The man who was Santa Claus

My Christmas column for the Webster-Kirkwood Times, 2022:

Trimming the tree. Putting up lights. Arranging pictures of Ted Ricks on the mantle. Ted who? You may not know him, but you probably do, and here’s how … 

Ricks spent the better part of two decades of Decembers, and then some, as Santa Claus at the old Crestwood mall. You remember the one — the place you once couldn’t get near on weekends during the holidays. From the mid-1990s on, Ricks took up residence near Dillards in the mall — smiling, laughing and patiently listening to kids dreaming of Pokemon, Gameboys and Tickle Me Elmos.

“He loved being Santa Claus,” said his daughter, Rhonda Ricks McCumber. “People always said he reminded them of Santa, so when he retired from IBM, he grew a beard, went to the mall and applied for the job.”

He was so good at it, McCumber said, that he became the permanent Santa, putting on the red suit year after year. And he kept the beard, too, year-round. 

“When he put that suit on, he wasn’t my dad, or my kids’ grandfather,” McCumber said. “He was Santa Claus.”

I know exactly what she means, and I have the pictures to prove it. Ricks was our Santa from the first time we took a toddler there in 1996 until his little brother made one last visit in 2005. 

Kids grow up, but Santa stays the same. And so did Ricks, even after the big anchor stores closed and the mall began its slow decline more than a decade ago. He continued to make public appearances in schools, churches and community events, bringing Christmas to anyone who asked.

In 2012, a local TV station did a story called, “A Santa Without A Mall.” In it, McCumber said: “He’s holding up a cardboard sign with a phone number so kids could call him.

“I said, ‘Dad, you realize you just put your real phone number on TV.’ He said, ‘Well how else are kids going to reach me?’” 

Being Santa meant the world to him, his daughter said.

Even during the pandemic, suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Ricks answered the call, because, you know, the kids. The folks who planned Christmas in Crestwood put him up in an empty store in a Watson Road strip mall, in a bubble. 

“It was like a snowglobe,” McCumber said. “But people still came to visit and have their picture taken outside of the dome.”

It would be Ricks’ last Christmas. He passed away a few months later in March of 2021. Cancer, not COVID, his daughter said. The pandemic isolation was hard on him, but Ricks never wavered. He still had some good to do in this world.

One man’s life touches so many. And when that man was Santa Claus, well, that man lives on in thousands of family photographs on mantles, in ornaments and memory books. And each Christmas, Ricks’ smile resurfaces again and again, and every grown kid remembers what it was like to believe in magic.

Originally published in the Webster-Kirkwood Times Dec. 16, 2022.