I found the real Santa, and he lives in Great Falls

His first words took my breath away, just like it did when I was a kid. “McKenna! It’s Santa!” Through the phone, his voice was thick and raspy. His laugh, airy, and he sounded like he was catching up with an old friend.

He was, kind of. Santa and I go way back, since my first Christmas as a newborn in 2002, when he was working at the Fox River Mall in Appleton, Wisconsin. My family returned to visit him every year, and I have vivid memories of sitting on his lap and watching him kick off the Downtown Appleton Christmas Parade. Now, Santa—my Santa, the exact Santa—was living in Montana, where he was born, and I was also living in Montana, where I go to college.

I’m 21 now, so it’d been close to a decade since the last time I saw Santa at the mall. Facebook helped me find him. It started in the days after Thanksgiving, when I was home from college visiting my mom. Someone told my Aunt Val, and Aunt Val told my mom, and after she hung up the phone my mom told me that Appleton’s Santa was actually from Montana. I should look into it, she said. I’m in my last year of journalism school and I know how to find people, so I did. I posted to an Appleton area Facebook group asking for information about Santa, and for weeks received messages and comments like, “Call me. I have information about Santa.” Within a few days, I had his number and he had mine.

Days after our first call, I make the three-hour drive from Missoula to Great Falls, where we reunite in the parking lot at the Montana Club. As I cross the cracked asphalt, wind threatening to knock me over, Santa stands in front of his daughter’s Honda. To me, even here, even now, he’s a beacon of cheer and joy.

He’s 86 now and tall, maybe six inches above my 5-foot-5. His thick white beard is as full as ever, and he’s wearing one of his signature Santa shirts, a red button-down covered in holly leaves. A cozy gray beanie rests where a Santa hat would have been, and his red suspenders are swapped for camo-patterned cargo pants.

He walks a little slower since the last time I’d seen him, and he has a few more wrinkles, but I would recognize him anywhere. He breaks into a smile and opens his arms for a hug. You’re never too old for a hug from Santa.

Santa became Appleton’s Santa in the mid-’90s and retired in 2019. He was the kind of mall Santa Appleton, Wisconsin, would always remember. He didn’t need, and didn’t wear, the big red suit. His beard was real as can be, trimmed by the mall hair ladies, and he wore a long-sleeved Christmas pajama shirt under thick red suspenders. He had the thin round wire-framed glasses and the perfect soft, warm smile. People talked a lot about his gentle kindness. And for nearly 30 years, he looked exactly the same, once gaining a small amount of Reddit fame after someone posted, “My Santa doesn’t age (1997-2017).”

It cannot possibly be overstated how much this Santa means to the people of Appleton, how much more revered he is than other people’s Santa.

As we sit down in the restaurant’s dining room, he doesn’t ask me what I want for Christmas, which I kind of get and also find a tiny bit disappointing. Still, I can’t stop thinking, How many kids get the chance to interview Santa when they grow up?

As we talk, he regales me with stories of his travels. I tell him I’m a dancer, and he tells me how he used to be a ballroom dancer, a hobby that took him and his friends all over the world.

He tells me about the Santa Special from his favorite Wisconsin restaurant, the Black Otter Supper Club in Hortonville, and scrolls through the hundreds of pictures he still has on his phone of the families who know him as Santa. He tells me how he used to fly home from Appleton on Christmas Eve, still dressed like he’s at the mall.

When the two little girls sitting next to us look over and recognize Santa eating “The Cowboy” burger, he smiles, waves, and passes over a couple $2 bills, a long-time strategy to make kids smile. They giggle, rush over and give him a hug. Just because he’s retired from the circuit doesn’t mean he’s not ready.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the madness of the holiday season. As a kid, Christmas was magical, but as I get older it just gets more complicated. I got in my car and drove through Montana in winter because I thought reconnecting with Santa might bring some of that magic back. And it did, but it was perhaps more magical learning about the man behind the suit.

I learned Santa was born on Aug. 3, 1937, in Daniels County. Montana was in a severe drought, and the day he was born, it rained. He said his mother used to tell him that’s when she knew: “You’re going to have a good life.”

He would tell you that’s what he’s had. Growing up in Peerless, an unincorporated town near the Fort Peck Reservation in northeast Montana, he spent a lot of time on horseback, working on a ranch and playing sports in high school. He got himself a Santa getup while living in California, and later in Washington, moving around before coming back home for a stint. He adopted the persona when there were no other Santas around for neighborhood kids, including his own. He’d drive around from house to house, visiting families in his Buick convertible.

His days in California inspired his go-to outfit: It was too hot for the traditional suit. “I said, ‘I won’t do it,’” and he never did give in to the pressure.

Being Santa wasn’t his primary gig until later. He was a lobbyist and a manager and a store owner and worked in insurance, among other things. At one point, he worked with the sheriff’s department in San Diego.

While playing the part in Seattle, a few Fox River Mall ladies spotted him and basically scouted him for Appleton, Santa remembered. Later on, while working with a company specializing in Santas with real beards, he got a call to apply for the position.

“I think I said, ‘Where the hell is Appleton, Wisconsin?” Santa said.

So he went there in the 1990s—he can’t remember the exact year—and Appleton grew on him. He got a yearly contract, and the most surprising thing about it, his daughter Tracie said, was that he kept working with the same mall for so many years in a row.

He said what he loved about being Santa was the kids. He learned how to handle the particularly fussy ones, reaching out a hand and letting them grab it, talking to the parents in the soft, gentle way so many Appleton-area families remember. He learned how to make them smile with signature moves, though I’m pretty sure I never received a $2 bill.

He once dined with the Green Bay Packers, and he still treasures a blanket given to him by a certain quarterback’s wife (though he never names names). He made friends with every hotel maid, every Great American Cookies worker, every Santa’s elf, every child in Appleton and their parents, too. He is boastful and proud of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He surrounds himself with good people, Santa said, and that’s what he remembers most about the arc of his life, his connection to Appleton and beyond: the good people.

We finish lunch and I follow him to his apartment building, a senior housing complex, where he introduces me to a group of his friends—his “retired elves,” he calls them. We take pictures in front of the Christmas tree until it’s time for me to leave, and he pats me on the head goodbye.

Santa’s other name is Russell Motschenbacher. He lives in Great Falls, happily surrounded by his friends and his family. He still has his signature patterned PJ Santa shirts—and a few more $2 bills in his pocket.