This role is bigger than life, so I’m not stepping out of it – I’m building around it.
Most of the year, I still look like Santa.
I keep a long beard year-round. I wear red and green most days. I don’t drop the posture just because it isn’t December. I’m not in a suit, but I’m also not separate from the role.
It threads through almost everything now. I didn’t plan for a season where the role would become bigger than life, but that’s where I find myself.
During the week, I work a full-time engineering job. Forty hours a week in meetings, systems, specifications, reviews, and problem-solving. That work pays the bills and keeps the structure underneath everything else stable.
Outside of that, most of my remaining time goes into building Merryvale.
Merryvale is a piece of raw land we’re developing into a home, a working property, and eventually a place where parts of our life and work will converge. Right now it’s not picturesque. It’s brush, trees, debris, old fencing, uneven ground, and a long list of things that need to be undone before anything can be built.
On most weekends I drive an hour each way to work on it. Sometimes I get a lot done. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes the weather wins.
Clearing brush. Dragging fallen limbs. Sorting scrap from salvage. Deciding what gets burned and what gets saved. Looking at a piece of land and seeing ten years of work instead of a weekend project.
Some days it’s just pulling old wire out of the ground, or walking the perimeter again because I missed something the last time. It’s slow enough that you can forget you’re doing anything at all.
There’s something steady about that kind of work. It doesn’t care how busy you are. It doesn’t speed up because you want it to.
At the same time, there’s another layer of building that happens away from the land.
Spreadsheets. Notes about equipment I don’t own yet. Lists of tools I’ll need later. Layout sketches that only make sense to me. Systems that don’t exist yet but will need to work together when they do.
It’s learning about technology for practical reasons and then talking about the same things with my kids when we’re discussing school, work, and what kinds of skills actually compound over time.
It’s calendar math. What can fit. What can’t. What gets pushed. What has to happen anyway.
It’s financial housekeeping that isn’t exciting but matters. Quiet ordering. Making space for what’s coming later.
Most of this doesn’t look like building.
It looks like preparation.
At home, my kids are older now, but I’m still involved. I’m teaching one to drive. I’m helping another think through college choices. The work changes as they grow, but it doesn’t disappear.
It’s late-night conversations, not bedtime stories now. Questions about money, work, relationships, direction. Less guidance, more listening.
My marriage is ordinary life and shared work at the same time. Groceries. Bills. Fatigue. Plans. The business and Merryvale are part of that fabric, not separate from it.
The role shows up in ordinary places.
It shows up in the way I talk about work with my kids. In the way I think about continuity when I’m making decisions. In the way I plan for things to exist after I’m not the one doing them.
It’s not something I put on and take off.
It’s what I choose right now.
I build things that won’t be finished quickly.
I build things I don’t feel qualified to build. I’m learning.
I build things that will hopefully outlive me.
We’ll see.
This was written in the middle of a build season, not after it.
It’s a snapshot, not a map.
There are whole parts of my life that don’t show up here at all. There are years of story behind this that I didn’t touch. There are futures ahead that I can’t see yet. None of that felt honest to try to compress into this.
So I wrote what was immediately in front of me.
The physical work. The planning. The overlapping responsibilities. The way the role threads through ordinary days. The way life right now feels less like a sequence of moments and more like a structure slowly being assembled.
If you’re reading this looking for a philosophy, there isn’t one here.
If you’re reading it looking for a lesson, I don’t have one to offer.
It’s just a picture of what it feels like to be building something you can’t yet stand back and see.
That’s all this is.
—Craig
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.
