After cancer forced him to wear a fake beard, Spangle Santa looks forward to next year

In a back room just off the bar at the Harvester Restaurant in Spangle, Santa waits.

He sits on a bench. A toddler eyes him suspiciously. She clutches a candy cane as her mother tries to gently persuade the girl to visit with Santa. She is unsure.

Santa, or rather Santa’s helper, Mike Rubert, stays calm. He doesn’t want to frighten the girl. His trick is to always let the kids come to him, to never force the issue.

“He’s really sweet with the kids,” said Rubert’s wife of 30 years, Kris. “He’s not a loud man at all. He’s very soft spoken.”

Later in the morning, during a lull in the action, a boy walks up to Santa. The child has been coming to see Santa at the Harvester each of the four years the Rubert has been donning the red suit. He and the boy are pals, Rubert said.

The boy asks him, “Santa, how old are you.”

Rubert quickly answers, “I can’t tell you that. It’s a secret.”

The boy stops for a moment, then asks, “Well, how old is Marshawn Lynch?”

Rubert chuckles and makes a stab at guessing the Seahawk running back’s age, then sends the boy back to his parents.

If the child had noticed anything different about Santa this year, he didn’t let on. After all, Rubert looked like Santa: Red coat and hat, white trim, flowing white beard.

It’s the beard. That’s the catch. It’s one of those curly fake ones. To Rubert, wearing the artificial facial hair felt, well, weird.

“It tickled my nose, that was the worst part,” he said. “Then I’d lean forward and it would swing out, so I’d have to make sure I held it so I didn’t lose the doggone beard.”

For 45 years, Mike Rubert had worn facial hair, and he’s been able to fill in for Santa for family and friends sporting his own gray beard. This year, however, a bout with tonsil cancer left him beardless. And while he now has a clean bill of health, his beard isn’t quite ready for prime time, his wife said, as it’s coming in spotty. “Hopefully next year he’ll have a good white beard again.”

A close shave

Rubert, 68, works as a house mover. Not the kind that packs up your belongings, loads it all in a truck and takes it to your new place. His business, Mountain Homestead Structural Movers, moves buildings.

His life took a dramatic turn in early April as he was driving along 57th Avenue, near Regal Street. He reached up to scratch his neck, and felt a lump under his left ear, where there shouldn’t be one. He immediately turned his car around and headed to the nearest urgent care. The initial diagnosis was an infection in the saliva gland; he was given antibiotics and orders to return if the lump didn’t shrink. A few days later, he was at the Franklin Park Urgent Care, getting a work-related physical from his former primary care doctor. He asked the doctor to check out the lump. “He said, ‘You’re going to go get this checked out now,’ and I said ‘Oh, crap.’ ”

He drove to the Rockwood Clinic, where the doctor immediately sent him in for an MRI. A week later, he was in surgery having the lump – a lymph node – biopsied. “He (the doctor) reached in with his little tweezers and took a bit out and said, ‘Oh, I can tell right now. I know how it’s going to come back.’ ”

The cancer had started in his tonsils before spreading to the lymph system. Rubert said he never had a sore throat, or a cough, or anything indicating his tonsils were filling up with cancer. “The only thing I noticed in the previous month or two months was that I was a little tired,” he said. “But not to the point it was debilitating. It was like, I could lay down and take a nap in a heartbeat.”

He soon had major surgery to remove his tonsils, tissue around the tonsils, and 23 lymph nodes. He began weekly chemotherapy treatments, for nine weeks, and did radiation for eight weeks. The radiation is what ultimately cost him is beard.

The Ruberts have been married for 30 years; until recently, Kris Rubert had only seen her husband clean shaven once before, when he wanted to try something different. That first time she cried, she said.

“The second time,” Kris Rubert added, “when I had to shave it off, I cried, for a totally different reason.”

Beginning a tradition

Melissa Bozarth, who owns the Harvester with her husband, said they first knew Rubert as a customer.

“We love Mike,” she said. “We asked him to come in and do it and he loves doing it and he’s so good with the kids.”

He came to the restaurant in July, and told the Bozarths about his illness and his beard. “He was so bummed because of the Santa thing,” Bozarth said. “He said, ‘Nope, I’m still going to do it if you’re OK with me having a fake beard instead of his real beard.’ I said no problem.

“It’s really more about his demeanor with the kids,” Bozarth added. “He’s not really the ho ho ho guy. He’s not overbearing. He’s soft and gentlemanly.”

Bozarth hopes Rubert is up for this once-a-year work with Team Santa for years to come. “People love coming here,” she said. “When you go to the mall it’s a totally different feel. But when you come here with the kids and with him, it makes such a big difference, I think.”

That’s Rubert’s plan. He really enjoys it. “It just fills me up for the whole year,” he said. “It’s not for the kids. It’s for me. Believe it or not.”

Especially this year, given all he and his family went through, becoming Santa was even more important.

“Anybody who has gone through what I did will tell you it really puts a different focus on things,” he said. “And it makes things a lot more clear as to where priorities should be at. So yeah. It was more important this year.”