Santa and His Helpers Arrive in Starr with Toys, Pancakes for Kids
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
In Starr, Christmas arrived Saturday on a paper plate stacked with pancakes. On a sunny December morning at the Starr Fire Department, the smell of pancake batter and syrup mixes with sounds of children laughing and Christmas music, and the line between emergency service and community ritual all but disappears.
“This is part of our Starr town events,” says Crystal Bowles, who introduces herself with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to being both organizer and neighbor. Bowles is a community organizer and a Starr resident, one of the people who make sure that Pancakes with Santa—an event that sounds like a fundraiser but feels more like a town reunion—happens every year.
The premise is disarmingly simple. Elementary school children eat free; their parents pay three dollars for a plate, a price that seems designed less to cover costs than to insist gently that everyone has skin in the game. Every child gets to see Santa, every child gets a toy, and there are “other characters” roaming the room—costumed figures who add a touch of low-budget pageantry to the proceedings.
For a few hours, the fire station is repurposed as a kind of ad hoc civic center. The bay where trucks usually idle on standby becomes a dining hall, packed with families, noise ricocheting off the concrete floors and metal rafters. The volunteers who might, on another day, be pulling hose or checking equipment, now work the griddles and refill juice cups, moving with the same choreography, just at a slower pace.
Bowles downplays the work involved, but the event is plainly the product of careful, unseen labor. There are flyers to design, donations to solicit, toys to sort, a schedule to coordinate around school calendars and holiday traffic. Behind each smiling child clutching a new gift is a committee meeting and people working behind the scenes as volunteers to make it happen.
Pancakes with Santa is, in one sense, a minor thing, the kind of small-town holiday event that rarely registers beyond the county line. But in a place like Starr, it serves as an informal census: a way of counting who is here, who has come back, who brought a new baby or a new boyfriend or a new conversation to the table.
The children, of course, see none of this. They see the red suit, the white beard, the improbable fact of Santa sitting in the fire station with Mrs. Claus, and the even more improbable fact that adults will line up so they can talk to him. They see pancakes arriving in stacks, toys appearing as if by magic, and grown-ups who, for once, are in no particular hurry to leave.
By the event's end, the batter is nearly gone, the toys mostly claimed, and the fire station begins its slow return to its usual state of watchful readiness. The tables are folded, the floor is swept, and the scent of syrup is replaced again by that of grease and rubber. But for a morning, at least, the work of keeping a town safe expanded to include the quieter work of keeping it together, one three-dollar plate at a time.
