A personal Santa origin story about becoming Santa, belief, and responsibility.
The Work Before I Had Words for It
I don’t remember Christmas as a sequence of events.
I remember impressions.
Textures. Waiting. Anticipation that stretched longer than it should. A sense that something important was happening, even when I couldn’t have explained why.
As a child, my older sister and I always tried to catch Santa.
When I was very young, I followed the rules. I went to bed when I was told to, because I knew that was how you ensured Santa would come. Later, when doubt began to creep in, I would lie awake instead. My parents’ bedroom was across the hall. I remember watching the clock – 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., sometimes later – waiting for them to come out and become Santa.
They never did. At least, I never caught them.
If they were Santa, they must have been exhausted by my refusal to sleep. Eventually, I would drift off. And every single time, Christmas morning arrived exactly as it should have. Santa had come.
We didn’t have many outward-facing traditions. Some years we drove around looking at Christmas lights. Most years followed a familiar rhythm: Christmas with my dad’s extended family a few days before, and Christmas Day afternoon with my mom’s side, after presents were opened at home.
At some point, my sister and I convinced my mom that Christmas breakfast made more sense than Christmas dinner. She agreed. Instead of a bowl of cereal, it became a big spread of eggs, bacon, sausage, rolls, and other things – and then, Grandma and Grandpa joined us before we headed out to the larger family gathering later in the day.
Christmas morning itself was its own tradition.
We woke up early. Always early. Usually around 4:30 a.m. My parents made us wait until 5:00 before they would get up. During that half hour, we were allowed into our stockings only.
They were always overflowing.
An apple or an orange in the toe – enormous, at least through a child’s eyes. Candy. Small gifts. Treats you never saw the rest of the year. And the dining room table – covered. Santa had left fruit baskets. Chocolate-covered nuts. Red and green peanut M&Ms (my favorite). Gumdrops. Cherry cordials (Dad’s favorite). Cookies. Jelly orange slices. A plate Santa had clearly gotten into.
By the time my parents finally got up, we tore into the gifts. Mom tried to slow us down. She never succeeded. Within an hour or so, it was over. And then Grandma and Grandpa arrived, and we did it all again.
I loved Christmas.
And for many Christmases, at the end of the day, I felt a quiet sadness. Not because I wasn’t grateful – but because after all that anticipation, there was nothing left to look forward to. Christmas was over. A long, cold Indiana winter stretched ahead. Unless there was snow. Snow made everything better to a little kid.
Some years there was. White Christmases meant sledding at Grandpa’s house. Those days wore me out enough that sadness didn’t stand a chance.
There are two memories that remain sharp.
One is a red Huffy Racer bicycle. My first bike. Fully assembled. Fully prepared for me. Leaning against the Christmas tree. Gleaming red with black trim. I rode it endlessly.
The other was the year I convinced my mom to let me open one gift on Christmas Eve. After a long time, she relented. I chose the one that felt most dense – small, but heavy. I remember the weight of it in my hands.
When I opened it, I was disappointed.
Not because I didn’t want it. I did. But it was practical, not fun. And worse – it meant one less surprise on Christmas morning.
I don’t remember ever again asking to open a gift early after that day.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to love surprise.
The One Who Carried Christmas
If anyone carried Christmas in our home, it was my mother.
She created the atmosphere. The tree. The decorations. The lights. Dad helped when he could – especially outside – but Mom made the magic happen.
She cared about all of it: ritual, meaning, togetherness, getting it right.
She protected belief fiercely. I was older than most of my friends when I finally asked her, directly, if Santa was real. I was twelve. Fifth or sixth grade. She told me Santa was a spirit – an idea.
I didn’t want to believe her. I don’t think I ever really did.
I still look at the sky on Christmas Eve.
She also made sure Christ was at the center of Christmas. We had a small, two-piece ceramic nativity – something I believe she hand-painted herself. It wasn’t pretty, but it fascinated me. The creche was one piece. The figures – Joseph, Mary, the baby, the angel, the animals, the wise men – were all one solid form.
When I was older, I began asking to attend Christmas Eve candlelight services at our Lutheran church.
Only later, as a parent myself, did I understand how much work she put into all of it.
When My Children Were Little
There is so much I don’t remember.
I don’t remember most of the gifts. Only a handful stand out.
My first Christmas as a dad, I built a dollhouse for my stepdaughter. I intended to finish it with her. Instead, my perfectionism took over. She was “too young to help,” I told myself, and I tried to do it myself.
I failed.
Life got busy. Years passed. Twelve years later, it was still unfinished. I gave it to her when she left home – the exterior mostly complete, the interior untouched. It became a quiet source of guilt for more than a decade while she was at home, and still remains so to this day.
I never tried again with my second daughter. One regret became two.
I don’t remember my son’s first Christmas as a baby, except for one image. He was born in September. We took photos sometime between his birth and Christmas – trying to be artsy, holding him sleeping in the palms of my hands to show how small he was.
Those photos became our Christmas cards that year.
I don’t remember my children’s faces on Christmas morning. I remember how tired I was. I stayed up late every year with Aileen, wrapping gifts, trying to carry my mother’s magic forward. By morning, I was often exhausted.
One image remains clear: holding my youngest daughter when she was two months old, just weeks after we moved into a new house. We barely had time to put up a tree. She was awake (rarely) and lying on my knees, looking up at me.
I remember trains. GeoTrax. Thomas the Tank Engine. I remember finding my son asleep face down in the middle of his train set, having worn himself out playing.
Aileen made a rule that changed everything: the kids couldn’t go downstairs until Mom and Dad did. She wanted their reactions – photos of them coming down the stairs, seeing what had happened overnight.
We lived far from extended family. On Christmas morning and through most of the day, it was just us. Toys being assembled. Boxes opened. Movies playing. I regret that my kids didn’t grow up with the large family gatherings I did.
What I wanted for them was simple and overwhelming at the same time.
I wanted them to believe – in magic, in Santa, in the meaning of Christmas. We went to church on Christmas Eve. My traditions became our traditions. Christmas was where I tried hardest.
As a single-income family, money was tight. Christmas was my act of service – how I could demonstrate what I couldn’t always articulate: my Love. And many times, at least to me, it felt like the only time I could get that kind of expression right (and often still does).
In the early years, we stretched what we had. We broke apart 6-packs of socks and wrapped each pair individually. Dollar-store items became stocking treasures. We wrapped Santa’s gifts differently – shiny paper, peppermint patterns. Most gifts came from Santa. We placed the “big” gift last, sometimes hiding it to protect the moment.
Santa got the credit. And we thanked God for Santa.
I don’t know what I got right.
I do know my children love Christmas.
I hope, someday, they remember not perfection – but effort.
The Weight I Didn’t Expect: When it First Arrived
Before I ever wore a suit, I felt responsibility twice.
The first time was in 2006, when I was Santa for my daughter Lily. I didn’t have a suit – I was just a dad trying to fill some really big boots. It was my first time doing it, and I wanted desperately to succeed for her. Not to perform well. To get it right.
The second time was many years later at my first Santa school. I had assumed the work would be simple – put on a nice suit, grow a beard, say Ho Ho Ho, pose for photos, ask children what they wanted for Christmas. Sitting in that room, surrounded by men and women who had been doing this for decades, I realized how little I understood. Watching them “play” in character, move easily, not take themselves too seriously, my very adult, rarely playful, logical engineering mind started to revolt, and then panic.
I called Aileen that evening, ready to quit before I ever started.
When I finally wore a suit for the first time, it felt wrong. It was a cheap suit, and it felt like a shapeless rag on me when I looked in the mirror. Like an imitation. I didn’t feel magical. I felt like an imposter. (Sometimes I still do.)
But tradition felt familiar. Important. Heavy. Like I was standing on the edge of something that mattered, whether I was ready for it or not.
The Weight I Didn’t Expect: Where I Thought It Would Be
When I first put on the suit, I assumed the weight would come from performance.
From logistics.
From cost.
From that awful word that turns magic into paperwork: “compliance”.
From learning how to “act” – how to move, how to speak, how to be “on.”
That’s not where it lives, at least not for me.
Those things matter, but they aren’t what stays with me.
I thought I would spend most of my energy trying to be a public facing Santa well enough. I didn’t expect how anxious, terrified even, that I would become of getting it wrong for a true-believing child. And I didn’t expect that the harder work would be knowing when not to fill space. When not to explain. When not to try to fix something that wasn’t fixable.
I was wrong about where the weight would settle.
The Weight I Didn’t Expect: Where It Actually Lives
What I didn’t anticipate – what I couldn’t have anticipated – is how many adults still carry belief into the room.
Not nostalgia. Not humor. Not play. Not even just a love for Christmas.
Belief.
Elderly men and women who choke up unexpectedly. Parents who linger longer than they need to. People who have experienced loss – recent or old – who aren’t looking for performance, but for permission to feel something again. To miss someone at Christmas.
Those moments are the hardest for me.
They’re also the most meaningful.
It shows up when a child looks at me with a seriousness that doesn’t match their age. When their question isn’t playful, but careful. When they lean in, as if they’re making a request that costs them something to ask.
Other times it shows when adults tell me about someone who isn’t there anymore. When they thank me with a gratitude that feels much too outsized for the moment we just shared.
I didn’t expect that part.
I didn’t expect how many grown people – elderly people, grieving people, hurting people – would want something from Santa that Santa cannot actually fix. I still don’t know what the right response is in those moments. Sometimes I speak. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes, I offer a hug. If the setting is right and I sense openness, I ask if I can pray with them. Sometimes I don’t, and later wonder if I should have.
These are the encounters that follow me home.
There’s no script for grief. No tidy Santa answer that resolves real pain.
But I always pray for them afterward.
That wasn’t something I expected Santa to require of me.
But here we are.
Becoming Santa – What Still Isn’t Settled
There are parts of this role I’m still trying to understand, and I don’t think they’re meant to be settled yet.
One of them is Mrs. Claus.
Not as an accessory, and not as tag-along or “support for Santa’s work,” but as essential. As the keeper and author of all the best magic, especially Santa’s.
If I trace Christmas back far enough in my own life, it wasn’t Santa who made it happen. It was my mother.
And if I look around honestly now, it’s women – year after year – who carry most of the invisible labor that makes Christmas possible. They plan. They prepare. They remember. They wrap. They wait up late. They read and tell stories. They pave the path for Santa’s Christmas Eve tour. They hold the weight of it all quietly.
Santa is often the symbol of that work.
Yet, they are the substance.
I want Aileen – Aila, Mrs. Claus – to be honored and loved not because she stands beside Santa, but because this work is incomplete without her. I don’t yet have perfect language for how to live that out publicly and consistently. I just know it matters, and I’m still learning how to get it right.
Another unsettled place for me is Faith.
Not belief as an idea – but faith as obedience.
I believe Santa, at his best, points beyond himself. I believe Saint Nicholas was trying to live out someone inside him, not invent something about him. I believe God uses imperfect people in unexpected ways. I pray that He uses me, too.
What I don’t always know is how to hold that tension well in a world that is loud, suspicious, and polarized – where sincerity is often mistaken for performance, or something else. I’m still learning when to speak plainly and when restraint is the more faithful choice.
That uncertainty doesn’t make the work weaker.
If anything, it’s what keeps me careful.
The weight of this became personal for me before I ever put on a suit.
The year before I started, my friend Mike passed away. He was a volunteer Santa. He was also a municipal judge. When my children were little, they knew him simply as Mr. Mike – the man who, on the rare occasions of their encounters, always listened to them, always made time for them, even played with them, and made them feel seen. When I later learned he was Santa, the words, “of course”, sprang to mind.
When he died – too young and unexpectedly – I heard stories from afar. Hundreds of people showed up at his funeral. Even people he had sentenced to jail. They credited him with saving their lives because he judged with love and compassion, not contempt. He was known for genuinely caring about each and every person who ever appeared in front of him.
I wanted a life like that – a legacy that actually meant something.
As several days turned into weeks, and I grieved my friend from afar, I came to the conclusion that at my age, I wasn’t able to go back to law school and begin that path. That path to that kind of legacy had passed. But a seed had begun to sprout in the soil of my heart – and I didn’t yet know what it was growing into, or whether I was ready for it.
Maybe I could…
Then, quietly and a few months later, at a library book sale, I walked in and my eyes landed on a book sitting atop the pile, as though it had been placed there for me – or at least that’s how it felt in that moment: Being Santa Claus. I took it home that night and started reading it out loud to Aileen. She fell asleep after a few chapters.
I didn’t. I kept reading. I couldn’t put it down.
I finished it sometime around 4am.
A few days later, and shortly after Christmas, I told her what had been growing in me for months. I expected laughter. I expected skepticism.
Instead, she said, “I knew I didn’t marry the Grinch. I was born to be Mrs. Claus!”
And while much about this role is still unresolved for me, that part was suddenly clear.
What I Owe
I used to think this role came with things I needed to do.
Learn the craft. Get the details right. Be good at it.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that wasn’t the center of it. For me, what this role really comes with are things I need to owe – even when I don’t yet have the right language for them.
I owe children possibility and hope without over-explaining either. I owe families loving restraint instead of manufactured spectacle. And to belief, I owe protection rather than unneeded amplification.
There’s another debt I didn’t anticipate.
When children tell Santa that they love him, it still catches me off guard. Every time. I hesitate – not because the affection isn’t real, but because I’m aware of what they’re actually responding to. It isn’t me. It’s the world that was built for them long before I ever entered the room.
Their parents did that.
Their families did that.
I’m just standing in the middle of it for a moment.
So what I owe – more than anything – is this: to never confuse my presence with the source of the magic. To never take credit for what was entrusted to me. To leave a room in a way that strengthens what already exists instead of replacing it.
If I do that well, then when I’m gone, belief doesn’t collapse.
It continues.
And at the very bottom of that responsibility, stripped of everything else, I think it comes down to this:
I owe love, purity, and I owe belief – not that others believe in me, but that I believe in them.
And if you’re reading this: Santa believes in you. Santa loves you.
But God loves you more. He sees you. And you matter to Him.
This account was written entirely from memory – without photographs, timelines, or conversations to help fill in the gaps. And there are gaps. There always are.
When I look at old photos, different memories return. Sometimes they clarify what I’ve written here. Sometimes they complicate it. That feels honest to me.
This wasn’t an attempt to document my story precisely, or to assemble a clean narrative. It was an attempt to tell the truth about my Santa origin story as it exists in me now, shaped more by time, responsibility, and reflection than by chronology.
What I’ve learned – slowly – is that memory doesn’t preserve moments so much as it preserves meaning. And meaning often arrives first as responsibility, long before it becomes articulate or resolved.
If parts of this feel unfinished, that feels appropriate.
—Craig
Portions of my understanding of this path were shaped by “Being Santa Claus” by Sal Lizard, which I encountered early in my journey.
Craig Hamilton is a professional Christmas performer and the creative mind behind Santa Craig Cringle. He writes about Claus professionalism, sustainability, and the evolving craft of Christmas and holiday portrayal.
