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Ed Butchart, a.k.a. Santa Claus, was a senior in high school the first time he donned the red suit. Butchart's brother asked for a Santa appearance as part of a deal brokered with his 3-year-old daughter, Susan. She had offered to relinquish her "blankey" if Santa Claus himself came to her house to get it. Butchart borrowed a Santa suit from a local department store and as the hour approached made the final adjustments on his fake beard and the two pillows stuffed beneath his crimson coat. His heart was "all aflutter," he recalls, when he walked to the house and rang the bell. Susan opened the door, screamed, then bolted to her room and hid under her bed in absolute terror. She refused to come out and reduced her father to squeezing under the bed himself to drag her out kicking and screaming. She eventually relinquished her blanket to Santa—a deal was a deal—but she never said a word to him and retreated to her room once the transaction was complete. It would be 40 years before Butchart put on the suit again. Between that episode and his present incarnation as Santa, he has grown to understand the heart's need to believe, even if it reveals itself in an irrational scheme about a fat guy squeezing down every chimney on planet Earth in a single night.I say "incarnation as Santa" because Butchart's white fluffy beard is real, he calls his wife, Annie, "Mrs. Claus," and when people stare at him in restaurants and approach him, he signs his autograph: "Remember to be good/Love, Santa." Instead of the North Pole, Butchart is based in Atlanta, Georgia. And instead of a toy shop, Butchart operates a 65,000 square-foot workshop where he and his "elves" refurbish old wheelchairs and other medical equipment to give away to the disabled.Butchart, 65, was in his earlier life a journalism major at the University of North Carolina, a Marine, and a medical-equipment salesman. In his later years, he heard a higher call—to live out his Christian witness through the character of Santa Claus.The idea might seem like a contradiction, especially for believers who want to keep the Christ in Christmas, and so eschew the Santa business. My husband and I were numbered among them. One Christmas Eve 17 years ago, when our children were preschoolers, my father snuggled the boys into his lap and asked innocently, "So what is Santy Claus going to bring you this Christmas?" Our 4-year-old looked at him with a straight face and answered, "You can think about him and pretend he's real, but he's not." We were left hemming and hawing, trying to explain that we weren't raising our sons to believe in Santa.Our thinking went along these lines: First, there was no getting around the fact that teaching about Santa was a bald-faced lie, and we were raising our sons not to tell lies. Second, we didn't like the focus of "getting" that believing in Santa perpetuated. Santa's unending promises of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Baby-All-Gones seemed a distracting subtext to the greater narrative of the season. Third, it felt like an undue burden to place on our children that there was this all-knowing, all-seeing, gift-giver who would extend or withhold his blessing depending on one's "goodness."Some called us killjoys. But it could also be argued that the Santa myth itself has a negative effect. Butchart, who has studied these things, estimates that 75 percent of kids up to age 3 are terrified of Santa. "I've been slapped, punched, kicked, head-butted, and generally abused," he says.Then there is the less measurable disillusionment factor when kids inevitably learn the truth and stop believing. In some ways perpetuating the Santa story teaches our children not to believe in anything, especially when those they trust the most, mom and dad, were co-conspirators in the deception.Ed Butchart's Santa, however, challenges these notions. He has found a way to redeem the myth and point people back to the Real Magic of that wonderful night. In this sense, Butchart has revived the same spirit of the fourth-century bishop, Nicholas of Myra, whose heroic acts of charity inspired the modern legend. Tom Brokaw, in a 1992 NBC Nightly News report, observed that Butchart's Santa "can only be described as the real thing." He makes even skeptics and Santa abstainers like me want to believe.

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14