Santa Claus

A Santa practices his jolly laugh at the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School. Credit: Getty Images

Get ready to adjust your holiday stories: Santa doesn't go to the North Pole to perfect that booming laugh. He lands his reindeer in Midland, Mich.

Home to the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School, Midland attracts Santas and Mrs. Clauses from around the globe to prepare for the holiday season. Forty hours of training is packed into three days in October, but as Santa School Dean Tom Valent explains, there are plenty of Christmas cookies to keep the Santas fueled up.

Valent is the third dean of the non-profit school. He took over in the eighties after taking his first class with the school in 1975, shortly after the school moved to Michigan from New York State. Started by its namesake, Charles Howard, the original Macy's Day Parade Santa who likewise worked on the original "Miracle on 34th Street," the school was once a destination for department stores to send their Kris Kringles for a pre-holiday brush up.

This year there were some 75 Mr. and Mrs. Clauses on the horn with Valent's wife Holly, who serves as registrar (and yes, that's her real name -- born on Dec. 22, she was tailor-made for the Christmas biz) all of their own volition. About 80 percent fly into town with their own beard hanging from their chinny, chin, chins. At 40 and up, Tom Valent jokes that these bearded Santas are finally getting to live the rebellion of the sixties.

But it's in Midland that they learn to keep it white -- the beards, we mean. The secret? Bleach. "It's very seldom where the beard comes in pure white," Holly Valent explains. "It's yellowish, it's grey." But a three-step process under the watchful eyes of a professional in Midland puts the ho, ho, ho in that hoary beard.

And speaking of ho, ho, hos, there's a bit of Midland magic in perfecting Santa's laugh too. "There's a real technique to it," Holly says. "A professional singer comes in and teaches them how to sing from their diaphragms." Sing Christmas carols that is. And the Santa Claus school graduates know them all, along with the reindeer's names and how to spell out "Santa loves you" in American Sign Language.

"The children are going to remember this visit for the rest of their lives," Tom says. A practicing Santa since the first of the Valents' five children were born back in the seventies, Tom is a contractor by day. He built Midland's Santa house, which doubles as classroom for the school and as a fully functioning Santa's workshop, drawing 25,000 kids in the heart of the Christmas season.

Valent remembers Santa from his youth. Growing up on a farm outside of Buffalo, NY, little Tom would wait by the window until Santa pulled up in the Blue Jeep that looked suspiciously like his neighbor's. "He had the same German accent too," Valent says with a chuckle that offers just a hint of the belly laugh he treats the kids to.

"It's a privilege to be Santa," the dean of the Santa School notes. The one minute on Santa's lap will be played back in their memories for years to come, and it best be a good one. Hence the school's ban on female Santas. It's not a knock on the ladies, Holly says. It's the shrewdness of the kids. "The kids can tell," she says. "They know, and that minute you have with a child might be the most important minute of their year."

Santa school

Would-be Santas brush up on their technique. Credit: Getty Images

The Valents know from smart kids. Tom's first attempt to play Santa in front of their kids failed miserably. "I put our daughter, she was 1 at the time, on my lap, and the first thing she said was 'Da Da'," he says with another one of his jolly laughs. Holly prefers to don her Mrs. Claus outfit out of town so Midland kids don't recognize Mrs. Valent peeking out from beneath the Christmas clothes.

Mrs. Clauses make up 20 percent of every class, paying $400 with the rest of the crew (returning students -- and there are plenty of them -- get the discounted rate of $350). They learn the songs, the names of the trees, the history and the magic too. They learn to be interviewed, sit with a group of pre-schoolers, a group of local teens with special needs and a kindergarten class full of adoring worshipers.

And when they come up with a tough question, like "Can you make my Mommy come home this Christmas?" the Santas say "Gee, I'm really good with toys, but tonight I'll ask Mrs. Claus if she can say a prayer for you."

"It's not politically correct," Valent tells Holidash, "but we can't really give them the gifts they ask for." And they want to give them something.

"Santa stands for all good things," Tom Valent continues. "So when you become Santa, you always want to be pure and wholesome. You don't want to take advantage of the faith these children and parents have put in you."