At the Huggins home, Santa has posed for photos over the years with Isla (pictured) and hundreds more. Photo: Jenn Baumgartner
Writer: Kyle Munson
Santa Claus is famous for slipping silently into homes, but he doesn’t usually linger for 10 hours in the same living room. He doesn’t bring a photographer and pose for portraits with 400 guests, including a rotating cast of toddlers, families in matching flannel pajamas, and the occasional Dachshund.
Yet this has become part of Santa’s hallowed holiday ritual in the Forestdale neighborhood in central Des Moines, where Bryan and Michelle Huggins have turned their home into something between a holiday photo studio and a community tradition. What began as one family’s attempt to simplify Christmas chaos has quietly grown into a small seasonal phenomenon.
The couple grew up in the Gen X era of holiday photos — she in southeast Iowa town of Bloomfield, where the town square turns into a postcard each December, and he in Hawaii, where Santa swaps fur-trimmed coats for floral prints and sunshine.
They began raising a family together in Oklahoma and moved to Des Moines in 2010. They soon grew tired of waiting in lines for holiday photos at local attractions while coping with three restless children and the occasional disheveled Santa. So they wondered if they could rewrite the script.
What if we skip the chaos? What if we just … did it ourselves?
Thus, inadvertently, a holiday tradition was born, with the two parents plus twins Finn and Isabelle, now 18, and daughter Isla, now 12.
That first year, 2013, included about 30 families, with cookies from Michelle’s mom and proceeds donated to Perkins Elementary School.
And now? A hundred or more families parade through the house on the second Sunday of November, with as many as 20 relatives squeezed into a single photo. Carloads dash through the brown Midwestern landscape from as far away as Cedar Rapids and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Michelle’s mom now spends the autumn baking 500 cookies, including Isla’s favorite, butterscotch.
The stockings are hung with care, dotting the mantle like so many punctuation marks. Faux presents are stacked with studied asymmetry beneath a lavishly bedecked tree.
Did I mention that Bryan and Michelle are both architects? One of their neighbors doubles as a prop department to contribute all manner of antiques, such as a children’s holiday book or a wooden sled from Germany.
Each year features the same fireplace as a backdrop, but Michelle designs a different set with a distinct color scheme. Some of the regulars begin reaching out at the start of the school year to request their usual preferred time and ask about the color so they can coordinate their outfits.
In the middle of it all sits Santa in all his festive glory, as if he stepped out of a 19th-century Dickens story or the Saturday Evening Post.
The photographer — they’ve worked with three — racks up as many as 10,000 shots throughout the day.
People bring dogs or other fur babies. (Full disclosure: My wife and I have lived next door to this wonderful family for a few years and once posed with a pair of our bemused chickens.)
The Hugginses even maintained the tradition through the pandemic. In 2020, Michelle offered to email makeshift Santa photos with help from Photoshop. In 2021, they allowed just one family indoors at a time. They’ve also vacated the house to allow an autistic child the necessary calm and quiet to finally enjoy a Santa photo.
Expecting parents have incorporated birth announcements into the photos — in one instance surprising most of the relatives who stood alongside them, unaware of the sly announcement until they saw the finished photo. The death of a matriarch inspired one family to carry on the holiday-photo tradition in her honor.
This North Pole’s unlikely outpost in Forestdale has even inspired spin-off Santa photo sessions in other homes statewide.
“Michelle has created a tradition for dozens of families,” Bryan said.
“Because I was impatient,” she replied, laughing.
As usual, the Huggins family will begin their Christmas season long before Thanksgiving, by posing for the big day’s first photos at 8 a.m.
“The best traditions,” Bryan said, “are the ones that happen by accident.”
Santa with writer Kyle Munson, Ann Sobiech Munson, and their backyard chickens Marcy and Clucky. Photo: Meghan Bradley
Photos with Santa
Sign up for 5-minute slots on Nov. 9. Suggested donation is $45 per family, and proceeds benefit Perkins Elementary PTA. Email mhuggins022@gmail.com (right away or next October).
