Sketches of a serial reporter
TALES OF SANTA CLAUS PAST
Somebody at the TV station must have thought it was a good idea. Get the Santa from Four Seasons mall and put him on the air for 48 minutes, taking calls from local children. It’ll be cute. Won’t it?
Well, it doesn’t take 48 minutes for the switchboard to light up, and not from children calling. Santa is not only politically incorrect — he’s dangerous. The adults are furious. The TV brass is furious. Whose hare-brained idea was this, anyway?
His first mistake is to tell the truth. There are lots of Santas, he tells a child caller. Sure. The world’s too big for one Santa to deliver all those toys.
His second mistake is that he won’t lie. No, Rudolph does not have a red nose that glows. He’s a wild animal.
But really, anyone who had visited Santa at Four Seasons — and that included something like 12,000 children every year — shouldn’t have been surprised at the call-in show. He had been doing the unthinkable for some time — that is, talking about what happened on the first Christmas and asking children to sing “Happy Birthday” before opening their presents.
“You’re playing with fire,” a marketing director once warned him, “and you’re going to get burned.”
But a funny thing happened. Attendance went up at Santa’s Village ...
From “The Man Who Became Santa Claus”
An author who knows how to tell stories
Lorraine Ahearn is a reporter for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., where she lives with her husband and two children and teaches at Guilford College. A recipient of the Casey Medal and the Associated Press Mark Twain Award for Investigative Reporting, she still believes in Santa Claus.
From The Author
"Other than a hot toddy, perhaps, nothing warms the bones like a fireside yarn. 'The Man Who Became Santa Claus, and Other Winter Tales' is straight from the sidewalks of Greensboro — true-life characters we'll recognize from the 24-hour breakfast counter at Jan's Diner, the precinct house downtown, the all-night mission or the volunteer firehouse on Thanksgiving Day: They are sinners, saints, and most of them, somewhere between the two, game faces we meet in the winter of the year."
— Lorraine Ahearn, October 2009
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