Kay Neal knew it when she saw the snow.
She was in a different place Thursday night.
She trained her mom’s smartphone toward the columns in front of the R.G. Wanek Center and framed her photo just right for the snow tumbling like waves off a fourth-floor balcony.
“Isn’t it just beautiful?” the 15-year-old from High Point asked her mom.
Yes, it was.
For the fifth straight year, High Point University made the campus feel like a Frank Capra movie. It unveiled for everyone Community Christmas, a free annual event that has become a holiday tradition produced by hundreds of HPU volunteers.
More than 9,000 people came Thursday night. More are expected today. They come to see a Christmas tree of a campus glowing underneath 86,000 lights.
They come to see Santa, hear music and take pictures. They come to gawk at the candy-cane stilt walkers from the famous Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and ride in a carriage pulled by Clydesdales whose hooves are almost as big as dinner plates.
But many simply come to get a real feel of the season. And at a time when families say they see a world full of violence and political unrest, they feel they need a dose of peace and tradition to help them feel anchored and secure.
They hear Christmas carols spilling from the speakers in the Kester International Promenade, and just beyond the Hayworth Chapel, they spot the 23 Nativity figures in a life-size crèche framed in light.
Wayne and Shiree Clifford, husband and wife, saw it, stopped and got their picture taken for free. They plan to put it in a frame and send a copy to Shiree’s sister in Texas and her son serving in the Navy.
“Too many people forget the real meaning of Christmas,” says Wayne, 51, an aircraft mechanic from High Point. “It’s not about the presents. It’s about the birth of Christ, and I say that, and I’m not a religious person.”
He laughs.
“But it’s true.”
It is. What’s also true is the allure of five Santas.
The Wanek Center was awash in color Thursday night. Families with young children waited in line to see Santa, and in the process, they met elves in green-and-red outfits whose felt shoes and hats jingled when they walked.
Anna Ventrone was one. By day, she works in HPU’s Student Life as coordinator of residential services. But by night – or at least this week – she is Santa’s helper.
Like so many, she sees tradition with every Community Christmas. She has worked the past three, and every time, she remembers her childhood in Cleveland – going to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve after feeding the homeless and giving them blankets and clothes to keep warm.
A good memory. Another good memory is the question she’ll hear children ask this week: “Am I on Santa’s good list?”
“When I hear that, I know the Christmas spirit is still alive,” she says. “There is so much bad in the world. But here, you see the pure innocence of the season, and we realize we can live in that moment.”
And at Community Christmas, that moment is beautiful.
It’s the serendipity of getting a selfie with two candy cane stilt walkers standing 10 feet in the air.
It’s the serenity of hearing inside the Hayworth Chapel a pianist play on a grand piano a jazzy version of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
It’s the chance to see your 3-year-old granddaughter climb into Santa’s lap for the first time and not scream with fright.
That happened Thursday night to Ruth Ann Dehart, a retired teacher’s assistant from High Point. She saw her granddaughter, Alyssa, just beam.
“It filled my heart,” Dehart says.
So, magic happens. Justin Rascoe sees it unfold everywhere he looks.
Like Ventrone, he’s a volunteer. He manages 10 people in HPU’s information technology department. But for the past three years, he has managed the Clydesdale carriage rides.
He recognizes the excitement he sees. When he was 8 growing up in New Jersey, a Figure 8 racetrack lit up his life on Christmas morning. On Thursday night, he saw a huge horse light up the life of a boy no older than 12.
“If I owned the horses,” the boy told Rascoe, “I’d sleep with the horses, take them to school and put cologne on them, too.”
“I like your spirit,” Rascoe responded.
That’s part of the magic of Community Christmas.
“You get to press pause,” Rascoe says. “Everything stops, and we all think, ‘Everything is OK.’”
By 8:30 p.m. Thursday, everything was OK. After three hours, Community Christmas was winding down. But not for Mat Allred.
He manages HPU’s recreation services, and at Community Christmas, he oversees the 12 fog machines that turn 100 gallons of a soap-like liquid into millions of fat soapy flakes.
It all makes the outside of Wanek and the Slane Student Center resemble the inside of a shaken snow globe, a sure still life of winter.
Allred volunteered for the first Community Christmas. He saw, he thinks, 10 people. Since then, he has volunteered every year to make the manmade snow, and as he has seen the event grow, he understands its importance even more.
All he has to do is look.
“I see it in the kids dancing in the snow and the emotion on the parents’ faces,” he says. “How cool is that?’
On Thursday night, Allred stood on Wanek’s fourth-floor balcony and made sure the eight fog machines turned his slice of North Carolina into Minnesota. Meanwhile, four stories below, a dozen kids looked like baby birds in a nest.
They looked upward, opened their mouths and tried to catch every falling snowflake.
“Mom!” a little girl yelled. “It’s real!”
And there was Kay Neal, the sophomore from High Point’s Southwest Guilford High. She stood at the bottom of the Wanek’s steps taking a picture of Allred’s snowfall.
Then, she turned to her mom.
“Is it over?” she asked.
Yes, she heard. But after three hours, that’s OK.
“This gives me a happy feeling,” she says. “It makes me realize Christmas is here.”