WOODEN WONDERS

PALMER — Santa’s workshop off Scott Road doesn’t look anything like the one in the colorful books and cards where elves diligently prepare toys for Christmas.

Where Santa’s sled would be parked, Jay Wickham has a huge motorhome. Absent any elves, the rest of the large shop is filled with power tools.

That’s where he plies his trade as a woodworker making everything from cabinets for the well-to-do to gag gifts for folks in the oft windswept neighborhood outside Palmer.

“I do quite a bit of furniture,” Wickham said Friday morning. “Some hope chests for young girls. I don’t make them out of cedar though. I line them with cedar in case they move down south where they have those kinds of bugs.”

This time of year, though, what Wickham gets the most joy from is his “wiener dogs and moosies.”

These are the gifts he hands out when tots and toddlers come to see him as Santa at Valley libraries.

He was at the Palmer library Thursday where dozens of moms with children in hand came for story hour and then to meet Santa.

“They can’t wait to get their toy,” Wickham said. “As soon as they get one, they’re down on the floor playing.”

In the next week or so he said he will give out all the 300 wooden, serpentine dogs on wheels, and 100 rocking moose.

“I may have to make 30 or 40 more before it’s all done.”

After Palmer on Thursday, he was in Sutton on Saturday and has two more stops before Christmas: Big Lake and Wasilla.

“I used to do Colony Christmas,” he said about the annual festival this weekend in Palmer. “But I can only do so much. Maybe at 74, I’m doing too much now.”

Of course nobody could convince one of the mothers who came to the Palmer library with three children in tow.

“She came up to thank me afterward and then started tearing up. I thought, what did I do?”

By then he was in his street clothes to start plowing snow that helps pay for all the wood in his shop.

“She saw my cap.”

He had on a ball cap that day that had paratrooper written on the front of it in honor of his days with the 82nd Airborne.

“She was military. She said her husband had done three tours.”

In addition to this gig as a snowplow driver, Wickham said he gets help from businesses in the area.

“Lowe’s gave me some wood,” he said describing bent and crooked pieces the store can’t sell but fits in nicely with what he does. “Last year Home Depot did the same thing. You have to utilize all the wood,” he said. “Wood’s too damned expensive to throw away.”

Wickham said he got started working with wood when he was in high school back in the small farming community of Steamboat Rock, Iowa.

“That was the only option,” he said. “The girls had home ec and the boys had woodworking. The first year it was all hand tools and the second year we got to use power tools.”

The project in front of him Friday, besides the wieners and moosies, was a television cabinet.

But children and homeowners aren’t the only customers he has.

He’s proud that one of his rocking moose is on a ship sailing the Persian Gulf.

“And girls like to take them off to college so they have something that reminds them of home.”

As if getting through this year wasn’t enough — he had both knees replaced in April — after building hundreds of dogs and moose. Now he’s thinking about 2009.

“Next year its crickets. The wheels will make their legs go up and down.”

And down the road he sees horses with wheels that will make their legs clatter on the ground.

“Won’t that make parents happy,” he said with a Santa Claus glee.