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There’s a photographer named Dave Dickey, and one day he posted a photo of me on Facebook, just a casual thing, and wrote underneath it, “Greg, you actually look like you could be Santa Claus.” And I laughed, because what do you do with that, and then I forgot about it, the way you forget about most things people say on Facebook. But Dave didn’t forget. A few months later, August or September I think, he reached out and said he was shooting for Lakelander Magazine and he wanted me to come in, and that’s when things got strange in the best possible way.
The shoot itself was elaborate, you know, real lighting equipment, the kind of setup that takes an hour before you even sit down, and at some point the photographer looks at me and says “drop the mic” and I genuinely, honestly, did not know what that meant. I thought he meant literally drop the microphone. I was looking around for a microphone to drop. And when I finally figured out what he was asking for, that moment, that confused old guy looking for a prop that didn’t exist, that’s the version of me that ended up in the magazine. Something real in the face because I was genuinely bewildered. Published right around 2010, 2015, somewhere in there, and after that everything changed.
But let me back up, because the story doesn’t start with Dave Dickey and it doesn’t start with Lakelander Magazine. It starts at nineteen years old, doing a DECA event at Indian River Community College, putting on a Santa suit for the first time and thinking this is just a thing I’m doing, this is just a favor, this is not a thing. Company Christmas parties after that, a few years doing the Lights of Lakeland as Santa, and then because this is Florida and we are who we are, the SantaCon pub crawl afterward, which is exactly what it sounds like (and I will leave it at that). None of it felt like a calling. It felt like being a good sport.
And then the Boys and Girls Club happened. I had met someone at a Scare Fair, which is already a sentence I couldn’t have predicted writing, and they asked if I’d come do Santa for the kids, and I said yes because I always say yes to things that feel right, and so I showed up, and the kids believed, and I drove home thinking that was something. But here’s where it actually landed. The Elks Lodge had a Christmas party, and I was in the men’s room getting into the suit, and a child came through that door, I mean burst through that door, and he stopped cold when he saw me, and then he screamed. Not scared. Screaming like discovery, like the moment you realize the thing you suspected is true. “It’s really him! It’s really Santa! It’s the same Santa we saw at school!” And I’m standing there half-suited in a men’s room in an Elks Lodge, and this child is not seeing me, he is seeing Santa, the same Santa, continuous, real. And that was the moment I understood that this wasn’t playing a character. These kids believed. And that changes everything about what you owe the room.
After Lakelander, the requests started coming and I started saying yes to all of them, and at peak I was doing thirty visits in thirty days. Marty Newkirk was a partner in a lot of it, and we’d spend a real hour with each child, not a photo and a handshake, an actual hour, and I learned things in those hours that I don’t have words for yet. KidPax fundraisers at Swan Brewery, “Have a Beer with Santa,” “Santa in July,” because why not, and United Way work with Candy Stanton and Alan Turner, and all of it felt purposeful in a way that a lot of things I’ve done in my life have only pretended to be purposeful.
And then there were the hospice visits. Two, maybe three of them, children who would not live to see the next Christmas, and I was asked to come, and I went, and I have been trying to find the right words for what that was ever since. I was so honored. I was so touched. I was so privileged. And it broke my heart. All of those things at the same time, not taking turns, all at once, and you just sit with a child who is running out of time and you be Santa as fully as you know how to be Santa, because that child deserves the whole thing, not a diminished version because the adult in the suit is overwhelmed. That is the most meaningful work I have ever done. I will say that plainly and without qualification. Thirty visits in thirty days and the hospice visits are the ones I think about when I think about whether my life has mattered.
Health issues have kept me away from it these last few years, and I miss it in a way that I can’t quite explain to people who haven’t had something like it. You know how there are things you do that make you feel like yourself, more yourself than usual, like you’ve accidentally stepped into the version of your life that was waiting for you to notice it? That’s what those thirty days were. That’s what the men’s room at the Elks Lodge was. That’s what sitting with a child who wouldn’t see another Christmas was, terrible and sacred at the same time, the kind of thing that doesn’t ask your permission to change you.
I didn’t plan any of it. I said yes to a DECA event at nineteen because someone needed a Santa and I was available. I said yes to Dave Dickey because he asked. I said yes to the Boys and Girls Club because it felt right. And then one day I was The Lakeland Santa, not because I decided to be, but because I kept showing up and the universe, or whatever you want to call it, kept providing rooms that needed what I had. That’s not a strategy. That’s not a brand. That’s just what happens when you stop waiting to understand something before you say yes to it.
If you’ve got something pulling at you, something that keeps showing up in your life as an invitation and you keep thinking you’ll get to it later, I want you to consider the possibility that later is not when purpose works. Purpose works now, in the men’s room, in the hospice room, in the magazine you barely understand, in the moment you’re looking around for a microphone that isn’t there. Say yes. Show up in the suit. The rest figures itself out.
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This post is part of the “Things I Learned the Hard Way” series. If this one landed for you, you might also want to read What Matters Most and Looking Back.
