Deer Park Couple Helps Make Holiday Special

Darkness advances on this snowy afternoon in the earth-bermed home of Bill and Nancy Hopkins. A wood-burning stove heats the room, but the light over the kitchen table burns dimly.

Bill Hopkins, 68, wears his hair as straight, white and fine as angel hair. Age spots mark his forehead. A dark lens covers his right eye. Below it, that side of his face droops.

Bill fears this may be the last Christmas he’ll feel well enough to preside over Santa’s House, a 20-year Deer Park tradition. But on this recent afternoon, Bill doesn’t want to talk about endings.

Instead, he asks Nancy to pop a video of last year’s Santa House into the VCR. In it, the upper floor of their house glitters with strings of lights. “Jingle Bells” plays. A small blond boy dances with delight through the crowd.

Bill gazes at the screen. “Imagine being 4 or 5 years old and walking into something like that,” he says.

Each year, the Hopkinses turn their home into a child’s North Pole fantasy. They string 4,000 lights. They pose prancing wooden reindeer in the lawn. They line up 37 volunteer elves to give away toys and candy canes and enlist seven Santas to listen to the dreams of children.

Last year 1,132 of them visited Santa’s House, accompanied by at least 2,000 adults. They came from as far away as Colville and the Spokane Valley.

“No money changes hands. No religion. No politics. It’s just people getting together and sharing time with one another,” says Bill, a former turkey farmer and real estate investor.

Santa’s House started quietly. The Hopkinses decorated a log cabin they owned 20 years ago and wound up winning a Chamber of Commerce prize.

The next year, Bill and a friend dressed up as Santa and handed out gifts to 100 children. Over the years, and even after Bill’s brain tumor and stroke in the early ‘80s, Santa’s House grew.

The Hopkinses added a top level to their earth-berm home. They never moved upstairs. Santa took over.

Nancy’s workbench, where she cuts out wooden climbing Santa toys, stands upstairs. There are the shelves of stuffed animals and dolls, many of them donated. There’s the overstuffed chair where Santa sits, and the tiny doorway that allows only children under 12.

Nancy likes to perch children on Santa’s lap for pictures. She’s 56, with sandy curls, round cheeks and a wide smile. On this afternoon, she wears a bright red sweat shirt that says, “Don’t Open Until Xmas.”

Both of the Hopkinses speak with a folksy country cadence. They’re self-effacing, friendly.

“Sometimes in October, it’s ‘Oh, Santa’s House again,”’ says Nancy. “Then you see that first child’s face and you forget all the work you did.”

Bill worries his motivation will sound mushy or idiotic. “The real thing is, it’s love,” he says.

Bill tells one Santa tale after another. There was the little girl who climbed on his lap one year and asked for an alarm clock. She wound up with Bill and Nancy’s clock, hugging it like a teddy bear.

“If she’d asked for the kitchen sink, it would have taken a little longer, but she’d have had it,” Bill says.

Other children send letters that arrive in the Hopkinses’ box at the Deer Park post office.

There was the lonely little girl who confided that she’d lost a ring on the school playground, a gift from her new stepmother. Bill reassured her and advised her to tell her stepmom.

There was the boy whose parents had recently died. He and his siblings had moved in with their grandmother, who lacked money for food or a tree. Bill called the food bank, rounded up a tree and lights, took up a collection in town.

“What a thing for a child to have to experience,” Bill says.

Bill hasn’t dressed up as Santa Claus for several years. “I had to quit,” he says. “I can’t see and I can’t hear and my face is all out of whack.”

For the last 12 years, former Spokane County Commissioner Skip Chilberg has volunteered to play Santa.

“It’s quite an awe-inspiring experience to sit there with a little 2- or 3-year-old in your lap telling you their greatest dreams,” Chilberg says.

Chilberg says the Hopkinses spend an incredible amount of time preparing for Santa’s House each year. But, he says, “I think they feel amply rewarded by seeing the kids’ eyes light up.”

Deer Park city clerk Chris McCoy works as an elf at Santa’s House.

“I think it’s so fulfilling for them; I just can’t imagine them ever turning it aside,” McCoy says. “Their hearts are so big and open, and they treat the children so lovingly.”

Nancy Hopkins says she’ll feel lost without Santa’s House. But she fears Bill’s tumor may have returned, and he’s seriously talking of closing Santa’s House permanently after this Christmas.

Bill doesn’t like to mention his health. “He’s a very private person,” says his daughter, Janice Guernsey of Sacramento, Calif.

Instead, he focuses on the memories he’s creating for today’s children. “We like to think that 50 years from now, this child will think about going to see Santa.”

Bill’s daughter wonders if the hardships of his own Depression-era childhood may fuel his desire to delight children.

Bill doesn’t talk about that. Instead, he asks a visitor if she’s ever read Bacon’s essays on love.

Francis Bacon, a 17th-century essayist, wrote this:

“There is in man’s nature, a secret inclination and motion, towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable.”

The evening grows dark. But Nancy turns on the lights and Santa’s House glows.

Bill limps out onto the front porch. He shows off his pride: a 6-foot wooden Santa Claus, carved by a Bainbridge Island chainsaw artist.

“I want it on my grave,” he says with a chuckle. “I don’t need any other marker. That’ll be my tombstone.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SANTA’S HOUSE Santa’s House will be open from 6-8 p.m. Sunday through Christmas Eve. To find it, take Highway 395 to Deer Park. Drive into town on Main and turn right at the four-way stop on Crawford. Crawford turns into Deer Park-Milan Road. Drive east 2 miles. Across from the airport, turn right on Cedar. Take another right on Antler. It’s the second house on the left, W. 1617 Antler Road.