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Phil Morgan has the thick white beard you would expect from a man who has played Santa everywhere from Doernbecher Children's Hospital to Meier & Frank.
That's a relatively recent addition to the repertoire of Morgan, who began his tenure as Kris Kringle back in 1958, when he was a Medford High School senior working at J.C. Penney.
"They grabbed me one day by the shoulder and said, 'Go put on a red suit. Santa didn't show,'" Morgan recalls. "And so I did and I had a ball."
In the years since, playing Santa has been filled with misadventures, from contending with vomiting children to being peed on by a turtle at a Dove Lewis event. But Morgan has been hooked ever since that day at J.C. Penney and says that he'll play Santa as long as he's physically able.
"I want to make sure that you understand that I really love what I do," he says with almost religious seriousness. "It's been an amazing journey."
It's personally satisfying, too.
"I'm a fairly introverted being," Morgan explains, "and when I put on that suit, all of the sudden there's part of me that comes out that I didn't even know was in there."
Many Oregonians probably remember Morgan as Santa from Meier & Frank. His success playing Santa at Elephants earned him a coveted spot onstage at the store's Santaland, the tenth-floor holiday attraction famed for its monorail train.
"The kids absolutely loved that monorail that went around the ceiling, but they would stomp their feet and scream," Morgan remembers. He was still sad when Meier & Frank was closed and Santaland was downsized, but he was forced to put on a brave face and remind people that "things change, even for Santa. Ho ho ho!"
Morgan likes to decompress in Hawaii after the Christmas season, where his granddaughter just gave birth to twins. Yet he still loves talking about the people he's met during the Santa days, from the men who have had their girlfriends sit on his lap while they proposed to a dying woman who was too sick to come to Meier & Frank, but still wanted to talk to Santa over the phone.
"These two little girls crawled up on my lap and they told me what they wanted for Christmas and their dad said, 'Just a minute, would you mind talking to my wife? She's got cancer and she's too weak to come,'" Morgan recalls. "It was like, 'Okay. What do I say in front of these girls? How much do they know?' So I just said, 'It's really nice to hear your voice. I hope the best for you and I'll send any healing energy I can pull together for you.'"
Morgan has lost two wives to cancer and has devoted much of his life to helping the sick—he currently volunteers at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria and is a Reiki master.
But he still wants to keep working as Santa, even if it means dealing with kids like the girl who asked him to arrange for her to play violin in Carnegie Hall."
Morgan found the perfect answer to that one.
"Well, you keep practicing and I'll see what I can do."