Anyone who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus hasn’t met Charlie Roy.
Roy has been filling in for the jovial icon for so long – and so well — many aren’t so sure he’s not the real deal.
Jami Warren’s two children, ages six and nine, certainly think so. Warren does too.
“They believe — and we are always going to believe with this Santa,” said Warren. The young mom hired Roy for an event recently at her Hendersonville home.
“You just look at him and think ‘oh, I know that Santa is real,’” she said. “It’s magical.”
Roy has been filling in for the real Santa professionally for more than a decade.
Before that, he owned a custom drum and guitar company with a worldwide distribution. In 1982, he moved the company’s corporate headquarters to Gallatin.
Roy first donned a red velvet suit in 1993 following the birth of his daughter Katherine.
“We were in Phillips Toy Mart in Nashville, standing there ready to check out, and at the counter was this box,” he recalled.
“My wife said we’re buying it and you’re wearing it when the baby is born. When you have a little one, you need to have a Santa Claus. And I had the belly,” he chuckled.
Although shorter than it is now, he had the beard too.
“He just always had that look – the white beard and white hair,” said Roy’s wife, Becky.
Becky said it wasn’t long before others were asking her husband to show up in his red suit for parties and various functions.
“When I started doing it, you could see the wonderment not only in the kids’ eyes, but the wonderment in the parents’ eyes too,” her husband recalled. “And I still do my best to create that. The day I quit doing that I will hang up my suit.”
And it’s no ordinary suit either.
This Santa suit is made of plush velour from Belgium accented by virgin lambs’ wool pelts from New Zealand and a custom leather belt.
“You’ve got to be part of the deal if you’re going to be the deal,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.
And many believe he is the ‘deal’ – from local photographers and store and mall owners to one of the largest Santa lookalike companies in the country.
He was working for that company in Stockton, Calif., a few years back when one of his most unusual and memorable requests came from a woman in her mid-fifties.
“It was early in the season and there was no one in line,” he recalled.
The woman walked past him and hesitated before finally approaching him.
“Could I have a picture with you?” she asked.
“Of course,” Roy replied.
The woman told him that when she was little her parents couldn’t afford to buy pictures with Santa.
“I just wondered if I could have one with you,” she said, offering to stand next to Roy.
“I said, ‘no dear, you sit on this knee right here, and by the way I’m buying your picture,’” he recalled. “And tears came to her eyes.”
“She thought about the hurt she had as a child,” he said. “That still sticks with me.”
Roy also remembers an eight- or nine-year-old boy who approached him while he was working at a mall in Florida.
“He came up and said, ‘Santa I don’t want anything, I just want you to get me a present for my grandmother. She needs a new washing machine.”
Roy admits he teared up a little.
“He put all of his wants and wishes on the line for his grandmother to have a new washing machine,” Roy added. “That just touched me.”
Locally, he’s worked at some of the same venues, like the Streets of Indian Lake in Hendersonville, for years.
It’s allowed him to see some of the same kids return year after year.
“I come around the corner and they leave their parents in the dust and come running up to sit in my lap. I tell them how much they’ve grown and how cute they are,” he said. “We have a great relationship.”
This year a six-foot, five-inch-tall fellow stood next to him for a pic.
“I remember him sitting on my lap as a baby,” Roy mused. “I think he came this year to humor his mom.”
Cheryl Puryear, director of events at the Streets of Indian Lake, has known Roy since moving to Gallatin in the early 1980’s.
Puryear says when she first heard that Roy was playing Santa, her first thought was, ‘of course he is.’
It wasn’t long, she says, before she hired him.
And what exactly are the job qualifications?
“You have to absolutely love children, of course,” said Puryear. “And get sheer joy from holding that role.”
And the joy is often contagious, she notes.
“I have vendors who ask to have their booths near him. They just enjoy watching him and how he interacts with the children and their parents,” Puryear adds. “It really is an art form.”
