‘Spirit of giving’: York County’s beloved Father Christmas, and wife, bid all goodbye
Scrolling through Facebook or Twitter in recent months is a sidesaddle ride with the apocalyptic horseman that is 2020. Coronavirus, Kobe, Australia on fire. Impeachment, acquittal, stock market plunge, record job loss. George Floyd, social protest and statues.
Then, somewhere between the transatlantic Saharan dust storm, the first signs of hurricane season off the coast, and those murder hornets we narrowly dodged, you’ll find this update:
2020 has come for Father Christmas.
A call ensues. True to 2020, he and his wife can’t chat because they’re hunkering in Florida with a hurricane approaching. A week later they’re back in their Lake Wylie home, just in time for an earthquake.
“That kind of stuff you can’t really stop, so you just muddle through it and clean up the mess,” said Frank Van Leer, the face of Christmas memories in Lake Wylie for almost two decades.
Turns out another seismic shift is here. Frank and his wife, Dona, aren’t just on vacation in Florida.
“We’ll be moving down there by Thanksgiving,” Dona said.
Becoming Father Christmas
It started at a party in New York. At the party, Frank had a down cast role.
“I was the elf,” he said, “and I would distribute the gifts.”
An idea, and a friend willing to craft a costume, led to the Father Christmas figure Lake Wylie now knows so well.
Frank had started in hospitals the last four or five years in New York, taking communion to patients.
The Van Leers moved to Lake Wylie in 2002 from Long Island.
Dona worked as a computer specialist in New York City. Frank taught middle school English. “It’s more like teaching how to survive eighth grade,” Frank said.
He brought Father Christmas south with him.
“They recognize him as Father Christmas whether he’s in the red and green outfit with a white hat, or whether he’s in shorts on a beach in Florida in a bathing suit, or whether I’m shopping in Macy’s,” Dona said.
Stories stick with Frank and Dona.
There was the frantic mother in a department store calling out for Daniel, only to find young Daniel frozen just around the next corner with his mouth agape.
“Daniel was standing there staring at Frank,” Dona said.
There was the sprint on hot sand at a Florida beach when Frank left his sandals closer to the boardwalk than the shore. A mother and daughter approached him.
“The mother says to me, Santa Claus, we just moved here from Ohio and Emily wants to know that you will not forget her,” Frank says, tears falling at the recollection. “I told Emily I will not forget you, and I never will.”
The year after arrival in Lake Wylie, Frank first showed up at the River Hills Lions Club Christmas tree sale. Three years later the club president — Dona — talked him into an appearance at a pancake breakfast fundraiser. Father Christmas has been a regular at both ever since.
He’s greeted and posed with children at holiday boat parades from Buster Boyd Access Area. When the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind brings its choir to sing each December for the Lions Club, Father Christmas and his bag of gifts appear.
“Frank does come out and give the students presents after the performance,” said Josh Padgett, fine arts coordinator with the school. “He is great with the students and one of the highlights of our holiday season. Our students really love meeting Santa every year.”
Frank couldn’t count how many appearances dot the years, how many photos with children, how many Christmas card images on distant refrigerators.
“It’s been a great privilege to be Father Christmas in the eyes of so many kids,” he said.
The Power of Legacy
It isn’t Father Christmas, but another beloved character Sherri Ciurlik sees in Van Leer.
“Frank is my Yoda,” the Clover School Board member said. “Everybody knows that he’s Father Christmas. That’s how the community at large knows him. He’s everything. Whatever our kids need, he provides. He’s just a positive force for all the kids.”
Ciurlik calls up to talk about the Van Leers immediately after an almost five-hour board work session a week before school opens during the pandemic. She says Frank has been been a mentor, reading coach or social club organizer at most every district school. He wrote a grant that brought an anti-bullying campaign.
Dona pioneered a reading program that gave 10,000 books to elementary students in a dozen years. She organized widespread volunteer vision screenings.
Both served on school improvement councils, despite having two grown children and no grandchildren in the district.
”They understand that kids are the foundation on which we build society, and they’re all in,” Ciurlik said. ”They do the things that they think build better people. That’s a dedication that we need more of.”
Years ago the state school boards association presented Frank its Champions for Public Education award for work in Clover. It’s one of many public service awards he and Dona own.
”You look at him and you see Father Christmas, and he lives that year-round,” Ciurlik said. “It’s truly the spirit of giving in love. He understands the power of legacy.”
Lion among members
Bob Daily has been with the River Hills Lions Club more than 30 years. It’s annually at or near the top for membership among clubs in the Carolinas.
“We haven’t had any club members that have done what (the Van Leers) have done with our statewide program,” Daily said. “Nobody has done as much as they have.”
Frank twice served as president of the roughly 170-member club. Dona served once. Both won New Lions of the Year (2004), the Franklin Mason Award for humanitarian service (2016) and the club’s highest honor, the Melvin Jones Fellowship (Dona in 2011, Frank in 2017).
Daily joins the Van Leers on some of those lists. The Van Leers have a way of committing together to projects, though one tends to take the lead with each.
“Most anything she’s been in,” Daily said, “he’s been involved, too.”
The club typically has about a $100,000 charitable budget each year. About 80% of funds go to York County organizations. Most of that money comes from four main events. Two of them, the Christmas tree sale and pancake breakfast, feature Father Christmas.
“He has a lot of people asking him to come and do some of those,” Daily said of Father Christmas, recalling a newspaper front or two featuring Frank. “He can’t do them all, obviously. He passes out the presents. That’s a big deal. This Father Christmas, he’s had a lot of publicity on it.”
What gets less publicity are the scholarship program, peace poster contest, junior Lion clubs, juvenile diabetes research funding, club recruiting. The Van Leers don’t just show up with over-sized checks. Dona also volunteered with crisis aid groups like PATH in York and the Clover Area Assistance Center.
She was operations manager at CAAC from 2007 to 2010, leading a group at the time of 150 volunteers and 2,600 clients. It provided food, dental care, utility assistance, life skills training and, yes, donated presents for children at Christmas.
The Van Leers are known statewide within the Lions community. They support smaller clubs. The same way Dona takes a support role for Frank when he’s Father Christmas, he travels for her various state, district and zone leadership roles.
“That was my turn to be support personnel,” Frank said. “I was Dona’s driver.”
They bring the best of the state home with them. Dona saw a prototype vision screening camera at the Medical University of South Carolina. Last year two dozen Lion volunteers vision screened more than 16,000 York County students.
“They’re just beyond anybody else,” Daily said. “There’s nobody that compares to them. They’re great people and we’re going to miss them.”
Finding Santa
Larry Lewis stands 6-foot-5. He has personality to scale. Last Christmas as it became clear Frank wouldn’t reprise the role in Lake Wylie, a search for Santa began.
In stepped Lewis.
“Being 522 years old, it’s exhausting,” Frank said. “It needs a younger person to do it.”
Lewis didn’t need his arm twisted.
“He’s going to school for it,” Frank said. “He’s going to school to be Santa. I just kind of went by the seat of my pants here.”
Lewis followed Frank last year on the event trail of car shows, tree lightings, school events. Then he spent three days in Michigan learning the history of reindeer, the North Pole and a nice-or-naughty list of Santa dos and dont’s.
“It’s a wonderful honor, absolutely,” he said. “I’ve got the red suit. It’s hanging in the closet right now getting ready to be taken out. I’ve already got my spectacles, my little round glasses, on order.”
What Santa school can’t prepare Lewis for is the inevitable, confused child who wonders this winter where Father Christmas went.
“I’m sure there will be,” Lewis said.
Frank said if his church in Florida asks he may don the costume again. He won’t come back as Father Christmas in Lake Wylie.
“I don’t want to have my presence in this community anywhere in conflict with (Lewis) taking over,” Frank said.
Frank and Dona spent recent months recruiting leaders for a variety of roles they will leave. Someone to organize the book collection and distribution, the reading program, the mentoring. They expect to have all those roles filled before they leave.
“That to me is the ultimate compliment that anyone can get,” Frank said, “is that people want to continue what you started. That’s priceless.”
Priceless memories
Stuart, Florida sounds a lot like Lake Wylie.
It’s a little east of Lake Okeechobee. It’s right on the intracoastal waterway. It’s Lions Club already has Frank and Dona as members.
They’ve had a condo there 25 years. It’s a third the size of their River Hills home. It’s on a golf course, like River Hills. It doesn’t have the grass to cut.
“It’s been our plan for 25 years to move there,” Dona said. “But the condo doesn’t allow dogs.”
Frank and Dona brought 12 dogs and five cats to Lake Wylie. Foreshadowing 2020, their last dog died late last year. They may already have moved except for, well, 2020.
“You can’t have garage sales,” Dona said.
For Lake Wylie, it’s a little more time with with Father Christmas.
“An earthquake of all things, and then Father Christmas?” said Susan Bromfield, herself synonymous with Lake Wylie as chamber of commerce president. “I grew up in the 60s and those were some difficult times. But this has just been the most unusual year.”
Bromfield said she sees the best of her community in the Van Leers. People who make the best of the situation, come whatever. She also sees a character who will be missed.
“He’s been at the holiday boat parade,” she said. “It was a lot of people that came through there. He’s been Father Christmas to many, many kids now for a generation.”
Frank tears up easy. To hear him, it isn’t the kids who will miss out most.
“As an old teacher you never get rid of it,” Frank said. “It just stays with you. The memories are just priceless.”
He said he thinks of the students who can’t see or hear, and come perform in a choir each Christmas.
“Witnessing those kids, the bravery the courage and absolute confidence that those kids have, it blows me away,” Frank said.
Frank estimates there have been thousands of pictures taken of Father Christmas. He and Dona instead focus on loving and serving others.
“That’s all we’ve been trying to do, all our lives,” Frank said.
The tears roll again.
Few of the kids in all the pictures likely knew his name.
“It’s wonderful,” Frank said. “It doesn’t matter to me that they don’t know my name. That they have known me for so many years? As Father Christmas? It’s priceless.”
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 10:12 AM.
