Each year in December, when snow blankets the tiny city of North Pole and colored lights twinkle in its windows, Santa Claus dons a red suit and black boots, pulls a pom-pom topped stocking cap onto his head, and invites little kids to clamber onto his lap.
"Who are you?" he'll ask them, eyes crinkled, mouth all but invisible beneath his thick, white beard.
They'll say their names and start to tell Santa what they want for Christmas. Then he cuts them off.
"I'll say, 'Whoa, wait a second,' " Claus told The Washington Post from his home in North Pole. "Before you tell me what you want I want to know what you're going to give to someone else."
He laughed. "I'm a little bit of a different kind of Santa Claus up here."
No kidding. Claus, 68, may have Santa's looks and driver's license (living in a town called North Pole doesn't hurt either), but the resemblance to the chortling guy in the department store just about stops there. He's an Anglican monk with socialist political leanings, a longtime children's rights advocate, a two-time presidential candidate, a former New York police official, an international peace prize winner, an erstwhile emergency response chaplain and a medical marijuana proponent (Claus himself uses it to treat his cancer).
He's got no objection to gifts, but he prefers they be of the spiritual variety: "I don't get behind much of the crass commercialization spectacle that happens around Christmas," he told The Post.
And as of Monday, when he is sworn in, he'll also be one of North Pole's newest city council members.
So, yeah. Not your mother's Santa Claus.
Claus, née Thomas O'Connor ("I don't even remember to respond to that anymore," he said) was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up on Manhattan's East Side. His early life was not unlike any of ours: He went to school, learned to drive, began studying for a Ph.D. but never finished his dissertation. For a while, he hopscotched around various New York public safety jobs, including assistant to the deputy police commissioner and head of security for the Port Authority. Those jobs exposed him to the plethora of ills that plague America's youths -- abuse, neglect, homelessness, institutionalization -- so he switched courses toward activism. He joined the Celtic Anglican order Anam Cara in the early 2000s, and occasionally wears his red monk's robes when he's not dressed in the more traditional North Pole outfit of jeans and a parka.
Claus legally changed his name in 2005, while living in Nevada. He'd been praying for new ways to boost his work as a children's advocate when someone driving by in a white car spotted his bushy white beard, leaned out the window, and yelled, "Santa, I love you."
He never saw the car again, but the next day he paid a visit to the county clerk's office. Within a few weeks he had a new passport, a new driver's license and a new mission: He was going to milk this Santa thing for all it was worth.
It turns out that name recognition goes a long way in politics. Claus soon developed a strategy for getting child protection laws passed: If a politician brushed him off on his first attempt to reach out, he would call up local media with the story.
"And I'd say, 'This is Santa Claus, this is what your senator told me,' and they'd make it into a news story," Claus said. "Then all of a sudden, I'd get the (lawmaker's) media person calling me saying, 'Santa, we misunderstood your activism. How can we help?' "
"People, they don't want to get into it with Santa Claus," he continued, laughing.
Nick, it would appear, is one saint you don't mess with.
On that point, Claus has a bit of a bone to pick: Santa is not the same as Kris Kringle, the traditional German gift-giver whose name comes from Christkindl, or "Chris child." Santa Claus is derived from Sinterklaas, the Danish name for Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was a fourth-century Turkish saint known for his protection of children and the poor. His feast day was usually Dec. 6, but it got wrapped up in Christmas celebrations in colonial New York -- perhaps the first-ever victim of Christmas creep.
Claus' vision of his namesake is more saint, less present-peddler: "Love is the greatest gift one can give," he tells the kids who sit in his lap looking for presents (they thought Legos were the greatest gift). His advocacy efforts won him a prize from the Santa Claus Peace Council in 2009.
Claus has also run for president in the last two elections to promote his child welfare agenda. His motto: "Restoring America's heart and soul."
"I haven't heard either of the big boys talk about anything with respect to children, so I'd like to use that as a platform to insinuate my views on children, their health, safety and welfare and that's what I meant by restoring America's heart and soul," Claus told the Guardian in 2012. "We have presidents and candidates and all these other politicians that are really into the whole war machine, some other things that aren't particularly good for children in my view and I would like to see voters consider changing that."
Claus got 625 votes in 2012 (Maryland seems to be the only state that counted him) though it's not clear that everyone who voted for him knew they were casting their ballot for a real person.
Like the presidential campaigns, the move to North Pole was largely a publicity ploy (he used to live in the much balmier Lake Tahoe, California).
"I thought, 'What else can I do to make this Santa thing work?' "
Stunt or no stunt, North Pole, a town of about 2,100 near Fairbanks, has plenty to keep a Santa busy. (The town was christened in 1952 by developers who thought the name might attract more settlers to chilly central Alaska.) There are about 600 kids living there, and the local oil refinery -- the main source of jobs -- shut down last year.
Shortly after Claus moved there in 2013, he headed up the local chamber of commerce. He also lobbied for Alaska to pass Erin's Law, which allocates funds to train teachers so they can recognize signs of child abuse.
Then, when two seats opened up on the North Pole city council this year and no one ran to fill them, Claus launched a write-in campaign for a spot -- his first successful candidacy.
Claus will be sworn in Monday along with other new council members during one of the council's semimonthly meetings. There won't be anything too special about the ceremony, he told The Post -- it'll only take about a minute.
But he'll take some pleasure in re-reading North Pole's motto -- "Where the spirit of Christmas lives year round" -- and knowing that Santa Claus lives there year round, too.