The Santa House downtown, and the world's oldest Santa school

For three days each October, several hundred grown men with real white beards descend on downtown Midland to study how to be Santa Claus. They meet in an actual building called the Santa House, beside the county courthouse, and the school they attend — the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School — bills itself as the oldest one in the world, founded back in 1937 and the only nonprofit of its kind. Reindeer handling, sleigh history, the right way to listen to a nervous four-year-old: it’s a whole curriculum, and Midland is where it’s taught.

The Santa House itself was built for the part in 1987, paid for through the Midland Area Community Foundation and a roomful of donors. Inside there’s a fieldstone fireplace, a carved chair worthy of the big man, and two lofts crammed with holiday displays. Once the Santas-in-training pack up in the fall, the town’s own Santa moves in for the season and takes visits from local kids.

It all grew out of an older habit. Back in the 1930s, Mrs. Herbert H. Dow saw to it that small trees strung with tiny lights went up around the Midland County Courthouse every Christmas. The lights faded out for a while, until in the late 1940s Gil Currie and his friend Bob Wilson — grown men who never quite stopped being kids about Christmas — decided the town needed its holiday glow back and revived it.

That’s the loop Midland still runs every winter. An endowment named for Gil and Eleanor Currie keeps the courthouse lights burning and the Santa House open, volunteers donate the hours, and the oldest Santa school on earth keeps turning out fresh Santas a couple hundred at a time. Come December, the corner of M-20 and Main is exactly where a town that takes Christmas seriously would put its Santa.