Here Comes Santa Claus

Inhabiting the role is key to a first-class Claus

by Ray Sikorski

It was about ten years ago that curly-locked George Carter was first asked to perform as “Santa Paws” for the Humane Society’s annual fundraiser.

“The beard smelled really bad, and the suit didn’t fit very well, and I had a cocker spaniel pee all over me,” Carter says.

Ah, the tinkling of Christmas bells. To add insult to injury, a photo of the rookie Santa and the nervous spaniel was featured prominently in the Bozeman Chronicle.

But somehow Carter was inspired, rather than deterred.

“That summer I had a suit made, and the rest is history.”

Since then Carter’s wooly look has become the stuff of Bozeman Christmas legend. Along with having worked the big chair at the Gallatin Valley Mall for nine years, Carter waves from the sleigh at Christmas Strolls, works private parties and family gatherings, and still offers his lap to the spaniels for Heart of the Valley’s Santa Paws.

“Pets don’t believe or disbelieve,” says Carter, whose alter-ego is the gruff-voiced morning commentator on KMMS-AM. “They just see this weird guy in a red suit. ‘Whoa, he wants me to sit on his lap?’”

Belief is the name of the game for Bozeman’s über-Santas. Like Carter, longtime Gallatin Valley Mall Santa Skip Tinder owns his own red suit, sports a billowing beard, and takes the role to heart.

Tinder, who looks the part right down to the twinkle in his eye and the jellybowl belly, took it as a compliment when friends first asked him to play Santa more than 20 years ago. Now it just comes with the territory.

“Maybe it’s a selfish reason,” he says of his reason for taking on the job year after year. “Maybe it makes me feel good to make the kids feel good – I don’t know.”

Tinder, who will be retiring from jobs with the Montana Highway Department and Kenyon-Noble Ready Mix within the next year, takes a certain amount of joy in the challenges of young believers. Upon being asked his name, a boy with brand-new blue glasses refused to give it to Tinder, on the grounds that Santa already went over that information downtown. Thinking fast, Tinder said he didn’t recognize the boy with his new glasses on. The boy ripped off the frames and declared, “It’s me, Jamie!”

Of course, not all who shop in the mall are young believers. Some are not-so-young wanna-believers, like teenage girls asking for new trucks and boyfriends (“I always ask them if they’ve been good girls, and they giggle”) and the occasional MSU football player. Tinder, who also plays Easter Bunny at the mall, boasts that he hosted two burly linemen at once on his big chair, for a grand total of over 900 pounds between the three of them.

Both Santas spoke of the challenges posed by children who ask for them to cure relatives of cancer, or to bring their divorcing parents back together. “That about does me in,” Tinder says.

But the feeling that Santa can’t bring everyone everything is offset by the simple wide-eyed magic of continued belief. Carter described a little girl who found a rusty bell in a woodpile, convinced that it had fallen from Santa’s sleigh one Christmas.

The girl’s parents secretly explained to Carter that she lost the bell, but they had purchased a shiny new one as a replacement. They gave the bell to Carter to present to the girl.

“I said, ‘I heard you lost my sleigh bell.’ Her eyes just got huge, and she said, ‘Yeah.’”

He pulled out the new bell, which rang just perfectly.

“She was on that age where they’re starting to not believe, but that was probably good for another couple of years. The look in her face was worth everything I ever did.”

Both Santas noted that they could be making big bucks in big city malls, but the idea held little appeal to either of them. Carter donates everything he makes as Santa to the Help Center.

“Santa Claus is a concept, it’s a belief, it’s an ideal. It’s not a sales tool,” he said.

“All it takes to be Santa is a red suit and a beard. What it takes to be a good Santa is making the kids feel like at that time they are the most important thing in the world. You relate to them as complete equals. It’s the way they open up, the way they talk to you. You can see belief in their eyes… which is one of the reasons why I don’t wear an artificial beard.”

And, Carter confesses, that beard gets pulled on quite a bit.

“There’s one spot in particular,” he says, pointing to the left side of his shaggy jawline. “It’s sore by the end of the season.”

All of this begs the question: Do you have to be a little bit crazy to be first-class Claus?

“Oh, yeah,” Carter says. “But it’s the good kind of crazy. It’s like your eccentric uncle.”