For many people, wearing the beard and the boots and dispensing gifts is just a pleasant holiday job. For a few, however, it takes on a deeper, more personal meaning. : Christmas Chooses Some Special Santas
Each year thousands of Santa Clauses around the country don their redvelvet suits and head out for shopping malls, schools and hospitals to listen to the Christmas dreams of children.
For many Santas, wearing the frosty white beard and jet-black boots is just a pleasurable winter job that helps bring in a little extra money for Christmas.
But out of the thousands, there are a few for whom becoming Santa is a deeply personal experience.
Each has his own story. Here are two.
It was on Kathleen Marie Conner’s ninth birthday that her parents learned she had cancer. The tumor showed up on an X-ray as a dark, thumb-sized half moon; in a little less than a year, it spread through her body like an ugly web and eventually choked off her life.
During that year, doctors at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte tried to control the disease, but in 1976, 10 days before her 10th birthday, “she closed her eyes, just like the lights going dim,” said her father, Don Conner.
Many acts of kindness are never meant to be repaid, but Conner, a burly, 58-year-old flooring contractor, felt he owed a debt of gratitude to the hospital for its efforts to save his daughter’s life.
How he eventually began to repay that debt is a story about hives and a beard he forgot to shave off.
It was just after Thanksgiving in 1982 that Conner came down with a case of hives and a variety of other diseases.
“I got deathly sick,” he said. “I mean, I had hives, hay fever, a bacterial infection and who knows what else. I couldn’t for the life of me stop itching.”
Nothing seemed to do any good. “Needless to say, shaving wasn’t on my mind. I just let my beard grow.”
His illness dragged on for weeks. In the meantime, the white stubble on his cheek blossomed into a billowy white beard that made him look like the spitting image of a Norman Rockwell Santa.
At first Conner paid no attention to his transformation, but he kept running into children who marveled out loud at seeing Santa in street clothes.
His illness went away after Christmas, and it dawned on him that here was his chance to repay City of Hope.
“Enough time had passed to where I thought I could deal with it,” he said. “I’m not a rich man, but I felt a debt of gratitude to City of Hope for everything they did.”
The hospital already had a Santa for its annual Christmas party but needed someone to visit patients who were too sick to attend.
“I told them, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do,’ ” he said.
Conner borrowed a Santa suit and, accompanied by two friends dressed up as Mrs. Claus and an elf, made his first visit.
He passed the same rooms that his daughter had been in and saw many patients who, like his daughter, were struggling for life.
“When I left a lot of rooms, I knew I wouldn’t be seeing them again next year,” Conner said. “I saw a lot of parents going through the same things I went through.”
After that first trip, Conner found that what had begun as a way of repaying the City of Hope had become something he enjoyed and wanted to do again.
He has returned to the hospital every year since, striding into each room, sometimes just to stand quietly and leave a present, other times bursting into a back-slapping, belly-laughing routine with Mrs. Claus and Ding Dong the elf. “I do it from the heart,” he said. “It really grows on you.”
Toni Carreras-Irwin, who is in charge of the hospital’s Christmas activities, said about six Santas come to the hospital each year, although most are associated with groups such as the Rotary Club or the Boy Scouts. Conner is one of two Santas who come on their own.
“He spends time with everyone,” she said. “It takes forever, and he drives me crazy. The patients love him.”
Conner, who has two grown children and lives alone in a cluttered converted garage in Redlands, said he never wants to stop being Santa. “It just makes my whole damn year,” he said. “The day after Christmas I trim my beard and let it grow out again. By the next Christmas, I’m ready.”
He said he sometimes feels sad walking through the parts of the hospital he remembers from when his daughter was ill. But he is comforted by the thought that his daughter would have approved of what he is doing.
“Hardly a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of her. A lot of the stamina I get, I feel I get from my daughter because she was a courageous girl,” Conner said. “I think she’d be proud of me.”
Bob Mack’s entry into Santadom started when his niece was searching for a Santa to entertain her little cousins one Christmas six years ago.
Mack, a 61-year-old plumber who lives in Pomona, had never played Santa before but figured it would be no problem entrancing some youngsters for a few hours. He used a Santa suit his niece had and went to her party thinking that would be it.
But afterwards, Mack’s sister, a nurse in Upland, suggested that as long as he was dressed for the part, why not visit some children at the Home of Angels, a nursing facility in Ontario that cares for severely deformed and disabled children?
Why not? he thought and made the trip.
What he saw both moved and shocked him.
“I thought they were just sick children,” Mack said. “When I saw them, it turned my stomach and turned my mind. It was like you took a human body and crushed it like a piece of paper.”
He was moved to tears as he walked through the nursing home. Of about 60 children at the nursing home, only one could speak, a young girl named Susie afflicted with a rare and sometimes fatal skin disease called epidemolysis bullosa, which causes chronic open sores, tissue scarring and infection. She talked to him, took him around the nursing home to see other children and finally asked if he would be coming back next Christmas.
“It was supposed to be a one-shot deal, but I knew right there I’d be back,” Mack said.
Since that first visit six years ago, Mack has returned to the Home of Angels each year. Now he also visits about 20 other hospitals and nursing homes in the Los Angeles and Las Vegas areas. Mack used to live in Las Vegas.
Each year he takes three to four weeks off from his job to play Santa for between 2,500 and 3,000 children. “I work hard all year long, and I know every year this is going to be my vacation,” Mack said. “I just keep visiting places until I get tired.”
Mack said he has been fired a few times because of his annual Christmas vacation but would rather lose a job than the chance to play Santa. “I’m hooked and I’m proud to say it.”
His preparation for playing Santa starts the day after Christmas, when he begins scouring the area for left-over candy canes. He buys about 20,000 a year at 1 to 3 cents each.
He spends all of football season making reindeer out of candy canes and pipe cleaners while he watches games on television.
Mack has also developed an unusual way to fill his Santa’s bag. On his many visits to Las Vegas, he has become quite proficient at an arcade game called “boom ball.” For 50 cents a game, he gets to shoot several balls into a numbered target area. If he earns a certain number of points, he wins a little stuffed animal.
“It takes a lot of concentration, but I can win an animal every time,” he said.
This year, he won 500 of them at the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
All told, Mack figures he spends about $5,000 a year to pay for stuffed animals, candy canes, gas, motel rooms, meals, costumes and Christmas lights for his car, which has a license plate that reads: “CLAUS S.”
Mack said he doesn’t know why playing Santa has become such a passion, although he thinks it is related to his own childhood.
He was the youngest of 10 children, and “my brothers and sisters always pushed me aside. I was the little guy who always interrupted their dates or something like that,” he said. “These kids are runts in a different way. They’re pushed aside like they’re not wanted.”
Mack said playing Santa has also filled a void in his present life. He is divorced, and both his sons are grown and live in the Chicago area.
But more than anything else, he said, it is the simple pleasure of feeling needed and making someone else happy that keeps him playing Santa each year.
Mack said he is happiest when he returns to the Home of Angels to see Susie, the little girl who opened his eyes to the meaning of Christmas, and the other children there.
“He comes every year with little stuffed toys and candy canes,” said Mavis Moretta, administrator of the nursing home. “Mr. Mack has been the only one to come back.”
Sometimes, Mack said, he goes back to the nursing home in the summer to sit with Susie, now 10, and chat for a few minutes. At those times, he goes not as Santa, but just as Bob Mack. Through all these years, Susie has never recognized him without his Santa Claus suit, and he never wants her to know the truth.
“To her, I’m just a person who stops by to say hello,” he said. “But as Santa, I’m someone very special.”
