Living, Breathing, and Working as Santa, All Year Long
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
By now, Frank Bara is used to having people on the street scream at him, children and adults alike. As Christmas approaches, it becomes harder and harder for him to go outside.
“Hey, Santa!” a truck driver once yelled, noticing Mr. Bara as he walked down Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. “I want a Porsche!”
Another time a man in a car leaned across his girlfriend’s lap so that he could catch Mr. Bara’s attention through the window.
“Santa!” he shouted, “I still believe in you!”
“Sometimes I forget that I look like Santa until people yell at me,” said Mr. Bara, 73, whose round belly, fluffy white beard, and wire-rimmed glasses make him look like a Norman Rockwell painting even when he isn’t sporting a Santa suit. “It can be depressing – I feel like I should be carrying around a bag of things to give to people. The saddest one was one guy who said, ‘Santa, I want a job.'”
Mr. Bara, an actor, director, and artist, is also a freelance Santa Claus. He was “discovered” in an elevator by a talent agent eight years ago. Since then, Mr. Bara has graced the pages and covers of U.S. News & World Report, Time Out New York, and Maxim as Santa (inspecting a laptop, looking tough for a Gangs of New York holiday issue, and frolicking with buxom Santa’s helpers, respectively). When not filming commercials, he also works as a live Santa, sitting in the window of stores like Gracious Home and entertaining children at corporate parties, asking them in his deep, gentle voice what they want for Christmas.
As Santa, Mr. Bara sweats year-round. There was the Heineken beer commercial shot in August in a Puerto Rican jungle (“I never saw it but I hear it was quite successful!”), the 98-degree day in Scarsdale spent scraping a defroster over a car window for a Lillian Vernon catalogue, and a mid-summer photo shoot for Tiffany, complete with perspiring, peacoat-wearing models and a little girl who decided she wanted to marry him. For that gig, Mr. Bara put an ice pack into his costume to keep his back cool and did his best to create an aura of Christmas wonder on Fifth Avenue – wonder that was ruined when a summer rainstorm melted all the fake snow.
In addition to his warmth and way with kids, Mr. Bara’s beard is what sets him apart from the Glue-Ons, freelance Santas who don’t have the commitment or the follicles to grow the real deal. Mr. Bara grew his around 1956 for a biblical television series on PBS – one of the many roles he’s played in his career as an actor. These days, most of his theatrical work lies in directing cabaret performances, but he’s also spent time on Wall Street, in the Merchant Marines, in the Army, and as a Trappist monk in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (“I didn’t talk for two years,” said Mr. Bara. “It was lovely”). Today, to keep his beard looking good, Mr. Bara perms it three times a year.
Most kids ask Santa for modern toys like PlayStations and Power Rangers, but Mr. Bara’s personal passion is making puzzles. One day in 1974, while visiting family in Cherry Hill, N.J., Mr. Bara used a cousin’s jigsaw to make an 8-by-8-inch puzzle that said “Mary.” After it took his friends more than six hours to put it back together, he was hooked; he’s been making puzzles as a side business for the past 30 years.
His puzzles, the pieces of which are so delicate that they need to be handled with tweezers, take between three months and a year to make. He hand paints and wood-burns each piece and spells words by carving intricate series of letters out of the wood itself. Mr. Bara’s largest puzzle, commissioned by the Dance Theater of Harlem, was 9-feet long and had 4,000 pieces.
“It has the names in it of everybody who was associated with the theater for its first 20 years,” said Mr. Bara. “There are paintings and sculptures in it. There are two miniature grand pianos.”
He started off making the puzzles as opening-night gifts for theater friends, but as his work became better known, so did his clientele. Mr. Bara has puzzled for Bob Fosse, Luciano Pavarotti, and Stephen Sondheim. His most recent puzzle, commissioned for “Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown, is several layers deep and features a John Langdon ambigram – a clever form of lettering, used in Mr. Brown’s novel “Angels and Demons,” that looks the same whether viewed rightside-up or upside down.
Mr. Bara’s workshop is a first-floor studio apartment on the Upper West Side that he shares with his partner, Marvin Hayes, a painter whose work has been displayed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Vatican. Mr. Hayes, an excellent cook whose belly is also the same shape as Saint Nick’s, alternates between calling himself “the biggest elf on earth” and “the world’s largest fairy.” He accompanies Mr. Bara on all of his shoots.
Even after listening to hundreds of children’s Christmas lists, Mr. Bara is still surprised by what he’s asked for.
“There was one girl, a very elegant little child, who said she wanted a horse,” Mr. Bara said. “I thought she might be satisfied with a pony, but she insisted on a horse. Meanwhile, her mother was standing behind her frantically signaling ‘No!’ So I told her something about how it wouldn’t make sense to get a horse because she was growing very quickly and it would be very difficult to match the length of her legs with the saddle.”
And then there are the greedy ones.
“This beautiful child, golden hair, went on for a minute and a half,” said Mr. Bara. “And afterwards he came back up to me and said, ‘Oh, I forgot one thing.’ He’d memorized his list – it must have been about 150 toys.”
Mr. Bara’s own childhood was different from that of most of the kids that he bounces in his lap. He was born in Jersey City during the Depression. He can remember his brothers making a homemade Christmas tree out of a broomstick, branches, and metal lathe shavings that his sister brought back from a war plant, but can’t recall whether he believed in Santa as a child.
“I think we were too poor,” he said. “I just remember wanting Christmas presents.”
One of the most challenging parts of being Santa, said Mr. Bara, is the day after Christmas. On December 26th, he tries to stay inside to avoid complaints from people who didn’t get what they asked for.
“It’s adults, mostly,” said Mr. Bara. “I have to wear a turtleneck to cover my beard when I walk down the street.”
Ms. Price is a freelance writer and editor of Salt Magazine (www.saltmag.net).