Retail Santas tend to get a bad rap, as though they’re only in it for the paycheck.
From “Miracle on 34th Street” (Santa shows up to work intoxicated) to “Bad Santa” (lives up to the name), these aren’t exactly the laps on which you’d want your children to sit.
“A Christmas Story”? Santa refuses to work a minute past quitting time on Christmas Eve.
“Elf”? He’s quick to violence and smells like beef and cheese while sitting on a throne of lies.
Some TV mall even let Al Bundy deliver its “ho ho ho’s.”
The gig is way more than a side hustle, though, for Robert Teddy. It’s closer to a way of life.
The award-winning pastry chef behind Wicked Donuts spent years workshopping his take on Mr. Claus — an executive whose childlike innocence belies his tendency to delegate, point fingers and deflect blame onto his elves — before taking it to the big leagues a few years ago in the chalet at Downtown Summerlin.
“I wanted the experience of, like, grinding it out,” Teddy explains. “I was a Meryl Streep. I needed to grind it. I needed to know it and live it and be it. I loved this character I was building, and so I wanted to test it. Where do you go to test? In a mall. Be a mall Santa.” 
Those wonderful whiskers
It all starts with the beard.
That magnificent mane has graced Teddy’s face since 1993. The follicular forest looks as though the bottom half of his head — and only the bottom half — has been cosplaying as The Cowardly Lion. With multiple layers and shades of brown, it appears at times as though his beard has its own beard.
If anything, though, that beard, which seems like the best asset a Santa could have, delayed Teddy’s Claus-ing career.
“A lot of them bleach their beards, bleach it white,” he says of other Santas. “And that’s a horrible, disgusting, noxious process. And once they’re done, they either dye it, which looks horrible, or shave it off.”
Shaving was a nonstarter.
“This thing, it’s kind of got its own personality,” Teddy says of his beard. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Like Venom, the comic book antihero? 
“Or Samson with the hair. More like that,” he responds. “It’s not as vicious (as Venom). But it would be unkind, I think.”
Instead of bleach, Teddy uses a Kryolan spray that colors his beard white, stiffens it, then washes out at the end of the day.
That’s the closest thing to a product that touches his beard.
Teddy washes it daily with Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap. Once a week, he applies a baking soda paste to strip away the impurities. That’s it. No conditioner, no other maintenance.
When the National Beard and Moustache Championships came to Las Vegas in 2012, Teddy and the beard took silver in the Garibaldi division.
“If you think the backstage of a women’s beauty contest is fierce,” he says, “I invite you to go backstage at a beard contest.” 
First steps as a Santa
As much credit as the beard gets for his Santa career, and rightfully so, Teddy’s culinary roots also were instrumental.
His grandmother had “mad cooking skills,” he says, and was assistant chef at the Danish Bakery in Leavenworth, Washington. When he was 13, Teddy apprenticed there, learning under master pastry chef John Espelund.
“That’s where I really kind of got the bug,” he says. But it wasn’t long before Teddy grew bored. “It’s all the same. A tart is a tart. A wedding cake is a wedding cake.”
Teddy leaned on his degree from the Art Institute of Seattle and launched a decade-long career as an art designer, working for the likes of Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft. When the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, a few years after family lured him from Seattle to Las Vegas, Teddy once again was looking for a new line of work.
The light bulb moment came when he stumbled across a woman on the Food Network talking about how she approached cakes like a canvas. After teaching himself some of the finer points, Teddy made a cake for a birthday party. 
A week later, he got a call from someone at Louis Vuitton — one of the party guests worked there — asking him to make a cake for a VIP event. That led to a stint from 2010 to ’12 as the luxury brand’s exclusive pastry chef in Las Vegas. Other clients included Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Teddy then spent a few years as a pastry instructor at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Las Vegas. A decade ago, one of his fellow instructors, who worked with a program that made cookies for members of the military, asked if he could be their Santa for an event.
“When I transformed, I was pretty surprised (by) how I looked,” Teddy says. “Like, ‘Wow, this is pretty good.’ ”
Playing the part
Being a convincing Santa is about far more than nailing the look.
Teddy is a big, barrel-chested bear of a man. But his voice is soft, like a lullaby dipped in honey, and shows few signs of the “really horrible stammer” that afflicted him as a child.
His personality doesn’t necessarily fit with the rockabilly, tattoos-and-pinup-girls vibe of his Wicked Donuts, which opened in 2020 at 9490 W. Lake Mead Blvd. But it, too, is gentler than it appears.
“To me, ‘Wicked’ is a good thing,” Teddy explains. “Wicked is the indulgence, the glitz, the glamour, the temptation. But it’s a good temptation.”
Unlike his doughnut branding, Teddy didn’t put a whole lot of thought into his Claus in the beginning. But once that initial gig led to more and more requests for his Santa services, he knew he had to invest some time into his presentation. 
“I had to come up with a character,” says Teddy, who doesn’t have an acting background and whose television appearances are mostly limited to Food Network competitions and local baking demonstrations. “What is my character? I had to define it so I could speak authoritatively from that character. Everything flows from that viewpoint.
“So the character is: Santa is a CEO. He’s the CEO of this business. But Santa, he doesn’t do much. Except he tells other people what to do. He points fingers.”
Teddy’s Santa loves to delegate.
“When they say, ‘I want this and this and this and this,’ I look it over,” he explains. “And I say, ‘You deserve everything on your list. You’ve been so good this year. Santa thinks you deserve all of it.’ ”
At this point, most parents start getting nervous, with visions of maxed-out credit cards dancing in their heads. Then, Teddy throws them a lifeline.
“I say, ‘Tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to talk directly to my head elf and have him write it all in the book.’ ”
But that elf, he tells the children, has a lot going on and can be a little on the forgetful side.
“So good luck,” his Santa says. “But I think you should have it!”
That way, Santa is always the good guy. If the children end up disappointed, there’s no reason to blame him. That unnamed elf can be the recipient of all that youthful scorn.
Keeping Santa on his toes
When you’re a Santa, difficult encounters come with the big red suit.
“There’s all kinds of questions. I mean, they put you on the spot,” Teddy says. “Some just are happy to be with you. Others definitely are a little more sleuthlike. They’ve been thinking about stuff. Like, what’s my name? What is the name of my elf? … Plus, you have to deal with all the movies — all the stories and stuff that Hollywood has come up with.”
Some children will ask Teddy’s Santa if he knows their names as a way to test him.
“Very few kids ask that,” he acknowledges, “and only the bad ones do, really.”
If the parents haven’t told him their child’s name, he’ll try to distract them and change the subject.
“But if they keep at it, I say, ‘Well, you know, I only know the names of the good boys and girls, so I don’t know your name.’ And the looks I get!”
Some of the toughest moments come from the visitors with the purest hearts.
“Kids will ask, ‘Can you heal my mother?’ ”
Teddy’s voice breaks as he recalls some of those conversations, which he calls an important part of the Santa experience.
“It’s tough, but you learn what to tell them. You say, ‘Sweetie, Santa’s not Jesus. I can’t heal your mom, but I know what your mom needs. And this is what you can do. … You can be there for your mom, because what your mom really wants right now is you. So just help her and be there.’ ” 
The magic of youth
Depending on when you read this, Teddy already may be up to his newly frosted beard in holiday cheer.
Each year around Thanksgiving, he unveils a half-dozen Christmas varieties of his yeast-raised doughnuts that bring a bit of French brioche to the American-style fluffy treats. The cranberry fritters at Wicked Donuts have become an annual tradition.
And he’ll once again be out there making holiday magic by meeting children and their parents.
(For the latest updates on both of his careers, follow @wicked_donuts and @chefsantateddy on Instagram.)
“I love it,” Teddy says. “I love the whole character of Santa and what it means.”
As adults, he explains, we tend to forget the excitement of Christmas and its seemingly endless possibilities. Spending time as Santa allows him to reconnect to those holiday tingles of his youth.
“It just puts me back there, and I remember that feeling,” Teddy says. “I just love it. It’s very fulfilling.” ◆
