nice to the children. She is just like the meringue on a lemon icebox pie; she completes the thing we do.”
