Becoming Santa Al: When a Calling Comes for Us
- Dec 25, 2025
- 5 min read
“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening.”— Parker J. Palmer
For many years, my father did not like Santa. Nor December. Not even the Christmas season. He was a bit of a Grinch. But not because his heart was two sizes too small. It was something different.
He loved Jesus with a steady, serious devotion. He was a minister. He believed Christmas mattered. And because it mattered so much, he felt protective of it. Anything that felt like a distraction—tinsel, noise, shopping, red suits, reindeer—felt like a theft. Something precious was being taken away.
So on Decembers he held a sign and stood outside in the cold. He was not trying to be cruel or judgmental. He was trying to be faithful.
“Jesus is the reason for the season,” the sign said. The message felt right to him. Not so much to me or my mother.
What my father did not yet have, nor did we, was language for the tension he felt. What he sensed, though, was real: a calling to protect meaning. A longing to keep Christmas anchored in love, humility, and Sacred nearness.
Then came the dream.
In it, a voice spoke plainly and unexpectedly: Be a Santa for Jesus.
That sentence undid him. He argued with it. He prayed about it. He resisted it. He could imagine preaching about Jesus. He could also imagine correcting people about how Christmas should be celebrated. But wearing red? Becoming the very symbol he had spent years opposing? That felt not just foolish, but disloyal.
There was also the matter of my mother as I mentioned earlier.
She was a professional woman, well respected, composed, thoughtful. The idea of her husband running around town in a red outfit, handing out candy canes, and cheerfully telling people—especially children—that Jesus was the reason for the season did not delight her. At least not at first. It felt undignified. It felt embarrassing. It felt risky.
And then there was me.
For years, I thought my father had gone a little off his rocker. I did not understand him. I saw the red coat and missed the courage and the calling. I saw the whimsy and missed the wisdom. Sometimes it takes a long time to recognize a meaning and purpose when it arrives wearing an unusual costume.
Still, the call stayed put.
Eventually, Dad found a red coat. Not a full Santa suit, but close enough. A red beret-like cap. He wore his cross right alongside it. He handed out candy canes, carefully explaining that they were shaped like a shepherd’s crook, like a J for Jesus. Children listened. Adults smiled. Why? I think something inside him softened. Others could soften their defenses too.
They called him Santa Al.
What changed was not his theology nor his values. What changed was his relationship to his calling. Which changed his relationship to others.
Calling often begins as tension. It pulls at us from the inside and presses against us from the outside. It unsettles our roles, our relationships, even our reputations. My father’s calling did not remove conflict; it gathered it into a form that could hold it.
Slowly, my mother began to see what was happening. The dignity she feared losing was not being lost at all. It was being translated. Joy was taking its place alongside reverence. Presence alongside proclamation. One December, she started wearing red too.
That is how callings grow. They are rarely understood all at once. They need time. They need witnesses. They need the courage to look a little strange before they make sense.
I understand him now in a way I could not then. What I once dismissed as eccentric, I now see as integration. He took everything that troubled him about Christmas and wove it into something life-giving. He did not stand outside the season protesting it. He stepped inside it carrying what mattered most.
In the town where they lived, Morristown, Tennessee, December had a face on the town calendar. Santa Al was the picture.
And in the end, that was the name that endured. On his tombstone, it reads: “Santa Al” along with his given name and birth and death dates.
Callings shape identity over time. They begin as resistance, mature through creativity, and eventually become how a community remembers us. My father did not set out to be remembered as Santa. He set out to be faithful. And faith, when it is alive, often finds forms we may have never even considered.
As the Christmas season comes and goes, it may be worth asking yourself a few questions: Where do I feel tension between the culture’s values and my own? Is there a place where I am standing outside with a badgering sort of sign, when my calling might be inviting me to step inside the others' culture (value system) with both passion, commitment, and tenderness...not feel threatened nor threatening?
What new form—perhaps unexpected, perhaps even a little embarrassing—might allow what matters most to be lived rather than defended?
I think about this for myself. For the first time, at seventy-five,
I bought a red beret and red blazer and also pulled out a cross necklace that belonged to my mother. I wore it all for at least a few minutes…in public; well, Sunday morning at church as I told as a poem the story of my father. What I was honoring is courage and calling and allowing our tensions to be integrated into a full rich life even if people might snicker a bit for a while.
Here is how I am taking his story forward....
May I (and maybe you too) have the courage to listen when a calling speaks in unfamiliar ways.
May I (and maybe you too) trust that meaning can wear many costumes without losing its heart.
May I (and maybe you too) find a form for faith, love, unique personal values and gifts that brings joy rather than division.
And may I (and maybe you too), like my father - Santa Al, discover that when a calling and identity finally align, the world opens to your passionate, tender, and sincere presence.
How might we pay attention to our inner tensions…staying alert for a calling or purpose on a large or small scale that may want to be midwifed?
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