Shopping Center Santas Go the Extra Mile for Children

When Santa arrived at the Woodland Hills mall, he didn’t come from the North Pole in a sleigh drawn by Dancer and Prancer. He flew into town from Baltimore on a commercial jet.

Cecil Jackson, 52, is among hundreds of seasonal workers listed in one of several national registers from which many malls across the country select their Santas. In the last three years, Jackson has worked in Chicago, St. Louis and Denver, as well as Los Angeles.

When he’s not Santa, Jackson is an auto inspector for the state of Maryland, but he arranges to take off the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas for this annual gig.

Because he may be sent anywhere in the country, he usually invites his wife to accompany him. But this year she was unable to get away for a monthlong vacation, so Santa is bedding down alone at the Best Western on Ventura Boulevard.

Even without his Santa suit, the 6-foot, 4-inch, 265-pounder with the real, snowy beard looks enough like Pere Noel that people on the street call out, “Hi, Santa” to him. He wishes a “Merry Christmas” to all.

And he will fly back to Baltimore on Christmas Eve just in time to put on his red suit and play Santa for the last time this year to his grandchildren on Christmas Day.

Jackson started playing Santa in his hometown for local organizations like Childrens Hospital more than a quarter of a century ago. “My daughter is now 27, and she’s never seen me without my beard,” he says.

He looks upon his Santa stint as more fun than work. But there are those moments when he wonders what he’s got himself into or what gets into other people, like the adults who wanted to have their picture taken with Santa with everyone wearing ski goggles. Jackson complied.

Then there was the little boy who was obviously a Santa-seeing veteran. When Jackson asked him what he wanted for Christmas, the child said to his mother, “How many of these guys do I have to tell before I get what I want?”

Another seasonal Santa, Steve Millar, who says he is thirtysomething, travels from his home in Covina to the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square, where he puts on his red suit and meets the children.

A marketing and promotion professional, he has two sons, 4 and 10, who keep him busy most of the year with Little League, Scouts and other youth-oriented activities.

While his youngest still believes in Santa and has no idea that his dad can be seen daily ho-ho-hoing in Sherman Oaks in a beard and a suspiciously familiar red outfit, his oldest son is in on the secret and thinks his dad is cool.

Three years ago, Millar played Santa for a community organization and decided it was so much fun he’d like to do it at a mall. He too now belongs to a registry that supplies Santas to malls across the country and is happy he found work near his home.

Millar says that, like all good Santas, he never promises children anything, but says he will do his best to deliver the Power Ranger or Barbie or Pogs the kids seem to ask for.

And he has also had requests to pose with people’s pets, and some curious brushes with adults who want their picture taken with Santa. “One man wanted me to curl up in his lap,” says Millar. Millar did.

What really gets to Millar are the kids who come in and ask for things for their parents or other relatives. He particularly remembers one little girl who asked Santa to help her grandmother get well.

“I told her I would do my very, very best,” Millar says.

Joe Pernell, 57, Santa at the Valencia Town Center mall, says he also gets a lot of selfless requests from children. Pernell, a semi-retired bus driver, tells the children he will try to fill their requests.

Pernell, who is 5 feet, 11 inches and weighs 260 pounds and has his own white beard, doesn’t need much else to portray Father Christmas, and he can usually handle the many requests from adults who want their pictures taken sitting on Santa’s knee.

Pernell works at the mall during the mornings, and another Santa takes over for afternoons and evenings. Pernell divides the rest of his pre-holiday time between making special Santa appearances at parties and gatherings and working with retarded adults at Lark Ranch, a few miles from his Saugus home. This is an ongoing job.

Like the other Santas, Pernell is a family man, with children from 7 to 27. He began working with children when he was a counselor at a Scout camp.

He plans to keep doing the Santa job as long as he’s able. He was the original Santa three years ago when the Santa Clarita Valley shopping mall opened, and he’s been doing it ever since.

Women’s Center Moving to Meet a Sadly, Growing Demand

The problem of too many customers is forcing the San Fernando Valley Friends of Women and Children to move its day center from a small bungalow in Van Nuys to larger quarters on Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood.

When the new facility opens in the spring, it will offer food, showers and clothing on a drop-in basis, as it now does in Van Nuys, but it will also have room for support and parenting meetings, case workers, storage, a laundry and a child’s play area.

By the end of the year, the day facility, called the Women’s Care Cottage, will have received more than 6,000 visits from 1,900 women and children. This is triple the number served two years ago, says Cynthia Cauffey, executive director.

The opening will not be a moment too soon for the organization’s clients. “These days, between 20 and 40 people a day squeeze into the one-bathroom bungalow,” according to Cauffey, who adds that because of fire laws, the waiting line often extends into the street.

She says the organization is closing escrow on the new facility with the help of major donations by the Bannerman Foundation and United Parcel Service, as well as about $100,000 in other private donations. It has more than $100,000 to go.

Nancy Brakensiek, president of Friends of Homeless Women and Children, said the organization was set up to help homeless women and children back into the mainstream, but the group is seeing more and more battered women who are not in immediate danger from their abusers.

The Friends organization, in addition to its Women’s Care Cottage day center, operates a live-in facility in North Hollywood and a child-care center in Pacoima to assist working mothers.

Ironically, the organization was set up in 1984 with the idea that it would eventually go out of existence because the need would have been eliminated.

“Sadly,” says Cauffey, “it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Overheard:

“My husband calls the treehouse his ‘branch’ office. He won’t let the kids up there. He uses it for thinking and reading when he wants to get away from the kids.”

Woman to friend in Granada Hills.