CHAPTER 15
Now I must get back to work. Good-by, Good-by.
—SANTA CLAUS
Gluck had survived Coler’s scrutiny. But the public welfare commissioner was not about to give up. The first week of the new year, Coler’s third deputy commissioner James W. Kelly again demanded the books of the Santa Claus Association. Gluck’s excuses of being too busy with the holiday season no longer applied. If Coler could not subpoena the association, he was willing to publicly embarrass them until Gluck coughed up details. The Santa Claus Man decided the best way to pacify the commissioner was to give him something.
He called reporters to his Knickerbocker office on January 10 and handed each a sheet of paper. The heading read “Statement of Receipts and Disbursements, 1927.” “I have never tried to avoid making this report,” he told the group jotting notes as he spoke. He had provided the same paper to Coler’s office, he explained. “It was not requested until December 23, and at this time of year it is difficult to obtain auditors in the first place. However, they have been working.” He promised that anyone reading the statement would see how the association had done nothing but “brought rich and poor in closer contact and taken the sting out of charity.” Gluck invited “any man or woman in the City of New York to call on me personally and file any complaint against the conduct of the office” and promised to keep the Knickerbocker headquarters open for ten additional days, just in case there were any such requests. He added that he never received compensation for his work, that he was an annual contributor to the association himself, and that no one had complained in all the years he ran the organization.
On the surface, Gluck’s “Statement of Receipts” appeared to fulfill Coler’s demands, with a list of earnings and expenses along with estimates of spending by the many donors who purchased gifts for the “kiddies” without using the association as a broker. The reporters accepted the document at face value. Coler did not.
The audit was not what Coler requested, and it irritated him that Gluck would insult him with such a ploy. In the association’s apparent show of transparency, the commissioner saw that Gluck was answering the questions he wanted to answer. Rather than allowing the Public Welfare office to review his financial records, Gluck had tapped his own accountant, Eric Pusinelli, to prepare the statement and provided no supporting details or receipts.
It reported that the total spent on the association’s efforts for the year, including the gifts that donors bought and delivered on their own, came to more than $106,000 according to Gluck’s own calculation (about $1.4 million today), but he claimed only $4,400 came in the form of cash disbursements sent directly to the group. None of the rest of the money was supposed to be handled by the association, but none of it was accounted for either. Tens of thousands of dollars could be going anywhere, and because it was impossible to find another member of the group’s leadership who could shed light on the operations, it seemed unlikely it was going to anyone but Gluck.
But even in such a specious document, the commissioner found other evidence of waste and dubious accounting. The total receipts by the association from the first of January 1927 through the seventh of January the next year amounted to $19,800, in addition to the balance of $2,730 on hand prior to the first of the year. Just $9,879 of that was alleged to go to relief work, with the rest covering salaries and other expenses. This contradicted Gluck’s claims that the work was done entirely by volunteers. Coler looked at the numbers from the group’s previous years. Every season, the cost of salaries ballooned—$126 in 1919, $3,695 in 1924, $4,265 in 1927. The cost of “personal shopping” followed the same pattern—$2,341 in 1921 (the first year for which it was accounted), $7,612 in 1926, almost $10,000 in 1927. All of this was unsupported by any backup documents. Whoever was doing the shopping could easily be buying themselves a sizable share of the gifts. Even though Vincent Astor allowed the association to use the Knickerbocker Building for free, $1,662 went to rent in 1926. A $10,000 fund from 1924 that was to remain “untouched” according to that year’s audit disappeared from the books two years later.
Then there was the mailing list. Gluck kept painstaking records of each individual who had been inspired enough by the Santa Claus Association to reach out to them. To that ever-expanding list, he added names gathered from fund-raising for the Citizenry Secret Service, the United States Boy Scout, and every other patriotic or charitable impulse he had tapped in the past decade and a half of promotion. Many of the groups had been shut down or discontinued, but the mailing list only grew. Under pressure, Gluck allowed the commission a brief look at this list. While Coler expected that Gluck’s information resources would be significant, even he was startled by the list the Santa Claus Man had accumulated: seventy-six thousand names of New Yorkers, gathered one by one over fifteen years. Coler’s deputy commissioner Kelly described it as the largest list of names he had ever seen and “one of the largest in existence.”
But with Coler unable to take any further action due to the limits of the city’s regulations on charity, Gluck could still claim victory. He stated that he had been exonerated of all charges against him, pointed to the wide support he received from other public officials on his “honorary vice presidents” list, and cockily told the papers that all the commissioner’s inquiry had been able to prove was that he “possessed a waxed mustache.” The Bridgeport Telegram ran with that crack for its headline, “New York Probe Proves Gluck Waxes Mustache.”
Once again, Gluck seemed to have slipped from Coler’s grasp. The commissioner soon got caught up in pursuing other charities and clinging to his job. He spent much of the summer and fall stumping for Governor Al Smith, a fellow Democrat as well as a fellow Catholic, in his run for the presidency against Herbert Hoover. His efforts made little impact. Smith eventually lost, with just 87 electoral votes to Hoover’s 444. The Friday before the election, with Smith’s loss all but ensured, Coler paused the proceedings at an annual dinner of the Cumberland Hospital Alumni Association, held at the Montauk Club in Brooklyn. He wanted to make an announcement of his own.
“There comes a time when a man of long experience must give the benefit of such experience to others,” Coler said. “And outside the department I may be able to talk more freely than I have inside. At the present time a fight between two interns who may hit each other gets a column in the newspapers. But the constructive work which the department is doing is lucky if it gets a ‘stick’ in the news.” Early the following year, he explained, he would be stepping down from the position of public welfare commissioner. Though he did not say it, key to his decision was that Mayor Walker was pushing through his bill to create the new Department of Hospitals. It was sure to pass, removing a large portion of Coler’s responsibilities starting February 1 the next year. Meanwhile, the commissioner’s bill to bring his charity reforms statewide had floundered. The bureaucracy and thanklessness of his work had finally worn Coler down, and he urged the city to provide more support for the department’s workers, even if he would no longer be around to benefit from it.
The battle with the public welfare commissioner had rattled Gluck, more perhaps than the implosion of the US Boy Scout. But now Saint Toogood was leaving his post. He would likely be replaced by one of Jimmy Walker’s cronies, and the Santa Claus Association would be free to continue its work undisturbed. Gluck had survived another tangle with the authorities. He had seen before that New York City’s public had a short and forgiving memory, especially when it came to Santa Claus. Just weeks after the group’s confrontation with Coler, the Times ran a typically cheery story about the organization, explaining that “The Santa Claus Association, devoted to the care of needy children, takes charge of many [letters to Santa] each year.” Things were getting back to normal. Gluck resumed his fund-raising and promotion of the group, speaking at the association’s old headquarters of the Hotel Astor before the Convention of the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs. But as he took a victory lap, Gluck did not realize that Coler was a few steps ahead of him. The commissioner had one last arrow in his quiver, and this one would prove fatal.
In December 1928, New York City postmaster John J. Kiely, like his predecessor Edward Morgan, braced for a record-breaking year of Christmas mail. Although Morgan had faced several million pieces of mail, fifteen years later Kiely, working from his office in the elegant General Post Office, expected ninety million pieces. He hired three thousand extra mail clerks for Manhattan alone and more than tripled the number of delivery trucks. But the influx in mail was hardly as newsworthy as it had been on Morgan’s watch. The parcel post had long been common practice; the sending and receiving of enormous numbers of holiday packages and the record-breaking spending on Christmas gifts was now unremarkable.
In the midst of this predictable frenzy, Kiely got a call from First Assistant Postmaster General John H. Bartlett. He wanted to discuss Santa letters. It was fifteen years almost to the day since another assistant to the postmaster general had called Morgan to tell him about a publicity man with some creative ideas about handling New York’s Santa mail. As it happened, this call concerned the same clever fellow but had a less cheery purpose. Bartlett was checking to confirm that the postmaster had seen the order in the December 6 Postal Bulletin. It contained the first revision the Post Office Department had made to its policy of Santa Claus letters since permanently releasing them in 1913, sparked by blatant and long-running abuse of the policy by one individual—a New York City man within Kiely’s territory. Bartlett was confirming the postmaster would act on the order immediately. Kiely said he would.
Contrary to what Gluck believed, Coler was not going to leave office without making a final push to end the Santa Claus Association. In his joust with the Santa Claus Man the previous Christmas, he had eventually ascertained the limits of his authority. Coler had no power of subpoena. He could pass the case to the district attorney, but the previous man who held that position, Edward Swann, and his assistant Edwin Kilroe had already taken a crack at Gluck and his phony charities, and he had slipped through their grasp. The Charity Organization Society and its leaders, going back to Barry C. Smith and W. Frank Persons, had tried to raise awareness of how Santa letters and the groups that answered them exploited the public’s emotions and generosity, but the public ignored them and hailed the association as a wonderful, worthy cause. Bureau of Investigation agent J. W. Kemp had gotten the most comprehensive view of the Santa Claus Man’s double-dealings but was only interested in spies, not crooks, so he left Gluck alone. Chief scout executive James E. West had inflicted the most damage on Gluck, toppling his lucrative US Boy Scout scam, but in the magnanimous 1920s, the Santa Claus Association soared back stronger than ever. Gluck’s Citizenry Secret Service and Crusade against Illicit Traffic in Narcotics had been shut down, but Santa continued to stand tall.
So many strikes made on Gluck from so many angles, but the Santa Claus Association survived every one. What had these others missed that Coler might use against the group? The commissioner, relentless when he found a quarry worthy of his energy, would not step down without first toppling this blatant fraud. So it came as a thrill to the public welfare commissioner when he struck on a tactic that it was hard to believe nobody had tried before. It seemed so obvious: the key to the Santa Claus Association’s undoing was in the US Post Office.
After his initial surprise the previous season when Coler asked him about the Santa Claus Association, Postmaster Kiely had since done some investigating and found that—unlike many names on Gluck’s list—he had indeed given the group permission to use his name as an honorary vice president. “The Association had written me previously asking the use of my name, and when I saw the list of men who were honorary officers I said all right,” he explained.
The support and original endorsement of the association by his respected predecessor Edward Morgan likely also played a role in Kiely’s backing of the group. In fact, the relationship Gluck cultivated with Morgan, including positive mentions in the press and twenty-five-pound plum puddings, was no doubt key in keeping the post office from seriously investigating the organization since it had earned the privilege to answer Santa letters in the first place. It allowed Gluck, at first a stickler for following his detailed process, to over time give up any pretense of propriety. But now, learning that the group had grown lackluster in its methods, and uncomfortable with Gluck and his lawyer citing Kiely’s name on the masthead as evidence of support from the postal department, the postmaster asked that his name be withdrawn.
This was a start, but Coler knew he would have to take his case further. He brought his findings to Charles H. Clarahan, head of the postal inspection service for New York City. He laid out what he had learned about the Santa Claus Association and what Gluck had refused, after repeated attempts, to tell the Public Welfare Commission. Clarahan contacted Gluck himself and demanded what records he had. Looking over the paucity of information provided, he determined that despite all of Gluck’s grandiose claims of celebrity endorsements and hundreds of clerks and volunteers, “the Santa Claus Association is a one-man organization.” Further, “the names of many prominent persons are listed on its letterhead, but they take no actual part in its administration. It has no treasurer. John D. Gluck is the whole organization and handles the moneys.”
This was a conclusion at which others, including Coler, had arrived. Gluck’s schemes were now common knowledge among authorities—with one investigation after the next and the Santa Claus Man’s own contradictory statements to the press exposing the real beneficiary of Santa’s generosity. But as Coler realized when passing the case to the postal inspector, Clarahan had an additional weapon that these investigators did not: the mail. Clarahan presented his findings to Kiely as well as Brooklyn postmaster Albert Firmin and First Assistant Postmaster General Bartlett. Reviewing Clarahan’s findings, they had to agree: The group was untrustworthy and it was hard to characterize the association as anything but the moneymaking scheme of one man. It was a startling realization: the Post Office Department had for years been enabling a huckster, passively endorsing his campaign to line his own pockets with the city’s Christmas generosity. That the malfeasance had been happening for years with the post office’s support spurred Bartlett to move quickly to formally distance the department from Gluck’s shenanigans. On December 6, he released the first formal change to the post office’s Santa-mail policy in fifteen years:
As a result of a recent investigation by post-office inspectors the department is convinced that “Santa Claus letters,” which postmasters under authority from the department are accustomed to turn over to charitable organizations and individuals for philanthropic purposes, have been used by certain organizations and individuals for purposes of private gain.
Postmasters are therefore cautioned in distributing such letters this year to deliver them only to established and well-known charitable organizations and individuals who are approved by the local associated charities, community chest organizations, or municipal agencies charged with supervision of matters of this character. In other words, make absolutely sure that your “Santa Claus letters” are not given to some one who will use them for selfish purposes.
Every precaution should be taken to the end that the Postal Service does not lend its prestige nor become party to any scheme wherein the appeals of the needy or the charitable impulses of philanthropic persons are exploited for private gain.
With the formal ruling in place, it was up to the city postmasters to execute the rule. Bartlett called Kiely and Firmin to ensure that they did. On December 9, the postmasters publicly and definitively withdrew support for the Santa Claus Association. “Fake Charity Caused Post Office to Change Disposals System,” the headlines blared.
It was the first Gluck heard about it. He’d already received a few deliveries of Santa letters for the year, and he and his few remaining volunteers busily addressed and mailed fund-raising appeals from the Knickerbocker Building when the news arrived. Gluck was stunned. For the first time since the group had launched fifteen years earlier, a December day came and went with no mail for Santa. But Gluck’s delivery did include an envelope from the office of the first assistant postmaster general. It was a copy of the December 6 Postal Bulletin along with a letter from Bartlett himself, advising Gluck that after reviewing the evidence with Clarahan and the postmasters of Brooklyn and Manhattan, they had decided: “We will stop your mail.”
Gluck refused to believe it. He’d been doing this for a decade and a half, and survived lacerations in the press, the COS, and the Bureau of Investigation. How could the post office arbitrarily make such a decision now? Who would do a better job? Speaking from the group’s headquarters, Gluck downplayed the decision. He promised that this was a small setback and the group would carry on. He pointed to several hundred letters he had just received from the Board of Child Welfare and plenty of other letters that had been sent directly to the Santa Claus Association, rather than through the postal service. He blustered that the group had been so successful that only a small percentage of letters even went to “Santa Claus” anymore—kids knew it was his association who would answer.
Coler was not going to let this slide if he could help it. As soon as he heard Gluck’s statement about receiving letters from the Board of Child Welfare, the commissioner reached out to its leaders to tell them how the association did not foster the Christmas spirit, but preyed upon it. The board severed all connections to the group, and Gluck was forced to return their letters. Coler continued his phone calls, spreading the word to the lengthy list of famous names on the group’s masthead. Reverend S. Parkes Cadman, the famed Christian writer and broadcaster who was the latest honorary president of the association (and the man who had dubbed the Woolworth Building the “Cathedral of Commerce”), publicly resigned amid the embarrassing headlines.
As the flow of mail to the headquarters slowed, Gluck, still constitutionally unable to recognize when he had been bested, desperately tried to keep it going. He called in every favor he could with his long list of press contacts but was rebuffed at every turn. The story of Santa’s downfall was much juicier than another roundup of childish scrawls. The papers that had fueled his rise were now celebrating his collapse.
Gluck soon learned that the Knickerbocker would not be available to him the next year. By Christmas, the letters coming into the office and the public’s support of the group evaporated. Without the endorsement of the US Post Office Department, the association lost its logistical ability to collect letters to Santa. But more importantly, it lost the city’s faith. Like a reversal of the climax of Miracle on 34th Street, the letters to Santa on which Gluck prided himself were taken from him. His right to claim the title of Santa’s Secretary had been revoked as the postman literally walked into his office and removed the missives delivered to Gluck days before. Fred Gailey’s defense argument held: Santa’s power lay in his letters. When the Post Office recognizes a man to be Santa Claus, he is. But when the post office revokes his mail, the right to play Santa Claus is likewise withdrawn. The effort to which Gluck had dedicated fifteen years, which had filled him with a sense of purpose and importance, was taken from him, thrown in the Dead Letter Office, and destroyed.
Without a reputable New York City Santa Claus to handle the North Pole mail, the Post Office Department was left with little choice but to send the letters back to the Dead Letter Office. The newspapers continued to print the children’s notes, and scattered individuals stopped by the General Post Office to answer one here and there. But without an organization to take over the work left by the Santa Claus Association, to help remind the city of the existence of the missives, most of the letters were destroyed—unanswered.
Over the next years, Gluck made sporadic attempts to keep the group alive without the Post Office Department’s involvement. As difficult as it was to generate interest in the association in 1928, when Coler was spreading the word about its corruption, the next years only got harder. The press and civic-minded people that had built Gluck into a modern St. Nick abandoned him. Worse, the stock market crash of October 1929 shattered the economic optimism that fueled the robust giving of the preceding decade. Production and employment collapsed. The American public’s unqualified confidence in the market and deification of businessmen were revealed as myths just as desirable, but ultimately unreal, as that of Santa Claus himself.
In the winter of 1931, as unemployment climbed and the country entered a deflationary spiral, Gluck tried, as he had successfully done so many times before, to turn misfortune into opportunity. He went to his typewriter and drafted a letter.
“Your Excellency,” he began his correspondence to President Herbert Hoover, written on one of the remaining pieces of Santa Claus Association stationery. “Five Presidents of the United States have sent Christmas greetings to the children of America, through this Organization.” He continued:
The writer has been a student of Christmas celebrations for a period of over thirty five years. In his humble opinion this Christmas is in a class by itself. WE NEED SOMEONE TO ORDER OLD MAN SANTA TO DO SOMETHING.
Why not inaugurate a national “Smile Week”—from Christmas Eve, December the 24th, until January the 2nd, 1932. Call it “Good Humor Week.”
He asked Hoover to send a telegram suggesting that Americans “leave a note on all chimneys that the children of America ask their parents to smile during ‘Good Humor Week.’” It was a letter much like those he had sent asking for prominent endorsements, benefit shows, a Christmas armistice, and for permission to answer Santa’s mail in the first place. For years it seemed that some spirit had seen to it that Gluck’s Christmas wishes were answered, but the holiday magic had since abandoned him.
George Hastings, Hoover’s administrative assistant, forwarded Gluck’s request to the National Information Bureau. The organization had grown out of former COS executive Barry C. Smith’s National Investigation Bureau of War Charities and now served as auditor of the country’s relief groups (characteristic of Hoover and his “associationalism,” he put his faith in the private sector to assist in a government matter). The group had recently added to its roster of directors none other than Boy Scouts of America chief scout executive James E. West. Needless to say, Gluck’s request did not receive a sympathetic response from this collection of enemies.
“When he first formed the Santa Claus Association, Mr. Gluck claimed that his only activity was to put donors directly in touch with children in need,” wrote back the group’s secretary and director, May H. Harding, in a page-long summary of the association and its dishonest practices. “In recent years, however, he has been flooding New York and vicinity with letters asking for checks and cash to be sent to him.” The next paragraph of the letter, Hoover’s assistant circled in blue pencil: “So far as we know, no satisfactory accounting of the books of the Santa Claus Association and the money sent directly to Mr. Gluck has ever been made. The Post Office authorities have, in recent years, made so thorough an investigation of Mr. Gluck and his activities, that they are no longer turning over to him the letters to Santa Claus which pass through their hands.”
“On the basis of present information,” she concluded, “this Bureau is unable to approve the Santa Claus Association.” Hastings took the bureau’s advice and pointedly declined Gluck’s idea. “I am directed to inform you that the President does not wish to proclaim any special week at this time.” The president, the country, and New York City were no longer receptive to Gluck’s Christmas wishes.
Coler had won. The final undoing of the Santa Claus Association could not have been a more delightful note for him to end his up-and-down career as public welfare commissioner on. He took great pleasure in halting the efforts of a man who played on the emotions of the public, who exploited their naïve generosity for anything involving Christmas and children’s welfare. It was a small victory in a decadelong crusade against such sneaky solicitors, but a deeply satisfying one nonetheless.
Coler’s rout of the association was one of his very last acts as commissioner. Days after Gluck lost his right to play St. Nick, Coler’s decade as charity sheriff neared its end with a retirement celebration in the glitzy ballroom of Brooklyn’s Hotel Commodore, as the leaders he worked alongside for years gathered to honor his work. Many of Coler’s ambitions had been thwarted, and he left the position with a sense of frustration that there was much more to be done. But he could take solace in the reforms accomplished.
Five hundred board members of the city hospitals and organizations that, at least for a few days more, still fell under the Public Welfare Commission’s jurisdiction gathered in the Commodore. They were there for what the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s editors described as a cheery and too-rare tribute to “a long term of distinguished service of which the general public has but little knowledge.” After breaking the ice with a joke, wondering how men connected with city government could afford the $600-a-person tickets for the dinner, toastmaster Orrin S. Wightman, former president of the Medical Society of the State of New York, sounded a note of sincere gratitude. “I feel that the tribute we pay Commissioner Coler tonight is more than ordinary lip service, and I know the Commissioner feels that the tribute is one from the heart—in addition to a response from the pocketbook.”
Over the next two hours, a string of doctors and city colleagues teased and praised Coler’s long, often unglamorous career. They celebrated the length of his service to the city. They toasted how he changed public perception of Blackwell’s Island by championing its name change to Welfare Island, helping remove the stigma surrounding the strip of land and services available there. He was applauded for being “an unrelenting foe to every form of trickery and every imposition in the name of charity that from time to time would be foisted upon a too gullible public.” The speakers testified to Coler’s character as a principled man less interested in pleasing people than doing what he believed to be right—a commissioner who spent this last decade embroiled in fights with charity groups and city officials often far more popular with the public than he, who preferred telling hard truths rather than delightful fairy tales. The heartfelt tributes from some of the city’s and country’s most respected men must have provided solace to Coler, a man unused to receiving public accolades.
After this string of speeches, Coler himself took the podium. He expressed gratitude for the kind words, but as was his nature, celebrating soon gave way to discussing business. He talked of frustration that the projects on which he worked did not get the attention they deserved, that the men working for him were making a fraction of what they ought. He could not resist another mention of the Kings County Hospital he once tried to build, with “every possible convenience and facility of the highest type for the care of the sick,” which was not to be. But in the midst of his imaginings, Coler stopped himself. “Gentlemen, I could talk all night on other phases of this subject,” and with that he wrapped up his speech. As a final gesture of thanks, Toastmaster Wightman strolled to the lectern and presented Coler with a small case. Inside was a Tiffany watch with cigar fob that reflected the Hotel Commodore’s lights into the commissioner’s tearing eyes. He had not expected such a gift. But before handing the trophy of gratitude to Coler, Wightman delicately turned the watch over in his hand and, in part to give the commissioner a moment to collect himself, read the engraving on the back.
“Presented to Honorable Bird S. Coler, December 14th, 1928, by the combined staffs of all the Hospital Medical Boards of the Department of Public Welfare as a tribute to his devotion to Public Service, in raising the standards and caring for the sick and helpless of a great metropolis.” Coler was for a moment speechless, struck by a wave of emotion and gratitude. He gathered himself. “I appreciate this gift more than I can express,” Coler told the cheering crowd. Then, ever the pragmatist, added, “I will take it home and get an insurance policy out on it tomorrow.”
The good cheer of the dinner buoyed him for days. Having spent a decade curbing inefficiency and exposing phony charities, Coler was relieved to take his last Christmas as public welfare commissioner at a more leisurely pace. Instead of his more typical holiday activities of shutting down fraudulent fund-raisers and warning the public against imprudent giving, he helped organize events for the New York Cancer Institute and the inmates of Welfare Island’s penitentiary.
Three days after his own fete, he attended a Christmas dinner for the young patients of the city’s hospitals. More than three hundred disabled and destitute children were bused to Central Park, where they took a ride through the tree-lined paths that many, coming from the outskirts of Staten Island, the Bronx, and beyond, had never seen. From there they headed to Drake’s Restaurant on West Forty-Second Street, not far from the Knickerbocker Building, where owner William Richters sprang for the cost of a massive turkey dinner for the assembled unfortunates. A mountain of Christmas gifts sat in one corner of the restaurant, the donation of wealthy businessman S. S. Rosen, who for years helped pay for cheery celebrations for the city’s hospitalized children.
Vaudevillians and singers entertained the gathered group, and each child got his or her own folded-paper hat as part of the festivities. Getting into the spirit of the evening, the commissioner snatched up a hat of his own and popped it on his head. He joked with a few of the children and sang along to the Christmas tunes. When the time came, Coler began handing out toys, candles, and dolls to the eager kids, first one at a time, and then by the armful, unable to hide an uncharacteristic grin on his face as the invalids laughed and shouted with every new gift he gave away. For all his high-level reforms, improvements to efficiency, and exposures of charity frauds, the commissioner could not deny that sometimes it just felt good to play Santa Claus.