Garelochhead Santa to go around village one last time

The twinkle in his eye dates back into forgotten decades. It lights the way forward for generations to come.

You can find that same spark of magic as curtains part just enough for young eyes to peer out and savour the moment of seeing Santa outside.

For 35 years, every Christmas morning, you were certain to see him in Garelochhead.

Ringing his bell, wishing Merry Christmas, echoing through every corner of the village, up and down the hills.

At 4am on December 25, Jimmy Kenney dons the mass of red and white to deliver a festive wake-up call, to catch maybe one young face looking out.

“That made my day,” says Jimmy.

Last year was to be his last. But we can reveal that Jimmy will make one more Christmas Day tour around the community - albeit this time with the help of a 4x4.

How it started

Jimmy moved from Dingwall in 1985 to start a job in construction at the naval base in Coulport. And he never left, staying in Garelochhead ever since.

In 1987, a neighbour was talking to his former wife, Paula. Jimmy had grey hair and a grey beard, so the neighbour asked if he would dress as Santa and give a present when her son was going to bed.

"Why not?" she said. And Paula bought a suit. And it started from there.

The next year, welding firm NJ Slee got a pick-up truck with a seat in the back and hot water bottles around.

"They had me strapped in and going round the village," recalls Jimmy, "blowing the horn and ringing my bell and handing out lollipops to all the kids that were standing waiting.

"This is on Christmas Eve. And then on Christmas Day I would get up at 4am and put the suit on.

"And Paula said, 'Well why don't you go down and wake everyone up?'

"And I went, 'Yeah, that sounds good to me'."

So for whose benefit was putting the suit on initially?

"Mainly my own," he says, with Santa's jolly laugh.

"To see what the reaction would be. My good lady, she got a lot of phone calls. It was very enjoyable.

"It took on average of maybe four, four and a half hours to walk around the village. In all weathers. It wasn't always snowing. Mostly rain. Garelochhead is known for that.

"And ever since then it carried on and I just made an annual thing about it."

Secret revealed

For a long time, few knew who was ringing a bell early on Christmas morning, the greetings bouncing off the hills like children bounding down the stairs to see what Santa had left.

"There are a lot of people who have moved into the village and never thought anybody would do something like that," says Jimmy.

"And a lot of people, when they find out who this Santa is - because I never let them knew for years apart from close people - said 'I can't believe it was you. For 20 odd years I was wondering who it was and it was you?'.

"To me, that's made my day."

Jimmy can't fool everybody. Granddaughter Awren, aged six, can pick up his accent.

"Granddad, I know it's you," she said at her primary school fair recently. She told her two-year-old brother Cameron. Mum Bethany told her not to tell anyone.

They still believe in Santa though. Children believe "there is this certain gentleman who goes around from city to city, place to place, all in one day," says Jimmy.

He spent a couple seasons in the grotto at Lodge on the Loch, and once a boy of nine or 10 asked an age-old question: "How do you get round all in one night, Santa? How can you do that?"

Standard question. Tough one.

"And I was thinking, 'here we go'," says Jimmy.

He told the lad: "You know how the earth is round? It's spinning so fast that we don't know it's going so fast; you're actually standing still.

"Well, I get up on Christmas Eve, Rudolph's all packed, the sleighs are all done, I press a button and I slow it right down to a minimum of JUST moving and no more.

"And that gives me time to go right round the whole world. Australia, Brazil, America and back to Scotland again. And then I'm up to the North Pole."

He was told that was the best answer, because other Santas didn't know. Mum and dad gave the thumbs up. Jimmy was sweating.

A monument

Jimmy's construction work took him to all corners of the globe. The length and breadth of Britain. Barcelona, Belgium, Berlin.

His last job was six years on the new Forth Road Bridge, climbing the heights of the 650-foot towers.

But the monument he will most be celebrated for, for generations, is his Christmas mornings in Garelochhead.

For 10 years, Jimmy was the resident Santa on Christmas Eve at Scrumbles, the former MoD community hall-turned pub.

Paula took old velvet stage curtains from the venue and turned them into Santa's outfit.

"It was heavy, lined velvet curtain," says Jimmy. "There was a cape, a jacket, trousers, a hood. She did a fantastic job.

"When you go through the village when it was raining, it was quite heavy."

There's a picture of Jimmy with son Ross dressed as an elf, in the first fall of snow of Christmas morning one year.

"We were the first people to walk in the snow," he remembers. "It was so magical."

Jimmy started going grey from when he was 15. For years he tried wearing the fake beard, but it was horrible, getting in his mouth, or being pulled down by children sitting on his knee.

Now, he spends five weeks growing out his whiskers into a bright bush of white, topped by his gold-rimmed glasses.  He has the solid handshake of a builder, but the eyes of a doting grandfather.

The flicker of light from curtains opening on Christmas morning is the twinkle in Jimmy's eyes. 

You can't capture it in a photo. But I promise you, it's there. In the corner of his eye, in his hearty laugh, there's this beam of light, bright like a beacon through, well, a lot of rain. It is the light of Father Christmas. 

The ethics to be good

He may wear the curtains of this festive parent, but Jimmy lost his own dad at the age of seven.

“I lost my father at a young age,” he says. “He died in 1961 at the age of 34.

“It was hard. There were six of us. Back in those days, how hard it was to grow up with a mum and three guys and three sisters.

“It gave you the ethics to be good to people. He was a construction worker and that's what mum said - ‘You took after your dad’.”

On Christmas Eve, the fire engine takes Jimmy around - and it's a pleasure.

It's pitch dark, pouring rain, and children have their little torches while Jimmy is in the back, waving, "giving it yahoo".

"It just gives them a little taste," he says. "You can see them saying, 'oh, will he back tomorrow?'

"You can see the kids' faces. And of course the mums and dads say, 'yep, but you've got to go to your bed early'.

"And then they do hear the bell in the morning. And sometimes, what a lot of parents tell me, is that you've gone by and they've heard the bell ringing ... 'Has he been? Has he been?'

"When you hear those stories, that's...I've done my job." 

Magic for generations

Sometimes, Jimmy has been passed gifts left at the door to hand to a child in the morning, or even to leave at the side of their bed.

A couple of years ago, he was asked to do a favour. He knocked on the door, and he wished the couple Merry Christmas. But he had forgotten to leave a gift the night before, and he handed over a small box.

The couple got engaged that morning.

Jimmy has been creating magic for generations.

"The kids that used to be in the window, now they're adults and they've got children and their kids are coming to the window," he says.

"And it's just like a full circle. All the young chaps and young girls that I knew, now they're adults who are having a beer with you. It's just amazing."

And son Ross, who now has a daughter, Aria, aged four, was once Jimmy's trusty elf,

"I think he was about seven at the time," he recalls. "Would you like to come out and dress as an elf?

"And how many kids at seven years old on Christmas Day would come out at that time in the morning? Fair play to him - he actually came out and did it for years with me."

This will be the last year of his Christmas morning tours. Now 70, Jimmy had already taken a break previously with a bad back, and the legs aren't as keen on Garelochhead's hills.

New partner Christine will again be at his side this year, driving around as they wake up the village.

So what has it been like all these years to transform into the red and white embodiment of magic?

"I'm going to make somebody's day," says Jimmy, who is also granddad to five-year-old Scarlet.

"It just fills me up with immense pleasure to know that here we go again, it's another year, opening the wardrobe, dusting the suit down, giving it a clean.

"When we went past windows, and all you sawwas the flitter of the curtain open and these tiny faces looking out the window and all of a sudden realising, 'wait - is it true?' and you're waving back to them.

"It was fascinating to me. And if you only got one or two on that whole morning, it still made my day."

Jimmy certainly hopes someone else will wear the suit - though possibly one for their own height, not his of five foot three.

“Did people enjoy it? Or was it annoying to them? Hopefully not," he says.

"On my behalf, it was a pleasure. Absolute pleasure. Doing it for the community. And I couldn't say no to any of it.”

Maybe Garelochhead will tell him this Christmas morning how loved Santa is. How special Jimmy is.

Jimmy Kenney, left, meets reporter Tristan Stewart-Robertson (Image: Newsquest)

The man in the Santa Claus suit

On a trip once to Gibraltar, Jimmy started chatting with a man who had nothing.

He didn't speak English and Jimmy had no Spanish. But they were able to hold a conversation. The man had large holes at the bottom of his shoes.

And later Jimmy returned and gave him his shoes before the tour bus drove off.

And that's the magic of the man in the Santa Claus suit that you might just catch through the crack in the curtains on Christmas morning.