Santa's day job: Hotel maintenance

WEST OCEAN CITY, Md. — You can send your letters to the North Pole, but Santa's real workshop is inside a Route 50 motel.

George Ganzzermiller is a Santa Claus look-alike so convincing that he turns heads young and old while working as a maintenance man at Comfort Suites.

"The children will stop him out at our swimming pool," said motel manager Stephanie McHenry. "Without any prompt from their parents, they'll just say, 'are you Santa Claus?' These kids are just absolutely enthralled."

When that happens, Ganzzermiller takes a knee, meets them at eye level and tells them sweetly that even Santa has to work a day job, just like their folks do.

"I get dressed up like this because I like to see the faces of the children more than anything else," he said. "I tell them I'm Santy Claus' helper, because Santy Claus has so many children to take care of through the year, through the whole world."

Ganzzermiller, 67, worked nearly four decades for General Motors at a plant in Baltimore before retiring with his wife to West Ocean City in 2003. He's been the maintenance director at the motel going on four years. Before that, he had never cultivated the Santa look.

"I just let my beard grow out, and people said, 'Hey, you look like Santa Claus,' " he said.

Ganzzermiller decided to take on the appearance of a "working Santa Claus," as he puts it — after all, he's quick to point out, Santa only wears his famous red suit on Christmas Eve.

Throughout the holiday season, Ganzzermiller comes to work in a festive plaid flannel shirt, khaki pants and black work boots. His bowl-full-of-jelly midsection is reigned in by a pair of wide red suspenders. Candy canes stick out from his shirt pocket, and his signature red-and-white stocking cap sits upon shoulder-length white hair.

Ganzzermiller normally sports a basic pair of silver-rimmed glasses, and when he does, his eyes disappear behind the tinted lenses.

But when it's time to be Santa – even for an audience of one – he switches to a pair of crisp gold-rimmed square ones. With the Santa specs on the bridge of his nose, his clear blue eyes twinkle just like Old St. Nick's.

Once Ganzzermiller began affecting the Kris Kringle persona at the pet-friendly motel, it wasn't long before wintertime guests asked to have their animals photographed with him. Now hotel management provides Ganzzermiller his own high-back chair beside a glowing and trimmed Christmas tree in the lobby for anyone who wants to have their picture taken with him.

"I tell them, leave chocolate chip cookies and white milk and carrots for the reindeer," he said of the little ones taking to his lap. "I get more outlandish requests from the grown-ups than I do from the kids — 'I want a Mercedes,' and this and that."

But he's not Santa all year long. Once a year, Ganzzermiller will shave his bushy white beard and get a haircut. And on that day, he walks into work, unrecognizable to his colleagues.

"Then, I'm just George," he said.

McHenry said it's always a hoot when they make supply runs to the nearby Home Depot or Walmart, and people of all ages will smile and stop them to wish Santa Claus season's greetings.

"He gets it constantly. But there's nothing hokey or fake about him," she said. "We're lucky to have him. There's not a kind thing he won't do for a staff member or a guest here. He'll help absolutely anybody, even a stranger on the road. He truly does have a Christmas spirit heart all year, he really does."