The House Where Santa Lives

Ask children in this neighborhood where Santa lives, and they might hesitate to say the North Pole. They might be inclined to point to a modest mid-century house in Memorial Forest where St. Nick winks, shimmies, and twinkles from nearly every nook and cranny. 

Leila Reynolds’ house.

The 92-year-old – grandmother to four and great-grandmother to three – has lived in this house for 60 years. It’s where she raised her two daughters and son, all now in their 60s. It’s the kind of home that holds onto its warmth, even when the world seems cold and moves faster than it used to, say neighbors.

It’s the place of holiday magic. 

HO-HO-HOME COLLECTION Neighborhood children form a semi-circle at Leila’s feet as she shares her many Santa figurines. (Photo: Dylan Aguilar)

Nearly every Christmas season for the past 12 years, Leila has turned her home into a wonderland of crimson and white, a maze of Santas on nearly every surface. A merry museum of sorts. But unlike a museum, this is a hands-on experience. 

Neighborhood youngsters spill into her pecan-paneled den, forming a semi-circle at her feet as she passes figurines around, weaving history and heart into tales about each one – carved statute Santas, stuffed ones, animated jolly gadgets that jingle, sing, and dance. She shares stories about Santa and his accoutrements, like his lunch box. 

Leila’s Santa Show and Tell is instilled in childhoods. Kids who once toddled wide-eyed from room to room, giggling at the Santa who snores, still pop in over college break.

Leila is the main attraction, say friends and neighbors.

She never lets the magic fade.

“She’s one of the most cheerful people we’ve ever met. She sees the silver lining in everything,” says neighbor Layne Childs, whose three daughters have scurried to Leila’s door multiple years for the Santa experience. “My girls love that everything is so touchable. She has several stuffed ones that sing and move, and they go straight for those. And they always leave with a candy cane.”

Skater Santa, one of Leila’s hundreds of figurines, is one of many to pass through children’s hands. (Photo: Dylan Aguilar)

“It makes me so happy to see the children giggle and get so excited,” says Leila, a spunky sort who says she never set out to curate a Santa collection. “It just happened!” 

Decades ago, she stopped putting up a Christmas tree. But she had a Santa here and there. Then friends and family gifted them, and it became a thing. There’s the bulbous Santa gourd. And a jolly face painted on stone by her mother-in-law. Santa flags staring from windows. Santa night lights. Snow globes. Kitchen utensils. A giant Santa Snuggie that she makes an adult model for the children, inciting belly laughs. 

“It’s Santa everything. Everything! Even Santa soap the kids can wash their hands with,” Leila says. “It’s so much fun!”

Son Miles Reynolds, in industrial sales, travels the globe for work. But Thanksgiving and Christmas are hardwired into his calendar, says the Ohio resident. Time for Mom and his childhood casa. And the unpacking of Santas.

 It was his first birthday when the family moved into that house in 1965.

A SEUSSIAN-STYLE SANTA SUMMONS Leila’s Dr. Seuss-style rhyming invitations hit the mailboxes each year, asking children to pop over for the Santa experience. (Photo: Dylan Aguilar)

“After Thanksgiving, we put them all out. She tells me where to place them,” he says. “I go every year.  It’s fun to watch how much the kids love it. I think it’s a great experience for them. And her.”

Twins Clayton and Deveny Gilmore, across-the-street neighbors, are now in college. They grew up on Leila’s witty Santa tales. The true magic of the holiday season, they say, begins when children in the neighborhood receive a handwritten note from Leila in the mail, her lyrical Dr. Seuss-style invitation tucked inside, inviting them to pop over.

“My grandmother wrote me letters, and I remember how special that made me feel to get something addressed to me in the mail,” Leila recalls. “Every child needs that.”

“It did make me feel special, says Deveny, a University of Georgia sophomore. “I only had one grandmother growing up and she lived kind of far away, so Mrs. Reynolds definitely is like a surrogate grandmother to me.”

Ditto, says Clayton, a student at the University of St. Thomas. “I really like her Santa on a pair of skis. She’s gotten Santas from around the globe. I enjoy going over and chatting with her. She was there our whole childhood pretty much.”

Leila’s neighbor Carol Gilmore, right, has made the seasonal across-the-street jaunt to Leila’s Santa “museum,” with her twins over many years. Her children, now college-aged, think of Leila as a grandmother.  (Photo: Dylan Aguilar)

“She puts so much heart and soul into it,” adds the twins’ mother, Carol Gilmore. “She’s just as sweet as can be. All the neighbors watch out for her to see if there’s anything she needs because we love her. She’s a part of our lives.”

“My neighbors are just the best!” exudes Leila. “When we had that bad freeze a few years back, they came out of the woodwork for me. When I had my knee replaced, 12 women signed up for a rotation dinner. These people are like family.”

Li Zhang, Leila’s next-door neighbor of 15 years, places Leila’s newspaper on her porch chair every day, rain or shine. She loves how her elder neighbor signs letters to her children, sketching a miniature picture of herself with a little mop of curly hair. Li has one child in college; another is a high school senior. Both are huge Leila fans with many Santa tours under their belt.  

“For her age, she has great mental clarity. She’s sharp. She remembers my children’s birthdays every time,” Li says.

“She’s the best neighbor we’ve ever had,” says Debbie Davies, who moved here from South Africa. “She’s always written my children, like on Valentine’s, and it’s such a nice personal thing for them to get in the mail. They were young when we moved here, and now they are teenagers and it’s just so nice that they’ve had that experience with her in their lives. It’s part of their childhood that is so special.”

“Childhoods should be filled with wonder,” Leila says.

Leila’s son Miles Reynolds is the Santa display maestro, helping his mother see to each Santa’s rightful place in the home each season. (Photo: Dylan Aguilar)

Hers was.

Little Leila Marian Poppen grew up in Muskegon, Mich. Come winter, her attorney father became an alchemist of ice. Under the moonlight of a cold sky, he turned their backyard into a surface of dreams, an ice-skating rink. He cleared the yard of snow, hosing it down layer by layer, a ritual of patience and precision. Mobs of mittened neighbors swirled about their yard that glistened like glass. 

“Oh, what a memory!” says Leila. Her only sibling, Sherman – Sherm, as she called him – was her companion in childhood. “And sometimes, teaser and tormentor!” she quips.

Life opened up, wild and full of laughter, in the alley of their Muskegon home. They played marbles and chase, and invented games with their own rules, like explorers setting the course. 

Just a few Santas in her collection, soft squishy ones that children love to hold and hug. (Photo: Dylan Aguilar)

Leila points to an object in her home, the Snurfer, the forerunner to the popular snowboard. Seems Sherm possessed an inventive streak that extended far beyond that alley. On Christmas Day 1965, he braced two children-sized skis together for his two daughters’ newest snow time thrill, then had the business acumen to get a patent on it. It became the first mass-produced snowboard. By 1968, there were Snurfer competitions, drawing participants far and wide.

A 10-foot Snurfer sculpture was erected in Sherm’s honor in downtown Muskegon. “He gave a wonderful speech about how community is built in an alley,” Leila recalls of its unveiling. 

The original Snurfer is displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, along with a tribute to Sherm. Leila owns one of the first Snurfers off the production line.

When he died in 2019, Leila’s world dimmed a bit. She scattered his ashes in the alley of her childhood home. “I miss him terribly.”

Birthday queen Leila sits front and center with family surrounding her. (Photo: Emma Knowles Photography)

Former neighbor Suzanne Chaffin knows grief. When she first moved across from Leila years ago, she was deeply grieving her teenage son. The family enacted a scholarship in his name and Leila helped evaluate applicants by reading their essays.

“Leila was such a comfort to me. I’d go over and sit on her couch for hours. She was such a blessing in such a dark time in my life. She’s like a mom to me.”

While Suzanne now lives in Cypress, they see each other often. And they share a love of puzzles. 

There’s a “Leila way” of doing puzzles, says family. And many in her family follow suit.

To Leila, referring to the puzzle picture is cheating. It warrants a cursory glance when you open the box, then it’s tossed aside.

She sits at her kitchen table, like a general surveying a battlefield, thousands of pieces sprawled before her, timer set, and magnifying glass at the ready. Oftentimes, her beloved Astros are on in the background. 

“Oh, that’s the only way to do it,” says the nonagenarian whose penchant for puzzles started as a child.

BIRTHDAY BASH Leila and family organized a birthday bash for her 90th a few years back, with a food truck and juggler, among other activities. Neighbors gathered on the lawn for a group picture. Some neighbors presented Leila, a puzzle whiz, with a custom puzzle later, depicting that scene and other vignettes from that day. (Photo: Emma Knowles Photography)

She and her family organized a block party for her 90th birthday, replete with a food truck, juggler, and a bevy of activities for the kids. A few days later, some neighbors presented her with a custom-made puzzle, a group picture of neighbor and family partygoers, sprinkled with fun vignettes. 

Leila’s daughter Nancy Musgrove, the school nurse at Frostwood Elementary, loves that children experience her childhood home and her mom’s storytelling. Nancy started first grade at Frostwood the year they moved into the home. Her siblings attended Frostwood as well. Her daughter, Jenny Musgrove, teaches first grade there.

“I remember that it was that fat gourd painted as Santa that she loved so much.  I think that’s kind of what really kicked it off. I remember going to art festivals and stuff looking for fat Santas to add to the collection. And then word got out and she started being gifted all kinds of Santas.”

“It was fun connecting the dots about Leila’s family,” says neighbor Missy Purgason. “My kids started at Frostwood where Nancy’s the nurse and her daughter teaches. We love to brag that we live across the street from school nurse Nancy’s mother, that we know three generations of them.”

The mom of four says her children love receiving hand-written letters from Leila and jokes she sends at Halloween. 

Leila’s firstborn Holly Montalbano is a holiday story herself. Leila and husband Miles, long since deceased, welcomed her on Christmas Day, 1957. Thus, the name Holly. Her mom was hosting a Christmas party when she went into labor with her. But a newspaper birth announcement misspelled it as Holy, an altogether different meaning when missing an L. “I think she was probably horrified!” Holly says of her mom. 

The 90 & Fabulous Leila is all smiles on her special day. (Photo: Emma Knowles Photography)

The Midland, Mich. resident is the event director for a nonprofit think tank, a career that keeps her busy. “But we will be with Mom this Christmas, all of us. My daughter and her husband, too. We haven’t all been together as a big family for Christmas in probably 15 years. We are very excited about that!”

While her mother was great at, well, being a mom, she was always community-driven, Holly adds. 

Her children grown, Leila worked for the local New Age Hospice, now known as Houston Hospice. As a new concept in its infancy, “people barely knew how to pronounce it. They’d pronounce it like ‘spice’ on the end,” she says. She and a partner eventually started their own company, Hospice Development Resources, that helped start hospices in Kansas, Michigan, and Indiana. “That was so rewarding.”

Even before hospice years, she volunteered. She started working for a group called Taping for the Blind in the late 1970s. She was recorded while reading books aloud, a program under the Library of Congress, created for the blind and print-handicapped. It’s now called Sight into Sound. Leila went from being a reader to president of the organization, adept at fundraising. She’s still on its board.

One of her volunteer gigs led to finding Santas. At 68, she volunteered for an exchange program, teaching English to students in Xi'an, China. The ancient city wall is a must-see for tourists, built under the order of the first emperor of Ming Dynasty. “And when I climbed up that wall there’s all these dusty little shops, one that has these little clay Santas in it. They went home with me.”

She’s looking forward to Christmas, lots of family, and her Santas to keep her company. 

But a fun fact, she says. Of all the houses in the neighborhood, hers lacks a chimney. A small faux chimney, detailed in red brick paper, stands against a den wall, a prop peppered with festive figurines and stockings.

“But, aha! No problem!” she says with a lilt. “How does Santa get in if I don’t have a chimney, the children might ask? Well, he has a special key, I tell them! I show it to the kids. They look at it, touch it, and you can just see their little minds working! I think they think that’s cool! 

“Santa has a key to my house. Of course!”