The bizarre origin of ‘Santa Schools’
Y’know, some people don’t believe in schools teaching the creative arts.
Even speaking as someone who only survived my school days thanks to drama and music classes and comes at you today with a shiny degree in creative writing, I can’t help but see where they’re coming from. It’s not just that I think they’re wrong, they factually are, to be clear. Classes in humanities are as vital to the development of young people as any other subject, and there are more than enough studies conducted the show this.
However, I’m sure there are more than a few people who went on to be professional actors who’ve stood in a draughty studio pretending to be a tree while their disinterested classmates outright laugh in their teacher’s face and thought, surely there’s a better way to do this? Even beyond that, surely the best way of learning a creative practice is to just do the thing? In fact, trying to enforce academic standards on a creative practice can stifle it.
For the best of both worlds, what you’d need is a school that could teach you the basics of performing, but only for a character that could guarantee you work after the course has finished. I’m sure many serious young men would love there to be a Hamlet college, or bright-eyed musical theatre luvvies wanting to set up the Elphaba Thropp school of ‘Defying Gravity’. However, the truth is there’s only one acting role that pretty much anyone can get.
Well. Depending on the time of year, at the very least.
Wait, a Santa Claus college?!
Yup, that’s right. An entire college course on how to properly embody jolly old Saint Nick, distributor of toys, consumer of milk and cookies, and all-around symbol of everything we love about the most wonderful time of the year. This might sound patently ridiculous at first. Anyone can don some red togs and stuff a pillow up their top. Some of us don’t even need the pillow. Yet that’s the problem, at least in the mind of the college’s founder, Charles W Howard, way back in 1910.
Howard loved Christmas and didn’t just love Santa, but he loved being Santa Claus. It was a role he first played as a kid, and as time went on, he became disillusioned with the sheer amount of depressed wannabe actors who felt like they were “reduced’ to being mall Santas over the Christmas season. Howard felt that kids seeing “Santa Claus” this way would ruin the wonder of Christmas and thus, took it upon himself to set up the Charles W Howard Santa School. An operation that first took place in his own home in front of three students.
As time went on, the operation grew. First, from simple things like teaching folks the phrase “Merry Christmas” in different languages, all the way to how to handle and care for actual reindeer. This was possible due to the business growing in record time, with similar courses being set up all over the country. It also made Howard’s name, with him playing Santa in the Macy’s Day Parade for nearly 20 years and serving as a consultant on movies like Miracle on 34th Street.
Howard passed away in 1966, but his spirit lives on in his thriving business. One that still operates by his heartwarming mantra that “He errs who thinks Santa enters through the chimney, Santa enters through the heart.”