For 73 years, Santa has been a fixture in downtown Seattle, in large part because of one tiny Ballard company you’ve probably never heard of. But Santa just got outsourced.
It turns out even Santa can be outsourced.
“A corporate decision was made, that’s all,” says Hillard Viydo when I reached him amid frantic holiday preparations the other day. “I don’t take it personally. But I am having a hard time explaining it to our longtime customers.”
Viydo, 63, runs Arthur and Associates, a legendary Ballard company that is believed to have invented that enduring national phenomenon, the Santa photo. You know, where you stand in line, sometimes for hours, for a kitschy snap with a department-store Santa?
It was the late Art French who was the first to make a business out of that, in 1942 at the old Frederick & Nelson store downtown. Every year since, the company has been a fixture in one downtown Seattle store or another and has probably taken upward of a million photos of Seattleites in bad sweaters next to generations of twinkling, company-hired Santas.
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Not this year though, at least not downtown.
“This is the first time in 73 years we aren’t in any downtown Seattle store,” Viydo says. “It’s definitely the end of an era.”
What happened is basically another version of an old tale: Homegrown family business gets swamped by national chains.
After Frederick & Nelson went under, in 1992, Arthur and Associates, headed by the force that was Hillard’s mom, Hazel Viydo, ran the Santa operations at Westlake Center and later at The Bon Marché. But after The Bon became Macy’s, a corporate change came down from the top.
Macy’s hired a Florida company to take over Santaland in most Macy’s stores, including New York, Chicago and here. When it did so in Portland, in 2011, the longtime “naturally bearded Santas” there were replaced by newer, cheaper ones with fake, costume beards.
The Portland press dubbed it “Santagate.” The news made headlines nationally as “Macy’s fires Santa.”
Here, Arthur and Associates also got the boot but immediately landed a Santa gig a few blocks up Pine Street at Pacific Place. Unfortunately, that locally owned mall was then bought by an East Coast real-estate conglomerate. So Viydo was ousted again — this time in favor of a Texas company that runs Santa operations in more than 300 locations in 48 states.
“Every time the local owners of a mall sell to national or international investors, I get a bad feeling we’re about to get kicked to the curb,” Viydo said.
I had no idea the Santa business was this cutthroat. According to Claus Net, the online community for department store Santas (yes, there’s such a thing), there’s now intense pressure for Santa photo efficiency. One Santa called it “rush ’em on your lap, rush ’em off.”
Also: Nobody is willing to wait in lines anymore, no matter how festive. So if a store Santa team doesn’t have a smartphone-text system for notifying parents when it’s their turn, forget it.
At the same time, there’s an increasing premium on authenticity — on natural beards, for example. Viydo currently employs 34 Santas, almost all with real beards and some who have worked for him for decades.
From Ballard, Arthur and Associates still runs the Santa operations at 11 area malls, most in the suburbs. There’s also a Seattle photographer, Rich Hansen, who manages the downtown Nordstrom Santa photo shoots. But other than that, we’ve outsourced Santa to companies in Orlando, Fla., New Jersey and the suburbs of Houston.
In the Santa wars, Viydo figures he’s still got a secret weapon — though it’s a fading one.
“The top phone call we get is: ‘Are you the original Frederick & Nelson Santa?’ ” Viydo says. “There’s still strong nostalgia for that. People are trying to recreate some indefinable feeling from their own childhoods.
“It sounds funny, because it’s Santa we’re talking about here. But people are looking for something real.”