Playing Santa Year-Round: Kids’ Wish Lists Welcome : Festivity: Make-A-Wish invites 250 children and their parents to mark Christmas and the group’s 10 years in the county.

On Sunday, Steven met Santa Claus and Ebenezer Scrooge.

That was fun, but perhaps not quite as exciting as last October, when the 8-year-old Yorba Linda boy had his own meeting with President Clinton. Like Sunday’s Christmas party for 250 children at the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel, Steven’s meeting with the President was arranged by the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

“Every child gets a wish,” said Marcia Schwartz of North Tustin, president of the Orange County chapter of the international organization and a volunteer for more than six years. In the last 10 years, the privately funded organization has granted 600 wishes to youngsters ages 2 to 18 with life-threatening diseases, Schwartz said.

Three times a year, the chapter also throws parties.

On Sunday, while the children joked with Santa and Scrooge (played by South Coast Repertory’s Hal Landon Jr.) and a group of clowns, the parents had a chance to reacquaint themselves with each other, said David Candlish of Long Beach, whose son, Ricky, lives in Costa Mesa.

“We network, we really do,” Candlish said. “Many of us have gotten to know each other at hospitals and through doctors and nurses.”

Hospital treatments are the common denominators for most of the families at the party. Each has a child who is seriously ill, or recuperating from illness.

Although Steven lost his left leg to bone cancer, he still manages without the aid of an artificial limb to roller skate, and ride a bike, and he romped around the hotel’s ballroom at the party, said his mother, Kimberly.

She was as surprised as the rest of the family when the boy asked to meet the President.

“One day he was watching TV and saw the White House and the President and asked, ‘Who is that guy?’ ” Kimberly said. “Then Steven wanted to know how he could get to meet him.”

On Oct. 4, Make-A-Wish Foundation volunteer Lyn Shermet of Fountain Valley made it happen. She and Steven’s family rode in a limousine to the Beverly Hilton Hotel and were escorted to the President’s suite on the eighth floor.

“We sat down on a couch and chatted, and the next day he asked us up for a personal tour of Air Force One,” Shermet said.

Last May, the foundation sent Nicole, a 7-year-old second-grader from Garden Grove, and her family to Disney World. For the past five years, Nicole has been battling leukemia, which is now in remission, said her mother, Tami.

“The doctors say she is 100% cured,” Tami said.

Jim Peterson of Garden Grove is another success story. The 20-year-old Cypress College student was a leukemia victim at 16 and had his Volkswagen Bug restored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Now, his cancer is in remission and he’s a volunteer.

“This foundation has been the best thing in the world,” Peterson said. “I’m just waiting to win the lottery so I can donate some money.”

The 12-year-old foundation, begun in Phoenix, now has 79 chapters nationwide and 11 outside the United States, Schwartz said. Along with Christmas, Sunday’s party helped celebrate 10 years in Orange County, Schwartz said.

“I got involved with this organization when I found out that 92 cents of every dollar donated goes to the children,” Schwartz said. “We only have two paid staff members in the county and 150 volunteers. To me, that was important.”