There are some highway exit signs that demand a detour from
your road trip to go visit.
Beer Bottle Crossing, Idaho. Worms, Nebraska. Hot Coffee,
Mississippi. Scissors, Texas. Whynot? (That’s in North Carolina.)
You’ll come across another unforgettably named town in the
southwestern part of the Hoosier State. Santa Claus, Indiana. Yes, Virginia,
there is a Santa Claus, and true to
its name, Santa Claus is a festive little dot on the map that’s just 50 minutes
from French Lick Resort — perfect for a quick detour or a day trip during this holiday season.
Here’s a few things to check out when you pull your sleigh into Santa Claus:
Santa Claus Christmas
Store
This is where the jolly guy himself is stationed during the
holidays. For a kid, sitting on Santa’s lap in
Santa Claus has got to rank high on the list on the mind-blowing experiences of
childhood. You can
even visit St. Nick here during other months of the year, not just during the holiday season.
The Christmas Store boasts an enormous range of gifts, decorations, collectibles, fudge and other treats with twinkling light displays throughout. (Try one of the homemade cookies, which are big as a small plate.) They’ve also got more than 5,000 Christmas tree ornaments, and those can all be personalized on site for free with names and dates.
Santa’s Candy Castle
It looks like a gingerbread house come to life, and you can
feel the sugar buzz from the moment you enter Santa's Candy Castle.
You can sample from their few dozen flavors of gourmet
popcorn (dill pickle to sugar cookie) and saltwater taffy (mango to s’mores),
as well as some of their other homemade fudge, turtles, toffee, caramels and
peanut brittle. One entire wall is devoted to Pez candy and dispensers. Kids
will be mesmerized by the Wonka candy and the dispensers of individual Jelly
Belly flavors. Even adults feel like a kid in a candy store with a huge
selection of hard-to-find retro sweets like candy buttons, wax bottles and wax
lips, Pop Rocks, Sifers Valomilk marshmallow/chocolate cups, Clark bars, Fruit
Stripe gum and Big League chew.
Saturdays in December you can even roast chestnuts over an open fire, just like in the song. Oh, and save room for a frozen hot chocolate, which is like
a milkshake but with Dutch cocoa to give it the hot chocolate flavor. It’s
served in individual sizes, or the 64-ounce size called the Avalanche. Share an
Avalanche with the family, or finish one yourself and get your picture on the
wall and leave as a Candy Castle legend.
Santa Claus Museum
and Village
This is an intriguing stop whether you’re a little kid with
a wish list or a grown-up history buff.
For starters, no visit is complete without snapping a picture next to the restored 1935 Santa statue towering 22 feet high. The village features building dating
back to the 1860s, such as the town’s original post office where kids can now
sit down and write their own letter to send to Santa (and have a reply from Santa mailed to them by Christmas). You can also learn about
the town’s history and how it evolved into a tourism hotspot. The quick
version of how the town got its name: It was originally supposed to be Santa
Fe, but another Indiana town had claimed the name, so Santa Claus it became.
The museum also displays some funny
and heartwarming letters to Santa that come in from all over the globe. (They also still get a few letters simply addressed “To Santa” on the envelope.) The museum has a team of elves who personally reply in December to each
one of the 20,000 or so letters that are mailed here annually.
If you can’t make it here, send one yourself: P.O. Box 1,
Santa Claus, IN, 47579.
More to see
The first three weekends in December are loaded with Christmas-themed activities, and a full list of those festivities can be found here. Take a drive through the Festival of Lights inside the town's Christmas Lake Village — where Santa Claus residents lives on streets named Candy Cane Lane, Sleigh Bell Drive and Snow Ball Lane. Be sure to explore Santa’s Toys toy store, which is filled with nearly 3,000 specialty toys that you can play with while browsing.
For a town of just 2,500 people, it’s astounding how much
there is to do here. But that’s the magic of Santa Claus.