HERE COMES SANTA CLAUS: With years of portraying Santa under his belt, Gary Knight is still checking it twice
STORY BY ERIN COGGINS | PHOTOS BY FLY LEAF PHOTOGRAPHY | LIVING 50 PLUS
Red suit. Check.
Shiny black boots. Check.
White beard. Check.
Christmas magic. Check.
It is this simple checklist that transforms Gary Knight into Santa Gary around November of every year.
“I usually trim my beard back after Christmas and then start growing it back out in May,” Knight said. “It usually takes me an hour to get in full Santa mode. I do not have to do anything to my hair as, like my mother, I turned prematurely white starting in my early 20’s so that by the time I was 35 years old, I was pretty much white headed.”
Knight first portrayed the North Pole Boss in the early 1970’s while stationed at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia. His wife at the time constructed his red Santa suit for his appearance at the bases’ PX store.
“I took two white wigs and wore one on my head and one on my face as a beard. It was pretty funny, but it actually did not look terrible, and the kids seemed to love it,” Knight said. “My oldest daughter was just over a year old at the time, and I was able to see her experience of Santa firsthand, and it was great.”
Twenty-five years passed before Knight donned a Santa costume again. He was in his 40’s when he accepted the part to play the Spirit of Christmas Present with the Fantasy Playhouse Children’s Theater’s production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, a role he continued for five years. In 1998, he played Kris Kringle in a local production of “Miracle on 34th Street.”
Besides theater, commercials and working with various photography studios around North and Middle Alabama, Knight has portrayed Santa for Bridge Street Town Center since the shopping center opened in 2007, but this year he is in a new location — Huntsville’s vibrant MidCity District. He will be there in his full Father Christmas Victorian style long coat on the weekends starting through Christmas Eve.
Including the Victorian style Father Christmas attire, Knight has five other looks, including a wool woodland long coat, a white with gold embroidery elegant coat, the standard “Twas the Night Before Christmas’ suit and the Santa on vacation suit with a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, sandals and shades.
“The most requested suit is the Father Christmas Victorian style long coat, but my personal favorite is the traditional red and white short coat with red pants and black boots that I remember so fondly from my childhood,” Knight said.
Christmas has always been special to Knight, who grew up in the Monrovia area during the ‘50s and ‘60s. At the time, the area was a farming community so the Knights would go out and cut down their Christmas tree, usually a cedar, and place it in a prominent place in the living room to decorate.
“We would also make a trip to ‘town’ (Huntsville) to see the Christmas parade and shop the stores with our money we had made all year long doing chores and helping at home,” Knight said. “There were four of us kids and Mama and Daddy, plus Mama’s parents lived next door as well. Even as a little kid Christmas was really special and magical to me, and I guess I never really grew out of it.”
A part of those magical memories involves one of Knight’s neighbors, Alton Lynch. Lynch was a professional Santa who kept his beard year-round to look like St. Nick. Knight, who grew up with Lynch’s grandchildren, says Lynch would talk about the reindeer and the North Pole as though they were real.
“I was convinced that he was the real Santa. The only other Santa I had seen aside from Mr. Lynch wore a fake cotton beard that clipped over his ears, and I knew he was not the real Santa,” Knight said. “The final reason I knew that Mr. Lynch was the real thing was that he was Santa in the Huntsville Christmas parade. He was Huntsville’s parade Santa for 20 years.”
Portraying the man in the red suit allows Knight to spread some of the magic of the holidays. He recalls a time when a brother and sister, ages eight and nine, were scheduled to have photos taken with Santa. They told their mother that they knew for sure Santa was not real. Knight knew the mother and they cooked up a plan to reverse the siblings’ opinion of Santa.
“She texted me with specific family information that only the siblings would know. When they arrived at the studio, I started talking to them and casually mentioned some of the information the mother had supplied,” Knight said. “The look on their faces was priceless. Mom got one more year of Santa photos.”
Knight says while in public, children have always migrated to him to tell him what they wanted for Christmas. And he has some humorous stories to document these encounters. He prefaces each of these stories with “the parents in these instances had no idea what their child was going to say.”
These stories include a 7-year-old girl who vowed to leave a towel by the fireplace so Santa would wipe his boots off to keep the carpet from getting dirty. Apparently, her mom really hates it when the carpet gets dirty. An 8-year-old boy said that he wanted his own sodas for Christmas because his mom never gives him a whole one. But one of Knight’s favorites involves a jar of mayonnaise.
“A 6-year-old boy asked me for his own jar of mayonnaise. His mother told me that she had made sandwiches once without mayo because she had forgotten to pick it up at the store,” Knight said. “Since that time, every time she went to the grocery store, he reminded her to get mayonnaise. But he still wanted his own jar from Santa just in case.”
Knight has five grandsons, all beyond the age of believing now, but he says every once in a while, he still catches a glimmer of the old magic in their eyes. That glimmer in any child’s eyes is what keeps him putting in the long hours to portray ole’ St. Nick.
“There is nothing like the joy and wonder in a child who is totally immersed in the magic of Christmas,” Knight said. “It always takes me back to that moment when I was a youngster. That is one of the things that makes the busy schedule worth the effort. Every time I can make a child happy or an adult smile and reminisce, it gives me the spirit and drive to carry on.”
From an early age and over the years, opportunities to play Santa have presented themselves to Knight numerous times. He says it is as though it was meant for him to take on the role.
“The reason I portray Santa and will continue to do so for as long as I am able, is the joy, magic and moments it conveys to others and to me,” Knight said. “I look forward to the smiles, laughter and love you see on the faces of people. Like the old song’s lyrics say, “in kids from one to 92.”
And if one wonders what Santa Gary would do if he were the real Santa. Well, that is as simple as the checklist used to transform him into Santa.
“I would make sure that the Santa magic is real and that he can actually make reindeer fly around the world while delivering joy and happiness all over the world in one night,” Knight said. “How cool would that be?”
For more details and upcoming schedule, go to www.facebook.com/SantaClausHSV.
Look for Santa at the Christmas tree pavilion at Artemis in the MidCity District on these dates:
Saturday, December 13th: 12-4 pm
Saturday, December 20th: 10 am-1 pm
Sunday, December 21st: 1-5 pm
Monday, December 22nd: 1-5 pm