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Patty Walker Scotten with Legendary Santa in 1956 and 2019 (Photos courtesy Patty Walker Scotten)
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Patty’s children, Carrie and Will Scotten, with Santa in 1989 and 2013 (Photos courtesy Patty Walker Scotten)
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Patty’s father, John B. Walker Jr., from the 1944 Medical College of Virginia “X-Ray” yearbook (Photo courtesy Special Collections and Archives, Tompkins-McCaw Library, Virginia Commonwealth University)
Patty Walker Scotten can still feel her parents’ tight grip on her hands as she waited in line for hours at Miller & Rhoads — right next to the fine china department — to get into the Tea Room and see Legendary Santa in the mid-1950s. Once, she remembers, the line stalled beside an elaborate (and expensive) soup tureen.
“They were mortified at the thought that one of us might bump into it and break it,” she says.
When they finally got in, Patty, then 4 or 5 years old, and her older siblings, Dolly and John, would have tea with Santa, eat reindeer cake and listen to organist Eddie Weaver play Christmas songs. They’d also buy presents in the children-only Fawn Shop and visit Bruce the Spruce, the talking Christmas tree, in the children’s department.
For Scotten, now 67, memories of Richmond and Legendary Santa are intertwined with memories of her family.
Although the jolly old elf first appeared at Miller & Rhoads in 1936, the Walker family’s history with Legendary Santa started in the mid-1940s, when Scotten’s father, John B. Walker Jr., was attending the Medical College of Virginia (now VCU School of Medicine). Money was tight, and they had no car, so his wife, Carleise “Piggie” Coyner Walker, looked for a place near their home in the Fan District where she could take her toddler daughter, Dolly, to visit Santa Claus.
When they arrived via public transit at the Miller & Rhoads department store at Sixth and Grace streets downtown, she was surprised by how dressed up all the children were — little boys in jackets and ties, girls in crinoline skirts and black patent leather shoes. Before the next year’s visit, Mrs. Walker saved up so that young Dolly could visit Santa in suitably fancy attire.
After moving back to their hometown of Burlington, North Carolina, when John Walker finished medical school, they continued making the three-hour holiday drive to visit Richmond and Legendary Santa. The family would stay at the Hotel John Marshall and do their Christmas shopping, too.
What kept them coming back?
“It’s magic,” Scotten says. Each year, there was a different theme, so there would be an element of surprise. One time, Miller & Rhoads re-created the North Pole with snow and icicle decorations. “It was freezing cold in there,” she recalls.
During another visit, Patty and her brother and sister told the Snow Queen, who greets the children, that they’d gotten a new German shepherd named Princess. Then, when it was their turn to see Santa, he said to them, “Johnny, Patty, Dolly — come on over. How are things in Burlington? How’s your new dog, Princess?”
“That meant he was real, the fact that he knew all that,” says Scotten, who still sounds amazed.
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The facades of Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoads department stores strung with holiday lights, looking east along Broad Street circa 1965 (Photo courtesy the Reinier Hendricksen Photograph Collection, The Valentine)
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The interior of Miller & Rhoads department store filled with Christmas shoppers, Dec. 5, 1949 (Photo courtesy the Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine)
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Legendary Santa treating children to cake at the Miller & Rhoads Tea Room, Dec. 22, 1974 (Photo courtesy the Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine)
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A paper mask/children’s menu of Santa Claus’ face from Miller & Rhoads, circa 1960 (Image courtesy The Valentine)
When her own children, Carrie and Will, were little, she and her husband, Rich Morrison, and brother John and his four kids would drive up from North Carolina and stay overnight at a hotel such as the Richmond Marriott Downtown or the Hilton Garden Inn.
“I’d wake up, and he’d be fully dressed, standing at the door,” she says of Morrison. She would drop him off early in the morning to wait at the front of the line and then head back and get the children ready.
She also remembers decorating their car with a lighted wreath and singing and bouncing along to songs such as “Sleigh Ride” on their trips to Richmond, always making sure to pass by iconic Main Street Station, where her father had arrived when returning home from treating patients at a leper colony in Japan after World War II.
After Legendary Santa moved to the 6th Street Marketplace, the whole family ate lunch with Santa and the by-now grownup kids did the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” dance and motions on the skywalk over Broad Street. Even when some of the family members moved farther away, to Kansas City, Missouri; New Orleans; and Washington, D.C., they would meet in Richmond for the annual visit on the day after Thanksgiving, the first day Legendary Santa is officially open for business.
Scotten has made sure that the family continued its streak of visits.
Once, her brother, John Walker III, missed going on Black Friday, and later drove to Richmond in a snowstorm, lengthening a typically three-hour trip to seven hours. When he arrived, he found that Legendary Santa was snowed out; the Children’s Museum was closed. “How about that?” he’d joke afterward. “I drove seven hours in a snowstorm to see Santa. He’s not here, and he drives a sleigh!”
“There were times I went up by myself,” says Scotten, who lives in White Lake, North Carolina, southeast of Fayetteville.
Sometimes she listened as children would ask for things that she thought seemed unrealistic. His answers often would warm her heart and even make her tear up.
“Santa would say, ‘I’ll do the best I can to bring you what you wish. But no matter what, remember that you’ve been good. Be sure that you’ll have some surprises for you and even for your mom and dad.’ ”
Occasionally Scotten would ask Santa for big things, too. One year, around 2010, she asked for a new job, and she got it. (She now works in a subsequent position as director of marketing and development for a company that builds continuing care communities.)
During another visit, her daughter, Carrie, wrote her secret wish — an engagement ring — on a bulletin board. A week later, she got her diamond on New Year’s Eve.
“We’ve always laughed and said she asked Santa for a ring,” Scotten says.
She acknowledges that she thought about skipping the visit this year. She was in pain from two herniated discs and awaiting a cortisone shot.
“But then you called,” she tells me, “and I took that as a sign.”
I had first contacted Scotten through Facebook while working on Richmond magazine’s December holiday feature to ask about a comment she posted on the Legendary Santa page and then followed up to see if I could talk to her when she visited.
What did she ask Legendary Santa for this year?
“I asked for health for my whole family,” she says. “He said, ‘You’ve got that, and you should know that your family loves you and is so proud of you.’ ”
Scotten says that Carrie, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, has started a new holiday tradition with her family: riding a Polar Express Train in Spencer, North Carolina. She is hopeful that her niece, Jessica, who lives in Washington, D.C., will continue the Legendary Santa visits with her children.
Watching boys and girls line up in early December at the Children’s Museum, home to Legendary Santa since 2005, Scotten still feels the old magic from her childhood.
“He’s compassionate and empathetic,” she says. “He validates whomever is in his lap, including a 67-year-old woman.”
Visiting Santa year after year also has helped to keep her family close.
“It’s part of what roots you as a family,” Scotten says. “It gives your children the sense that the world is ordered and they can count on things. I think traditions are important.”
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