Growing a beard last Fall never felt so odd as when in shorts I walked along a beach. After all, one expects Santa at the North Pole, not on a Pacific beach. It then struck me that I was not only growing a beard, but thinking like the old fellow.
Actors report getting into the characters they play, but I'm not an actor, just a retired editor and volunteer hospital chaplain. So I looked back on why had taken on the role.
I started growing my third beard after an off-duty Santa caught me sketching him in an Arizona restaurant. He pointed to my white hair and said that I could look good as Santa if I grew a beard like his. So I quit shaving, as I had done on two earlier occasions -- in my 20s to enter a cowboy beard contest and in my 40s when beards were in style as they again seem to be.
During its growth in Sterling, Colorado, a Santa named Larry asked support from the ministerial association of which I was secretary. Larry raised money for sick kids who wrote Christmas wish letters as well as for others needing help in our rural area. I joined him and other Santas at a summer parade and a sugar beet festival. It was jolly fun tossing candy from the back of an antique fire engine and meeting up with kids, friends, and neighbors on the courthouse square.
When my wife Pat and I moved to the Denver area Larry booked jobs for me at a nearby mall, and I visit patients at two hospitals, beard and all, including two Santas. Other patients, especially this time of year, ask me why the Santa beard? I now reply that finding Chaplain Santa in a hospital is no odder than finding him in walking shorts along a beach.
Domenic A. Fuccillo is a CPSP Clinical Chaplain in Littleton, Colorado.
Domenic A. Fuccillo
mafu1@bresnan.net