Dan Gallagher answers his door dressed in red shorts, a green shirt, suspenders and red, white and green striped stockings.
It’s not just for the Christmas season or when he’s working at the mall. He dressed that way on Halloween.
Gallagher fixes a cup of Santa’s White Christmas coffee in his Keurig, a brew with hint of cinnamon or perhaps nutmeg. Asked if he plays Santa year-round, he interrupts — grasping a hand and leaning in, eyes peering over his spectacles.
“I don’t play Santa. I am Santa.”
Earlier in life Gallagher wasn’t Santa, though. By his own description, he was a Scrooge. His reluctant heart was turned by a kindly woman, a whale and a little boy.
Not a fan of Christmas
Gallagher was born in Ohio, but has lived in Florida for 40 years and in Jacksonville for the past 15. Over the course of his life, he’s owned a pest control company, run an Irish pub and worked as a maintenance director for Bristol-Myers Squibb in Clearwater.
In his younger years he didn’t play Santa. He didn’t even celebrate Christmas.
“I didn’t buy Christmas presents for people. I really didn’t care much about any of it,” he said.
Instead of decorating his house, he’d camp out on a 5-acre parcel near the Suwannee River and drink beer. It was a place where no one would bother him.
Gallagher wasn’t introverted, but he had known betrayal.
He’d lost his two kids to a divorce when the oldest was just 4. He was drafted into the Army and served in Vietnam. When he came back to Oakland, Calif., people spat on him and called him a baby killer. Even his sister called him that.
Things started to change many years later, when Gallagher met the woman who would become Mrs. Claus.
Love of a good woman
Denise Carey was a sterilization manager for the health-care industry. It was a job that put her at odds with Gallagher. She enforced quality control at the medical facility he maintained and the two fought all the time.
“She used to drive home saying, ‘I hate that man,’” Gallagher said.
But Carey had a generous nature. Though she earned a good living, she spent a lot of it on other people.
She decided she and Gallagher couldn’t go on fighting. So she sat him down to have a talk. The talk led to understanding and understanding led to friendship. The two started dating. But the real turning point came later.
Gallagher joined Carey on a business trip to Boston and the two took a whale sight-seeing cruise. The ship came up alongside a whale and the whale made, what seemed to Gallagher, a psychic connection.
He rolled over in the water next to the couple and looked up at them with his big eye. Gallagher swears he heard the whale say: “Just tell her you love her. You know you do.”
He did. It didn’t change the world, but it changed him.
“It relieved me. I had been afraid to say it because of my past,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher proposed to her a short while later in front of a friend he used to complain to back in the couple’s troubled days.
Once Gallagher’s heart was opened, it led him to Santa.
The start of being Santa
His first gig came in 2000 when he was asked to play Santa for the Oldsmar Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce.
Gallagher didn’t know why he was asked. He liked kids only three ways: “baked, broiled or someone else’s.”
Fortunately, these kids were all someone else’s.
He bought a cheap red corduroy suit. He only had brown boots, so he decided to disguise them with black polish. When that didn’t work, he bought black motorcycle spats to cover them.
The first little girl who came to visit him as Santa noticed the spats and asked why he wore them.
Gallagher was nervous, but the answer came. “Well, have you ever walked behind a reindeer?” he asked.
“The Lord must have put the words in my head,” Gallagher said, “because I’ve always known how to answer kids after that.”
Though he was asked to play Santa many times, Gallagher still doubted himself in the role. He didn’t even have a very long beard. He joined a group of Santas in Jacksonville called Palm Tree Santas and began learning how they felt about the job.
In 2005, Gallagher and his wife were dining at Applebee’s. There was a little boy who couldn’t stop staring at him. The boy’s grandmother whispered to Gallagher, “He thinks you’re Santa.”
Gallagher went to the restroom and looked in the mirror, not understanding. He was wearing blue jeans, a blue checked shirt and a Vietnam veterans hat.
But, he made a decision. He walked back out and said to the grandmother, “You’ve got a smart little boy, because I am Santa.”
He and his wife left the restaurant with the boy yelling behind them: “Bye, Santa! Bye, Santa!”
“My wife asked me about it, and I told her, ‘I just committed to being Santa,’” he said. “And she answered, ‘Well, it’s about time!’”
Since becoming Santa, Gallagher has learned more about the role. He’s taken courses in SantaClausology at four schools. The outfit one wears matters, but so does the attitude.
“It takes a special person, one with an open heart and a real feeling for people,” he said.
Gallagher recalls different tricks he’s played to convince skeptical kids to believe.
There’s one where he uses a magician’s bag to swap out a bell that doesn’t ring for one that does. The bell works when a child tries to believe.
Convincing a skeptic
But Santa becomes even more convincing when he talks about things that are entirely true. He recalls a 14-year-old boy who wouldn’t let his mom take his picture with Santa.
Gallagher asked the boy to come talk with him.
He told the boy he understood if he didn’t believe in Santa. But he asked him, if he had a girlfriend, would he believe in giving her a gift.
Then Gallagher told the boy a story about someone else who once gave a gift.
Born around the year 280 in the city of Lycia in Asia Minor, Nicholas of Patara was orphaned as a boy, Gallagher said. He didn’t care about the fortune he inherited, he wanted to become a priest.
He heard about a father who was too poor to give his daughters a dowry.
Nicholas secretly threw gold coins through the man’s window one night. (Legend has it they fell on stockings drying by the fireplace.) The father later caught Nicholas, but was sworn to silence.
Nicholas would go on to become the Bishop of Myra and eventually became known for his art of giving his wealth secretly to people who needed it.
Canonized after death, he was called St. Nicholas — a name the Dutch later derived into Sinter-klass, which Americans know as Santa Claus.
After the story, Gallagher asked the boy to give his mother the gift of a picture of him with Santa.
The boy agreed.
Gallagher was raised Catholic, but was never particularly religious. He’s become more so, since working as Santa. He’s noticed other Santas have a sense of faith, as well.
The correlation between Santa and Christianity may seem strange. Jesus was real and Santa, a myth.
But Santa comes from a real person — a bishop who cared more about helping the poor than about the wealth he had inherited.
He still exists today, Gallagher says, in the form of hundreds of descendent Santas who honor his spirit.
He exists in those who have perfected the art of giving a secret gift.
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