Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger.
December 25, 2025 at 04:50PMIt’s not often that a new Santa Claus story becomes canon, and with good reason. There’s the weight of ritual, a holiday tendency to play the hits; there’s also the particular ease with which holiday stories fall victim to cliché, going simplistic and saccharine. Will David Gauvey Herbert’s profile of Bob Rutan, a longtime Kris Kringle for Macy’s, get the same replay treatment as A Christmas Story or David Sedaris’s chronicle of his time as Snowball the Elf? I can’t say. But Herbert does considerable reporting to open the clandestine world of Santaland and round up men who were transformed by their time in the suit—and the wishes they heard.
Bob moved to Hoboken with 150 headshots and a new wife. Within six months, the headshots were gone, handed out to casting directors and agents he never heard from again, and soon after, so was the wife. She wrote a play about a woman married to a feckless actor.
Bob’s life was slipping into cliché. He handed out flyers on street corners and performed Shakespeare spoofs in the park for tips. He subsisted mostly on cereal and pasta. His new apartment in Hell’s Kitchen had plywood floors. His roommate eventually landed a role on a hit HBO show and became a successful character actor. Bob, meanwhile, was thirty-two years old, three months behind on the rent, and doing quadruple shots of tequila at Marvin’s Place on Forty-third Street.
On a gray October day in 1991, Bob found himself outside Macy’s. He remembered a college buddy who had played Santa there once. How hard could that be? He figured if he told his landlord he had a job that fall, maybe he’d be able to stay. He walked through the beaux arts entrance of the world’s largest store and asked for human resources.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/25/macys-santaland-new-york/
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