Signal Hill’s annual children’s visits with Santa Claus had to go virtual on Dec. 2 due to the pandemic, along with the City’s annual holiday tree-lighting ceremony.
But visiting Santa via Zoom wasn’t the only thing different for Signal Hill’s children this year.
They also had the opportunity to experience the City’s first Black Santa, who also happens to be female.
Not that the children noticed, said Signal Hill City Clerk Carmen Brooks, the woman behind the Santa suit.
See related: Dreaming of a not-only-white Christmas
“What I thought would happen, and didn’t, was that they were going to say, ‘Santa, you’re Black!’” Brooks told the Signal Tribune. “Race was never part of the conversation. They were all into what they wanted for Christmas.”
Families could register their child for a “Virtual Visits with Santa” time slot from 5 to 7:30 p.m. that day and then had the option to choose which Santa they wanted their child to visit– white or Black.
Three families, all of whom were white, opted to have Brooks as their Santa, she said.
Mackenzie Randall, Brooks’s neighbor who registered her two children for the event, told the Signal Tribune that her older, four-year-old son Houston neither recognized Brooks nor said anything about her race or gender.
“She’s kind of like a surrogate grandmother to him, so I was wondering if he was going to be able to recognize who she was,” Randall said. “And he didn’t at all. He just took everything at face value that it was Santa Claus.”
Brooks disguised her voice and was fully covered by her costume, Randall said. Her son is familiar with Santa from previous live visits and stories in which Santa is a white male.
“To him, Santa is Santa, however presented, apparently,” Randall said. “He didn’t question whether or not it’s Santa Claus.”
For the record, the top of Houston’s wish-list that the four-year-old read to Santa is a dinosaur from Netflix’s “Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous” series.
Children actually start to become aware of race as a social construct by age four, according to a 2019 article in Pediatrics Nationwide.
“They begin to recognize their own racial group and those of others,” the article states.
“Depending on home and community experiences, they may start to discriminate between certain human variations in selecting playmates.”
But parents have the opportunity to shape their child’s racial perceptions while they’re young, according to Dr. Ashaunta Anderson from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“By age 12, many children become set in their beliefs—giving parents a decade to mold the learning process, so that it decreases racial bias and improves cultural understanding,” Anderson says.
Brooks said her experience made her wonder whether families of other ethnicities would be interested in a Santa Claus that reflected them.
“It made me think, how many other people of races call in to participate in these events?” she said. “Why not? That’s another question.”
She is pleased that she could open this conversation in Signal Hill, Brooks said.
“This is all a learning opportunity for everybody,” she said. “[The City] never had to seek out volunteers that were of different race and ethnicities. They just never thought to do that. Had I not volunteered to do it and made it part of the conversation, we wouldn’t have had a Black Santa, even with the broader conversation taking place across the country.”
A total of 14 families registered for the “Virtual Visits with Santa” event, according to Community Services Director Aly Mancini.
Most of the children visited with Signal Hill Police Department (SHPD), Sergeant Don Moreau, who has served as the Signal Hill Santa for a number of years at its annual in-person event.
Moreau could not respond to a request for comment due to a job restriction, but Brooks said he makes a natural Santa, one you would never think was a policeman.
“He so transformed and was incredibly good with those children,” she said.
Between scheduled Zoom calls, Brooks and Moreau bonded over their mutual work with the homeless.
Moreau serves as the SHPD homeless-liaison officer and Brooks works on the front line of homelessness in a Costa Mesa shelter.
Brooks has worked with the homeless for 13 years, she said and became a Signal Hill commissioner after moving to the city, having previously worked in community services for the City of Glendale. She was elected Signal Hill City Clerk in 2019.
And she would like to be a Santa again next year.
“It was a lot of fun,” Brooks said. “It was really nice interacting with the kids. I volunteered for something and didn’t realize how much I would like it.”
