Freeing His Inner Santa

It may have begun as a holiday gig seven years ago, but to Michael Baldwin, being Santa Claus is more than a job.

The 57-year-old California transplant, who plays to Christmas audiences throughout the Northwest, has embraced the role 365 days a year. The way he tells it, he didn’t choose the lifestyle -- it chose him.

“See this?” he says, tugging at his long white beard, his bright hazel eyes glinting in the afternoon sun. “It never comes off.” That’s because it’s real.

Sitting in a coffee shop on Queen Anne Hill, Baldwin sips a double-tall latte and tells the story of his transformation from skinny blues-playing surfer dude to jolly old St. Nick. It’s a story of fate and genetics, he says.

He stands 6 feet tall and weighs 270 pounds, much of the weight in just the right place to fill a Santa costume. The belly jiggles when he “ho-ho-hos.” The part of his face that peeks out from his bushy beard appears ruddy with joy. His eyes crinkle above bifocals. On this day, he wears a Hawaiian shirt -- but it can’t hide the persona.

A little boy in a checkerboard sweater walks into the coffee shop with his mother and spots Baldwin. He freezes, eyes wide open. “Santa,” he says with reverence. Baldwin smiles and waves. The boy stares at him from behind a giant cookie for much of the next 20 minutes.

This sort of thing happens to Baldwin every day.

“I look in the mirror and it blows me away,” he says. “I really do look like him!”

When he was a young, slender man with red hair, freckles and a surfboard under his arm on the beaches of San Diego, it never occurred to Baldwin that his hair would someday turn white and his physique would fill out. It was a slow change.

Over the years, he played blues harmonica in various bands. He moved to Seattle in the ‘70s, and most recently worked as a sales rep for a Seattle-area software company. In 1992, his fiancee and best friend, Nanette, died of cancer. He has been single ever since.

“It was one of the defining points in his life,” says Baldwin’s younger brother, John. “They’d planned to get married and have kids. He hasn’t met anyone else that he’s loved as much, but he really loves children. He’s always wanted to reach out to children.”

The moment Michael Baldwin realized just how to do that came in 1995. He was sitting in a restaurant, not far from his Queen Anne bungalow, when a little girl saw him and immediately hid behind her father’s pant leg. Then she said, “Daddy, it’s Santa Claus.”

Baldwin was moved by the little girl’s sincerity.

It was right around that time when he began noticing his growing resemblance to the fabled old elf. Others did too. More and more people were noticing. He would turn heads, especially young ones, wherever he went.

Baldwin says he followed the signs. The Christmas after the encounter with the little girl, he tried out the role for the first time. He was a natural. And he says the role brought out the real Michael Baldwin -- the jolly man who loves making people laugh.

The fourth year he played Santa, something else began happening: “I started feeling the responsibility of playing the role,” Baldwin says. He recalls playing Santa for a Christmas cruise, and then afterward following the crowd into a bar.

“This family walks by and their kids see me through a window,” Baldwin says. “There I was, Santa with his hat off and drinking a beer. I thought, ‘Not good.’ ”

From then on, Baldwin resolved never to drink or carouse or do anything else that would sully the image of Santa Claus in the eyes of young people. He quit smoking. He even stopped swearing.

Today, he has a closet full of red clothes and drives a bright red turbo-charged PT Cruiser, which looks like a shiny new ornament on wheels. Instead of reindeer, he’s got a 6-year-old yellow lab named Buck who rides shotgun.

Baldwin does Santa gigs at stores, private parties and fundraisers. Since leaving his job at the software company last year, he has started an online business, sending personalized Santa cards to children who’ve done something good. He also gives away much of his time, volunteering as Santa in hospitals and homes for the elderly.

“He’s so believable because he’s so real,” says Christin Kundert, a bookkeeper in Tacoma. Kundert has known Baldwin for six years and has asked him to “do his Santa” at her house for the last four. Kundert and her husband have three adopted children, ages 2 to 10, and have had a series of foster children come through their home.

“He’s especially good with the older kids, the ones who are right on the border about believing in Santa Claus,” Kundert says. “His passion comes through, and these kids really start believing he’s for real.”

John Baldwin says his brother’s transformation over the years is genuine.

“It’s no act,” the brother says. “It’s who he really is.”