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you dress up like Santa Claus for them this year? I’ll make you a Santa suit!’ And she did.” Little did Parker know, his seamstress had another surprise in the works. “Well, she also called up [the news] and told them that Santa Claus was going to be bringing a bus full of chil- dren to McDonald’s. So, when we got there, the news was there with cameras and a whole bunch of people just waiting to see Santa Claus. After that, playing Santa Claus became an annual thing for me.” Parker’s Santa Claus ensemble is unique in that there’s nothing fake about it: no wigs, no glued-on beard; he’s all-natural. He remembers once when a little girl ques- tioned if he was “really” Santa — and she was quickly converted into a believer. “I was working at the Gentilly Mall one year doing pictures, and a lady came in with her granddaughter — she might’ve been three or four. She was a little bitty thing. Her grandma said, ‘Now get up there on Santa’s lap!’ And the little girl told her grandma, ‘That ain’t no Santa Claus! He’s fake! He’s got a pillow in there under his shirt.’ So, I unzipped my jacket, and I had on one of those what I like to call ‘air-conditioned’ undershirts — it had a few holes in it — and she saw that brown skin through the holes and reached in there and touched me and said, ‘S***! That’s really him! He’s really Santa!’” He’s also learned some hard-fought lessons that only truly seasoned Santas know. “If you pick a small child up to put on your lap, and they’re trembling, you need to just go ahead and put them down immediately — they’re fixin’ to wet on you,” Parker advises somberly. “I’ve had it happen plenty of times.” Bathroom emergencies aside,Parker believes his role as New Orleans’ Chocolate Santa to be the “most enjoy- able job in the world.” And while the joyful memories of holiday seasons past are always at the forefront in Parker’s mind, if you ask him to give a rough estimate of how many kids he’s met over the years while playing Santa, he’ll admit — it’s far too many to count. “Lady, I would not begin to lie to you,” he tells me, laughing. “I’ve been doing this since 1971, so at this point, I have no idea.”

Advocate staff photo by SOPHIA GERMER

MEET FRED PARKER

by SARAH BAIRD

54 www. rouses .com FRED PARKER DIDN’T SET OUT TO BECOME SANTA CLAUS DURING THAT FATEFUL HOLIDAY SEASON ALMOST 50 YEARS AGO — HE JUST WANTED TO GIVE SOMETHING BACK TO THE KIDS. “I like to tell people I started [playing Santa] because I got backed into it,” Parker chuckles. For 47 straight Decembers, Parker has gained citywide fame serv- ing as “Chocolate Santa” or “Seventh Ward Santa” for scores of children in his neighborhood and beyond. “I was driving a school bus for Orleans Parish back in the day, and the kids would always give me Christmas gifts. I’d get two or three little different gifts for the kids, and one year, I finally thought, ‘I can’t go and wrap 65 little gifts for the kids, so how to do I repay these children?’ I asked their parents if they would give me permission to take [the kids] to McDonald’s on the last day of school [before the Christmas break] — my treat — instead of bringing them straight home. Well, I did that two years in a row, and coming up on the third year, one of the other drivers said, ‘Why don’t