Keith Dobbins plays Santa for the money and the kids. Also, he’s a Parrothead

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

The last time Keith Dobbins met Santa Claus, the fat man was handing him socks. For a kid growing up in Pitt Gas, a coal mining town located along the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania, socks were a practical gift. A small town that Dobbins calls more of a “patch,” Pitt Gas was a collection of about 300 homes built by a mining company for workers and their families. Dobbins’ father worked in the mine and, looking at 6-foot, 245-pound Keith today, you can easily place him underground. But the last time he met Santa Claus, Keith was just some second grader growing up in a town bereft of grocery store and stoplight.

“I was in second or third grade,” he says from a camping chair in his dressing room at Downey’s Stonewood Center. “And Santa came by our school to hand out presents.” The kids clamored around as Santa dug into an oversized bag and pulled out candy packets and small toys for Dobbins’ classmates and friends. When it came to his turn, however, Santa handed Dobbins the socks.

Socks.

Even for a kid from a patch, socks, as a present, suck.

Offended, but attempting rationality—“Maybe he knew I needed a new pair?”—he went home and complained to his dad. But his father already knew all about it. After all, he had bought the socks when he bought the red suit and cap.

“He told me that he was in the Santa costume handing out presents at my school that day.”

And that was when Keith Dobbins figured out that the whole St. Nick thing was a hoax. Soon after, the Dobbins family moved to a slightly larger town and eventually to the much larger Warren, Ohio, but his disillusionment with Christmas not only stuck but grew, as he came to believe the holiday had been polluted by commercialization.

Over the next 40 years, Dobbins worked as a national buyer for several corporations (including General Motors), saw Jimmy Buffet in concert (twice!), gained a fondness for dark beers (thanks to work-related trips to Germany), road tripped to Vegas and moved to California, where he quit his job to become an actor, his most consistent gig being dressing up as the very icon of consumerism he’d grown to resent.

Dobbins, adjusting the red suspenders holding up his furry red pants, laughs about it now, about the turns life takes, how one day life will give you socks. A young woman appears—she works at an elementary school in Pico Rivera—and beckons to Dobbins. Lunch is over. He takes a final bite of a green apple, pushes himself out of the nylon collapsible chair and grabs his red jacket and black belt from a nearby table. Straightening up, he lets out a practice “Ho! Ho! Ho!” and walks back into the mall.

The first time I saw Santa in his street clothes, he was rushing to his car after work.

Wearing a tie-dye cap from Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” cantina and a wilted Blitz Bar T-shirt, weighted down with a duffel bag full of Santa gear, Dobbins was trying to get home in time to watch himself on an episode of Bones—he and 11 other men in red suits stand behind actress Michaela Conlin while she investigates the death of a mall Santa. The episode was supposed to air closer to Christmas, but Dobbins thinks the writers strike forced the network to push it up.

This is the fifth Christmas he’s been playing Santa. His wife, Laura, was the first to note that, with a longer beard and grayer hair, her fun-loving husband could look like Big Red himself. A year earlier, also at her suggestion, he dropped out of a stressful career to pursue acting, a hobby that got thrown to the side after college. Dobbins met with the head of All Season’s Promotions (a San Dimas-based company that specializes in wedding photography but also hires Easter Bunnies and Santas).

The interview lasted as long as it took Dobbins to walk through the door. “Yup, you’re a Santa,” the woman behind the desk told him. He was hired on the spot. During that first season, he split his time between Lakewood Center mall, the Avenue of the Peninsula in Palos Verdes and Stonewood in the heart of Downey.

“I never pictured myself as Santa,” he says. But now, Dobbins looks forward to the holidays and the steady work his white-haired look provides. Now he splits his time between Stonewood—where he has been exclusively for the last four years—and Santa-ing at private events, where places such as the California Country Club and Rose Hills Memorial Park pay him upwards of $150 an hour.

Some Santas portray the character year-round, wearing red shirts in July and signing their emails, “Santa.” Harold, a Santa friend of Dobbins’, has a summer job at Lake Gregory where he tethers boats for vacationers in green bib overalls and clunky leather boots; locals know him as the Crestline Santa. One Santa, noting the recent passing of a colleague, told me the man had “taken his last sleigh ride.” They take Santa seriously.

Not so much Dobbins. Most nights, he gets home from work, goes into the garage of his Chino Hills home, pops on an Eagles 45—yes, a 45—and tinkers away at his 1967 Pontiac Firebird.

“I’m a big-time Parrothead,” Dobbins admits. “The Eagles and Jimmy Buffet are all I listen to, really.” It probably was silly to think his musical tastes ran to “Silent Night” and “Silver Bells.”

Laura is the one that got him into bands like the Eagles and Van Halen when they met in the early ’80s.

Dobbins, a child of the ’60s, grew up with soul and “psychedelic stuff.” In 1969, he blew a chance to go to Woodstock, weighing what he figured was just a free show against a six-hour drive from Ohio. He regrets it now.

A few years later, Dobbins and a friend (who was escaping a confrontation with his jilted wife) took their first road trip out west, partying in Vegas before ending up in Los Angeles, under the glare of the Hollywood sign. The first time he saw the West Coast he knew that it was where he wanted to live, so with “Hotel California” ringing in his ears, Dobbins returned to Ohio.

“The last line really stuck with me,” he says. “‘You can check out anytime, but you can never leave.’” A dreamy look washes over his face. “I’m getting the chills just thinking about it.”

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

Dobbins is back at Stonewood a few days later and is walking, in full Santa ensemble, down a long hallway lined with stores’ delivery doors. Eight years ago, he was a self-admitted Scrooge. What, exactly, did he hate so much about the holiday season?

“The commercialization,” he says, his voice and the bells on his pant cuffs echoing off the concrete walls. Dobbins doesn’t like feeling obligated to buy things for people he wouldn’t normally buy things for. Though he is not very religious, he enjoys the idea of Christmas, but can’t stand the capitalism behind it. It still creeps him out that six-year-olds ask him for cell phones.

But being Santa had begun to change his perspective by the end of working his first Christmas. He stopped referring to shifts at the mall as “calls.” He still refuses to go Christmas shopping, though.

As soon as Dobbins bursts through the heavy double doors to the roar of a crowded mall, all commercialism is forgotten. He greets every kid he sees on his way toward the purple overstuffed chair in the center of the mall. At the end of another tiring day “in the chair,” Dobbins walks to his car sighing heavily, like a homicide detective returning from a crime scene. Bearing the secrets of hundreds of children a day creates quite a burden, as does bearing the children, themselves—Dobbins suffers from degenerative hips that worsen with each child placed on his lap—but it’s often the ones who don’t speak that leave the largest impact on Dobbins.

“Kevin came in today,” he says, referring to a teenager with Down syndrome. Standing in the foyer leading to his dressing room, an Eagles shirt hugging his portly frame, Dobbins recounts how Kevin jumped on his lap, put his head on his shoulder and bounced around with glee when Santa remembered his name. Kevin didn’t say a word, he never does, he just nods and giggles between “excited noises.”

After Kevin left, a three-year-old on oxygen was placed on Dobbins’ lap. He shakes his head as he tells how the parents removed his oxygen hose so he could take a normal-looking photo. He treated the sick boy as if he were any other child, doing Scooby Doo impressions to get a smile out of him and asking standard questions like, “Have you been good this year?” The child stared at the round face in front of him, but never answered.

“He was just looking up at me,” Dobbins says. After a few minutes—the longest the boy could go unplugged—they took him off Santa’s lap, put the hose back over his ears, the nodules into his nose, and left Dobbins shaken but grinning from ear to ear.

Around September, Dobbins’ daughter will tell him to start the “smile Olympics” to get him used to the perpetual happiness he must hold while in character. When children ask for “mommy and daddy to get back together,” he changes the subject and smiles. When a “tiny little thing” came in asking for a bed, he had to show teeth when she told him it was so her father and grandfather didn’t have to sleep on the living room floor. And when kids attached to tubes come to take a picture with him, he smiles.

Dobbins has two homemade business cards that he hands out. The Santa one has a portrait of Dobbins, adorned in red and white fluff with a pair of tiny rectangular glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, grinning a cherubic smile with the slogan “Your Personal Santa” above his home and cell phone numbers.

On the other hand, his acting business card might as well belong to someone else. The photo is of a close-shaven Dobbins, wearing a striped collared shirt and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, staring off pensively to the cardholder’s upper right. “SAG” and “AFTRA” hang above his name and a web address to watch his acting runs along the bottom.

As if the cards didn’t showcase his versatility enough, Dobbins’ portfolio sits in the back seat of his Hyundai, filled with full-color glossy 8½-by-11 headshots. Who knew the authentic-looking Santa Claus towards the end of the pile is also available to play an equally as authentic-looking Mike Love, construction worker or kilt-wearing, bagpipe-clad Scot?  His resume lists background work in Tremors 4, principal roles in Chapman University student films, a photo double for Orson Beane and the “bearded bar fly” in The Maxwell Multiple Climax, “a 30 minute educational video that teaches men how to achieve multiple orgasms.” (The Maxwell poster shows a guy sitting on an exploding watermelon—with four girls in bikinis—the bullets of an automatic machine gun in the foreground.)

As Dobbins quickly found out, becoming a Santa is a lot more than putting on a cheap Halloween costume and saying “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

After learning the basics at Santa school (“Always talk in the third person, do your research and watch where you put your hands.”), Dobbins networked his way into the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas (AORBS), a fraternal organization of “real bearded gentleman dedicated to the joy of being Santa.” It was here that he realized that Santa is a business.

“A fun business,” he says, but still a business. There are special shampoos to keep white hair from going yellow, cooling vests to wear under the thick Santa suit and costume options to make your head spin—everything from Victorian St. Nicholas robes to $1000 silk-lined jackets.

AORBS embraces all the nuances of portraying the old man and holds an annual luncheon at the Knott’s Berry Farm Resort Hotel.

“It’s weird to see eight men sitting at a table talking about hair care products,” Dobbins admits, but membership only requires two things: a real beard and the experience of playing Santa at least once (even if it was just for your grandkids). For a professional, albeit seasonal, Santa such as Dobbins, belonging to AORBS has helped him gain the credibility and knowledge that only a vigilante Santa club can provide.

As much as Dobbins likes his seasonal job, he is thankful that it is just that. After Christmas, he is ready to distance himself from the color red and the childlike persona he wears for two months.

“By January, I want to try a new challenge,” he says. So, as soon as he can, he trims the wild Santa beard into the same well-groomed scruff he’s been sporting since 1976. Then he calls all his Hollywood friends he abandons during the holidays and dives into auditions for roles as professors, grandfathers and doctors.

But just as he is attempting to detach himself from the previous three months, he is already preparing for the next holiday season. Dobbins’ annual beard cycle starts with the shaving of last season’s whiskers so that by June the beard is halfway to Santa-length, making him appear unkempt, but garnering plenty of homeless roles through the summer. Dobbins’ beard has seen Santa work as early as October, but looks best closer to Christmas when the hearty lump of naturally white hair is at its longest.

He digs through his bag and pulls out a plastic comb. Nonchalantly, he drags it up his neck and through the brush, catching tangles on its way out to the other side. “It’s never been this long,” he says.

As he gets into his navy blue Hyundai Santa Fe to once again start the trek on the 91, he turns to say goodbye. The parking lot lights dangling 20 feet above us glisten off his eyes, forming an unmistakable twinkle.

Tags: amalgamated order of real bearded santas, Christmas, downey, keith dobbins, lakewood, Long Beach, mall santa, Santa, stonewood center, tremors 4