How Art Brown keeps the spirit of Santa real and imaginable year round, for kids of all ages

It’s 10am on a Sunday, and a huge pot of beef stew simmers on the stove in Art Brown’s kitchen. As he stirs it with a large wooden spoon, a rich aroma fills the air. Art is wearing a black muscle shirt, revealing thick black hair on his arms, yet when he turns from the stove, the beard on his face is white.

And his cheeks are rosy and the eyes twinkly. Definitely twinkly.

“I’ve been blessed or cursed with the face of Santa Claus,” the 63-year-old says. “I’m not normally recognized in the off-season but when I am, it’s usually by children. Kids will look at me and well, I guess I can’t get rid of this face.”

A cook in the navy and then a corrections officer, Art is a man used to wearing a uniform, so perhaps donning the distinctive red suit was a matter of destiny; after all, he’s been married 24 years to a woman named Virginia.

He was still a few years from retirement when people started to tell him he looked like Santa Claus, and after an afternoon of working outside, Art took a look in the mirror, saw the hair and the beard and the rosy cheeks, and realized they were right.

And yet, Art was already a man known for giving. Every week, he drove to Halifax, a two-hour drive from his rural home near Collingwood—in northern Nova Scotia, if not the North Pole—to donate plasma at Canadian Blood Services.

“It was just something I could do,” he says with a shrug.

He says his transformation into Santa Claus began many, many years earlier, when he was 12 years old.

“My friends were telling me there was no Santa,” he recalls. “They were talking about looking around the house and finding the gifts they were getting for Christmas.

“I had never looked around our house; so I asked my parents.

“It was explained to me, coming across in a way similar to ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.’ [See “Dear Virginia,” page 23.] But I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I said to myself, there is no way I’m going to let anyone tell a little guy there is no Santa Claus.

“I was just about in fist fights for the next few years, arguing with my friends about there being a Santa.”

Art’s commitment to keeping the spirit of Christmas alive is rooted in his belief that childhood should be special.

“We are children for such a very short time,” he says. “When we grow up, we go from birth to teenager, and our belief in Santa Claus disappears. That’s a short time. If you live 60, 70 years, that’s a long time without Santa Claus.

“Once you become an adult, playtime is really limited. The imaginary stuff is gone. But it’s magical to a kid.”

The first children he brought the magic of Christmas to were his own.

“I lost Santa Claus but I got him back with my own kids.

“They would be watching TV in the evening and it would be getting close to bedtime,” the father of three explains. “I’d go down to fix the wood furnace then through the furnace room door to the outside and ring the bells. I’d wrap them in a towel and run like a son of a gun back upstairs where the kids would just be bouncing.”

Later, he rigged the bells on a wire through the ceiling. The bells would ring in the attic, the sound carrying throughout the house, while Art was standing right in front of the children.

He chuckles at the memory. The chuckle sounds familiar.

When one of his children asked why Santa was around before Christmas, Art would say, “He’s always checking.”

Art will play Santa for anyone who asks, and he makes money with his Santa gig—a lot of money. That cash allows him to pursue a secret agenda. Although he doesn’t charge a fee for his more than 50 annual appearances at offices, schools and homes, he accepts donations—as little as $20, and up to $300 from a couple in the United States, who donate in memory of a brother who died in Vietnam. The donations add up.

Art then asks around until he finds families who need help making Christmas happen. He arranges to take the parents shopping for gifts, sometimes groceries as well. Santa pays for the gifts while Art foots the bill for gas and a meal.

“Everyone shops carefully because they don’t know how much money I have,” he says.

While he’s had years to perfect his answers to the tough questions children ask, Art admits he wishes he had better answers to some of them. The hardest requests from children are the ones Art knows no one can fulfill.

“One little girl asked me two Christmases in a row if I would bring her mother to her,” he says, getting up to stir the bubbling stew. “When I asked around if there was anything I could do to help, I was told not to go there,” he says, adding that it was apparently a complicated situation.

“But the one that always floors me is this one: ‘You won’t be coming to me this year because we’re poor.’

“What do you say? If a kid comes up with that, the parents obviously have said something. So all I can say is, ‘Santa Claus always does the best he can.’”

When confronted with a doubter, Art will suggest that perhaps it’s time to take the child’s name out of “The Book,” then he witnesses some serious backpedaling.

“Sometimes you do a little bit of defending yourself, to help restore their belief against what they’re beginning to learn from school buddies. I fortify their belief for another year.

“It’s such a small thing, but it puts a lot of joy into the kids,” Art says about the importance of his role. “I want adults to believe to the degree that they will back up Santa. There are a lot of people who figure that their child is 10 so they tell them that Santa doesn’t exist but I’ll let them have it for as long as they’ll keep it.”

For Art, the point is to uphold the Christmas message about giving throughout the year.

“Nothing irks me more than greed,” he says, “in whatever form you want to look at it.” He jerks a thumb toward the pot. “Anyone who drops by is welcome to this stew.”

Interestingly, Art has never allowed his own family to know him as Santa.

“They’ve never seen me dressed in the suit because they would know me,” Art says. “You can do for everyone else but you can’t do for your own. A couple of years ago, my grandson Keith wanted to know why Grampy looked like Santa Claus. He said ‘Your hair is white.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it is. It does that every year at Christmastime. You know how rabbits turn white in the winter? It must be something like that.’”

The art of the perfect answer.

“If you’re gonna do it, you’ve got to do it all the time. The kids think they’re talking to Santa even when I’m not dressed as Santa. I’ll be in a store and a child will be looking at me strangely so I put my finger to my lips—and the child starts to vibrate.”

Another chuckle. It sounds so right, so red velvet, so... bowlful of jelly.

“I can switch into that in a heartbeat,” Art says.

With a wink of his eye.