To you, his name is Bill. To every kid who stays up past bedtime anticipating the sound of reindeer hooves on the rooftop, his name is Santa.
Up until 13 years ago, Bill Quintel was a typical middle-aged guy. He lived in Alamo, worked for AT&T, and drove a Harley-Davidson motorcycle when the weather was warm. Then at church one morning he caught the eye of Janet Brennan.
Brennan, who managed the Danville Livery at the time, noticed him pull up on his motorcycle, hop off and kiss his wife. There was something familiar about him, she said. His deep belly laugh, the twinkle in his eye, his short white beard.
Introducing herself, she had to ask. It was uncanny.
“Do people ever tell you that you look like Santa Claus?” she inquired.
Being the lazy autumn morning it was, the question seemed a little out of the blue.
“Nope, can’t say they have,” he answered.
Despite his initial hesitation, Brennan began to coax him into playing Santa at the Danville Livery – a role he was a bit resistant to take.
“I’d never worked with kids before, but this just clicked in to place,” he said.
Santa in the spring, summer and fall
Flash forward to today and he is not such a typical guy. To kids in Danville, he’s larger than life. A celebrity of sorts.“They run toward me with open arms,” he said.
Quintel, who has rosy checks and pristine white locks like Santa himself, plays the part both on and off the job. He’s been approached and asked about the resemblance so many times that he has begun carrying a pouch of candy canes with him everywhere he goes.
No matter what month of the year it is or what place – in a shopping mall or a quiet coffee shop – he hears both kids and adults pick him out of the crowd. They point, smile and say things like, “Hey, where’s Mrs. Claus?”
But what can he expect? Having embraced the role whole-heartedly, Quintel spends six months of the year growing out his beard. And in the weeks before Christmas, he only wears red coats and shirts.
Being Santa’s double does have its perks, he said. After all, how many people are granted a child’s immediate trust? Or the ability to spread joy just by giving a mischievous wink?
“I feel so blessed to look like this,” he said. “When I was 17, I found my first gray hair. By the time I was in my 20s, I was salt and pepper.”
Of course now, in his early 60s, it’s all salt.
Diaries of the doppelganger
Imagine being regularly called over to take photos with strangers or knowing intimate personal things about families, told to you by children. These are just a couple of the responsibilities that come with role of looking like one of the world’s most benevolent characters.“I had a boy come in by himself one year and tell me the only thing he wanted for Christmas was to see his dad more,” Quintel said.
Situations like this are delicate, he said. But he did approach the mother and let her know what her child had asked, in a gentle way. He said it was difficult for him because she started to cry and walked away.
Being around children, he encounters a lot of situations that need to be dealt with delicately. And he approaches them the way one would imagine that Santa would himself.
For example, one year he donned his full costume and visited a young girl with cancer. Although she was severely ill and couldn’t speak, her face lit up when she saw him. The other kids, who were a little older, asked him why he couldn’t make her healthy for Christmas.
“They said, ‘Santa, can’t you make her better?’ It just killed me. I had to tell them it’s out of Santa’s hands, it’s in the lord’s hands,” he said.
Luckily other entries in Santa’s diaries aren’t as painful. He’s had a lot of laughs and good times playing the part. Parents have come up to him at restaurants to tell him their kids spotted him, think he’s Santa and have never been so well behaved.
“He has so much love in his heart, and he embraces the Christmas spirit year round,” Brennan said.
Quintel also told the story of having sausages with good friends and their daughter one hot night in August. The young daughter had always known Bill as Bill – not as Santa. But that night he said she watched him very closely while they were eating, studying him intently.
“On the way home she said, ‘Daddy I think Santa disguises himself as Bill in the summertime,'” Quintel said.
An elephant for Christmas
On the job, Quintel has perfected answers to the requests and questions that kids fire at him. What is Santa supposed to say when a child asks for a helicopter or an elephant to be delivered Christmas morning? Quintel can tell you.“If they ask for something a little pricey or outlandish I’ll glance over at the parents and they’ll give me a nod or shake their heads,” he said.
He said he tries not to guarantee anything without getting a subtle OK from one of the parents.
“If it’s a popular toy or there aren’t many in stock I say I’ll see what I can do, we’ve got so many orders of those,” he said.
He also has some convincing answers devised for the cynics out there, as kids over 10 years old start to question the reality of a man who keeps track of every kid in the world.
“I tell them the elves do it by computer,” he chuckled. “That we have a naughty and a nice list.”
Ask him how he gets around the world in one night or how he gets into a house with no chimney and he’s got answers, too. He says the time change helps him get to all the houses before morning, and that it’s easy for him to get in through the window if there’s no chimney. And when he gets the question, “Where’s your sleigh?” he tells kids about how he drops his reindeer off with a local rancher.
Looking back on all of the kids he has seen in the 13 years of playing Santa, he said he has only encountered one child who told him he was naughty and didn’t deserve any toys.
“I said if he promised to be good next year I would bring him something anyway. I told him I admired his honesty,” he recalled.
In Hayward where he grew up, Quintel’s family couldn’t really go all out for Christmas. They didn’t have a lot of money, and one year he remembers his parents telling him that Santa spent his money on his sister’s wedding. But every year his family did manage to get him something, to make the holiday special for him, and to take him to see Santa in Oakland.
Now that he is the local face of Christmas, he celebrates the holiday in a different way. Going back over some old photographs of himself with children over the years, he reflected on his time spent being Danville’s resident Santa.
“There is even more joy there than I thought,” he said.
Meet Santa
Visit Santa at the Livery from 6-8 p.m. Dec. 14-15; from noon-3 p.m. Dec 16-17; and from 6-8 p.m. Dec 21-22. Call 838-7070 for more information.
