Hope you’ve been good so far this year. Because it’s not just that Santa Claus is coming to town, but that hundreds of Santas are already streaming into Memphis. While they already know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, you might catch a break this week since they’re busy attending the International Santa Celebration (ISC) April 25th through 28th at the Renasant Convention Center.
That’s a lot of whiskers. And ho-hos. And twinkly eyes, all of which will be taking in Memphis for days of workshops, conferences, baseball, a river tour, a parade on Beale Street, and a hall full of vendors.
The ISC happens every two years and is open to all types of Christmas performers. Don’t expect all of them to embrace the traditional in their roles, although you can expect them to all share a love of children, a message of kindness, a belief in giving, and an affinity for wearing red.
Yes, there will be mostly old guys with white hair and beards, but there’s room for Mrs. Clauses and elves. If you’re really lucky, you’ll get to meet Genma Holmes, who is Ms. Claus and devoted to the role.
For Holmes, it started when she was a child growing up in Fayette, Mississippi. “My grandparents were my Mr. and Mrs. Claus,” she says. “So I learned the heart of serving others through watching my grandparents be that example. They did it for their grandchildren, and they taught us to serve other people and give back in our communities.”
It was a perfect fit for her, blending not only the joy of the season, but the culture of the South, particularly one where civil rights leaders set the tone. “Nobody was a stranger,” she says. “Everyone got fed, everybody got a hug no matter who you were — that whole spirit that embodied serving others and taking care of your community.”
Holmes, outgoing by nature, carried it even further: “I wasn’t a Mrs. Claus; I wasn’t an elf. I just said I’m going to be everything my grandfather could be. Except I’m not a male. But I didn’t want to get into anything other than just being Santa, so I took on the persona of Ms. Santa — and the rest is history.”
That’s been 27 years of taking the spirit of Santa all over the country. Holmes calls herself a serial entrepreneur, and her list of accomplishments prove it. She’s based in Nashville and runs a pest control company; she has a media consulting firm, edits publications, and is a media influencer. As Ms. Santa, she is deeply involved in promoting the Yule spirit and is on the board of directors of International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas, better known as IBRBS, which is the primary sponsor of the ISC.
The president and CEO of IBRBS is Stephen Arnold, a Memphian and member of the International Santa Claus Hall of Fame. Arnold is a longtime member of the local MidSouthern Santa Society and astute observer of the Santa industry who you’ve almost certainly seen around town at the major Christmas events. Known as Fabled Santa, he’s been interviewed in The New York Times and knows as much about the business of being the jolly old elf as anyone in or out of the North Pole.
Arnold ran the Only Kids specialty toy shop for 22 years, a store familiar to many Memphians for its location at the Regalia Shopping Center. Having a toy store was his entrée to being Santa, although it wasn’t his goal. There were times during the holiday season when the Santa he hired wouldn’t show up, so the hefty Arnold would don a suit and entertain the youngsters. It wasn’t something he could do or wanted to do on a regular basis since, after all, he had a toy store to run at the busiest time of year. Eventually, though, he closed the store in 2002 and found his calling as a Santa Claus who got into it in a big way.
He’s been wrangling the details in putting on the ISC, and the lineup will have plenty for anyone in the Christmas entertainment sector. “The conference itself is primarily an educational opportunity,” he says. “We will be offering 48 classes on various topics pertaining to the Christmas community at any one time.”
As happens with conferences, there are often sessions that overlap, but the schedule mixes them in a way that allows for choices. There are classes, for example, for Mrs. Clauses. There are meetings aimed at Santas who have real beards, and then those who wear fake beards, more elegantly described as Designer Bearded Santas. Although the IBRBS is for real-bearded Santas, the ISC is open to anyone, no matter the status of their chin whiskers. There will be elves, reindeer handlers, and more.
“The advantage to this conference versus attending a specialized Santa school,” Arnold says, “is that every school has the master who’s developed the curriculum and they obviously teach what they’re most familiar with. There are guest speakers they may have during the usually two-day events. This is a three-day event with 42 talented, experienced speakers. As an attendee, you can choose the curriculum that you want to choose, so you have a big selection. At a school, every attendee will attend every class — there’s no choice except what’s decided upon by the owners of the school.”
Then there is the networking. “There’s the camaraderie, the sharing of experiences, the meeting of people that you may have only met on Facebook or heard about through something else,” Arnold says. “The attendees are coming from France, England, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, Canada, and almost every state, so there’s real opportunity to meet people that you wouldn’t ordinarily meet.”
It wouldn’t be much of a convention if there weren’t vendors. It’ll be something like a huge toy store, but for Santas.
“If you’re looking for a new suit, we’re going to have three, I think four people who specialize in suits,” Arnold says. “We’ve got four vendors that are going to be purveying leather goods. We’ve got two, three beard maintenance, beard oils and bombs. We’ve got several of them for other accessories like the belt buckles and pins and bells, things like that.”
Does this sound tempting? Well, you’re in luck since the vendor area is open to the public. It’s especially useful for those Santas who can’t make the entire event. “There are a lot of Santas who can’t attend because of timing or a commitment with work or money,” Arnold says. “We know that there are quite a few coming from Arkansas and some from Mississippi who are just coming up for a day to shop. And we expect that there will be some interested people in the community, maybe even some prospective Santas who may have been thinking, ‘Boy, I think I’d like to do that.’ They can come in and see all of the goods.”
But what about the programming of the convention? What’s on the wish list? There is a variety of offerings that will appeal to the novice elf or the seasoned Santa. Here’s a sampling:
• Mrs. Claus Flying Solo
• Ho Ho How to Market Your Santa Business
• The Enduring Magic of the Classic “Twas the Night Before Christmas”
• The Santa Clause: What to Include in Your Booking Agreements
• American Sign Language — Practical Use for Santa and Mrs. Claus
• The Art of Projecting Your Voice
• Setting Up a Virtual Workshop
• How to Stay Cool in Your Costume
• Santa and His Pipe
• Working With Children With Special Needs
• Miracle on Diversity Street
• How to Create Magical Home Visits
• Reading to Children
• Developing Your Christmas Brand
• Developing Your Christmas Wardrobe
• Surviving the Season
And that’s just a partial listing. But every one of those topics means something to Christmas performers. It’s fun to be with kids and amuse them, but there are scads of details for a successful Santa to tend to and there are lots of ways things can go wrong. And that’s not the impression anyone wants to leave.
Arnold says the workshops and sessions are geared to being a successful Santa. “Let’s talk about the business of being a Christmas performer,” he says of the program lineup. “So many of them see themselves as Santa and try to learn how to portray the role, but so many don’t know anything about being in the business of being Santa, how to take care of your receipts, what’s deductible, what’s not, how to be a professional in the industry.”
For all the tradition that seems to be part of the Santa mythos, change is very much a factor in what Santas do, how they present, and what they can bring to keep the holiday spirit alive.
Social media has changed so much of how Christmas entertainers interact with the public. And of course the pandemic really did a number on the idea of a child sitting on a lap and whispering what she wants to Santa. In 2020, the business of doing Zoom encounters or taping videos got a big boost. It kept the Santa connection alive, but is it really a good move in the long run?
The state of being Santa today is vastly different than just a few years ago. “There was a lot of trepidation about what was going to happen because of Covid, what the residual effect would be, and would Santa in person ever recover,” Arnold says. “And the answer is that the state of the Santa business is good. People have not withdrawn from having Santa, wanting to either visit with Santa in mall situations or big box stores or in person at events or their own events. I was never busier than last year. I had to turn down so many people for home visits and things.”
He mentions Steve Dodd, a local Santa who does a lot of work in the community. Arnold says that Dodd is just about booked up for the rest of the year. And Arnold himself is quickly filling up his calendar. “Last year I tried to cut back and I still did I think 75 appearances and probably have that many this year. I’m going to deliberately try to move more of my business into video visits so that I don’t have to physically go out and meet with people. I’ll try to still do the big events like Graceland, the Christmas parade, and maybe the St. Jude tree and the LeBonheur tree. I got some pretty good gigs, but I think I’m going to have to do less of the other things.”
Still, there’s plenty of new talent coming onto the scene and it’s adapting to changing times. “The prices have gone up to cover the expenses that have happened in both the accessories and suits that we have to buy, but also obviously transportation,” Arnold says. “But the community seems to accept the fact that it costs a reasonable amount of money to have a true professional come and visit. And more people started picking up home visits because they realized that they didn’t have to wait in line for an hour or two and get a picture from somebody who wasn’t a professional. They realized they could actually hire a photographer or a good friend to come and take pictures in their home and have a different kind of experience.”
While the scene is improving for the Santa industry, there have been lots of changes.
Holmes, as Ms. Santa, has seen it all go down. “A lot of the newest Santas are competing with each other,” she says, “literally on social media, versus becoming their own Santa.” No, she says, it shouldn’t be that way. “We should grow our own. We see children who were babies when I used to go to their schools as Ms. Santa. They are adults with children, and that customer base is built right in.”
While it’s perfectly sensible for a Santa to do some traveling wherever the business takes him, there is a caution, Holmes says. “Like I say to the younger folks coming in, you’re spending a lot of money, and yet you haven’t bloomed in your own backyard. I believe in starting where you are, bloom where you’re planted, bloom right there. Then watch yourself grow and grow and grow. Become a household name right in your own community.”
It’s a classic case of changing with the times while trying to preserve long-held traditions.
“Social media has changed everything,” Holmes says. “And sometimes I wonder if we are trying to be a social media Claus versus the heart of Santa. Those are two different titles, and we see that. I’m not knocking it, but there’s a dynamic of social media. I’m into social media. I actually work for companies that use social media. I handle their business, their communications and everything. I totally understand that. But I also know that sometimes we have to, in order to become bigger, we must become smaller.”
Related to that, Holmes also cautions against aiming too high. She once used the Nextdoor networking app where she’d established a presence. “Are you looking for Santa photos?” she asked. The result? “It was 72,000 people coming at me at one time.”
But with all the changes going on in the industry, she finds a great deal of satisfaction in working with other Santas, which is what prompted her to get involved with IBRBS and the ISC. “I wanted to go deeper in my relationships with other Clauses to help sharpen them, whether I’m being sharpened or they’re being sharpened. We can get the big head because we wear the suit in red and we can lose that humility that is so vital to being a Claus. I was seeing a lot of things online. You’re behind the screen and you could just type anything out, and then you wonder why your business is the way it is.”
Holmes remembers when some students had come in to help her with a project, and they were all watching these people online who listed their names as Santa. “They were making comments and saying, ‘I don’t think I would want my child to be engaged with Santa Claus because these Santas are really mean.’ We don’t realize how we look or sound to the rest of the world until the rest of the world tells us this is what we sound like.”
So, she feels it’s important to keep the communication among Santas open and share the success stories. “We have achieved our goals, and we also have watched some of the things that are concerning to us about the Claus community get addressed, not just by us, but by others as well,” she says. “I believe in that community of getting together and really having someone to be your partner in sharpening you. Iron sharpens iron, and that has been one of the most beautiful things. I have since found several Ms. Clauses who were single, solo Ms. Clauses and they have done the same thing. They wanted to have someone not tell them how to be a Ms. Claus, but to help them be a better person. I say, if we’re going to help each other be a better person, then you’re going to naturally be a better Ms. Claus.”
Even as the ISC is bringing together Christmas entertainers from all over the globe, Holmes finds in that expanding world a powerful way to carry on the message of good will. “Santa World comes in all shades, colors, hues, shapes, sizes, different backgrounds, different nationalities,” she says. “When I travel to other places, I meet people from all different places, a microcosm of the real world. And when I go, I see people from all backgrounds. But here’s one thing — they’re all unified around the love of the holidays. No matter what their beliefs are, when they see me show up with toys, they’re like, ‘Baby, get in line!’”
For Holmes, there is a purpose to being Ms. Claus, and to work with individuals and organizations to raise the Christmas spirit, and to perpetuate joy. “My goal is to show that the happiness that we can bring to the world, we can be that to the world,” she says. And then she laughs: “Because sometimes Santas are just grumpy old men! I want us to be the happiness that we show. We can be that too. And then we can represent that no matter what background that we are from.”
That happiness should, she believes, rise above the everyday. “It doesn’t have to get into a race conversation or a female-versus-male conversation. It’s like, no, just be the happy you. That’s what people are going to love and gravitate to.”
And for all holiday entertainers, whether versions of Santas or elves or reindeer impersonators, she holds forth with this sentiment about the ISC: “We hope that this attracts new members, and for members who have stepped out for a minute to say, ‘Hey, let me catch my breath,’ please come back. We can’t do this without you. We need each and every one of us to be the best that we can be by helping each other.”
