When Santa Kept a Home in California

SANTA BARBARA —  Here’s a story about Christmas in Southern California. I realize there are those who regard the phrase “Christmas in Southern California” as an oxymoron, believing that Christmas more or less fails to make an appearance here in paradise. I offer my story as evidence to the contrary.

In 1946 a man named Patrick McKeon rolled into Santa Barbara after his hitch in the war. His prospects were about as bright as you would expect for an ex-sailor with barely enough bankroll to open, say, a gas station. A lot of servicemen did just that after the war, but McKeon was more ambitious. He wanted to build a business that would leave a mark, that people would remember.

He spotted an empty piece of land just south of Santa Barbara on the main highway to Los Angeles. A good piece of property, he thought, the only question being what to do with it. He needed a business idea, a high concept that would pull customers off the highway and into his establishment.

During this period, other businessmen in Southern California were facing the same problem. The ubiquitous car with its potential customers sped by so fast that a curbside business had only a few seconds to deliver its message. Thus the world’s largest doughnut got built near LAX and various restaurants sprang up in the shape of hot dogs and ice cream cones.

McKeon’s idea was equally spectacular, and it was destined to become one of the classics of auto-inspired architecture. But in McKeon’s case, his inspiration would end up altering his life in ways he did not expect. McKeon decided to make his business a monument to Santa Claus.

In the beginning, of course, life changes were not foreseen. McKeon and his brother opened a series of stores along their strip and then built, on the roof, the largest Santa Claus in the country. It was 25 feet tall and stood there in the dusty, subtropical sunlight, its right hand frozen in an eternal salute to the traffic.

Just why McKeon believed that people driving next to the Santa Barbara beach would be attracted to a gigantic Santa Claus is something of a mystery. And in truth, Santa initially flopped. In the first year, sales totaled $30,000.

But then a discovery was made. McKeon learned that if you really got serious about Christmas, the customers would remember the stores and come back. They liked the feeling, and this being Southern California, it didn’t seem to matter whether it was July or December. So McKeon began to operate the only stores in America based on the principle that Christmas should be observed year-round.

Here’s the sort of thing I mean. The brothers installed a loudspeaker inside the giant Santa that was connected to a microphone in the store. When they spotted a kid outside, his name would be quietly obtained from the parents and then Santa would start a conversation.

“Hello, Andy,” Santa would say from his perch on the roof. “That’s a nice a bathing suit you have on.”

Andy would look upward and become very still. “You know, Andy,” Santa would say, “Christmas is only a few months away. Are you being good?”

Andy, his eyes wide, would nod gravely.

People loved it. Just like they loved the refrigerator-equipped North Pole that stood outside the store and stayed frosted all summer long. And they loved the small post office that postmarked letters, “Santa Claus, Calif.” When kids to wrote to Santa, McKeon’s sister always wrote back.

The McKeons started to think of themselves as the keepers of Christmas. If the stores made their money by selling date shakes and turquoise jewelry, that didn’t seem to matter to anyone. This was the 1950s and it was OK to be nutty about Christmas. In their own way, the McKeons became famous in Santa Barbara.

It couldn’t last, of course. There was a divorce, some lawsuits, and times simply changed. Pat McKeon eventually left Santa Claus and now operates a construction business in Santa Barbara. The new owners--understandably, McKeon says--have pretty much dropped the Christmas theme. The post office closed and for all intents Santa Claus, Calif., no longer exists.

But the news isn’t all bad. When the new owners applied for the permits needed to dismantle the gigantic Santa, they were turned down. It seems that Santa had been named a county landmark and was inviolate. So it will stay, McKeon says, a reminder of the good times, when Santa talked to kids in the summer heat, when letters got answers, when Southern California did Christmas its own way.