Once again this Christmas, 72-year-old Fred Deane will stand outside St Ann’s Church on Dawson Street, Dublin, draped in an ankle-length black cloak, dark cassock and bowler hat.
It is a costume befitting an 18th-century undertaker, but Deane is a “Black Santa”. He is fitted out in the traditional costume worn by charity collectors here and in its namesake cathedral in Belfast since the 1970s.
“When it started originally it was nothing like this at all,” said Deane, who as church caretaker has been filling the role of Black Santa for more than a decade, accompanied by other collectors and carol singers.
“We are now in our 20th year this year. Tommy Haskins, who was one of the previous vicars, he used to do it. Sitting out here on his own. But there was no music, no nothing, he just sat here all day on his own.”
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That solitary Christian act was imported from St Ann’s Cathedral in Belfast, where the Very Rev Sammy Crooks first began collecting in 1976.
As Deane explains, the term Black Santa arose from a combination of Crooks’s physique – a “small little chubby man [with] rosy cheeks” – and an outfit shaped from black cloth rather than red.
“[But] we’re like the real Santa – everything we get we give away,” he said. “And it’s grown over the years in that the same lots of people come back year after year.”
The familiar charity collection, launched on Monday by the children of the Kildare Place School Choir, runs until Christmas Eve and benefits a host of organisations including the Salvation Army, Simon Community, Alice Leahy Trust, Protestant Aid, St Vincent de Paul and the Samaritans. Although rattling buckets are the norm, online donations are also accepted.
“The great thing about this sit-out is it goes to local causes and there’s not one penny taken in administration; whatever goes into the bucket goes straight to the charities,” said Canon Paul Arbuthnot, who is doing his first Black Santa collection.
His inaugural year was marked with a pair of black socks from the dean of Belfast, the Very Rev Stephen Forde, who is continuing the tradition there.
“The abiding Christian message is one of where we pray for peace, we pray for good will to all, and that is seen in what we do and whatever little we have to give to those who have nothing,” Canon Arbuthnot said.
