“For Deaf children, meeting a Santa who can sign back changes the whole experience of Christmas.”
— TODAY
NBC’s TODAY introduced national audiences to Charles Graves in a holiday segment focused on what changes for Deaf children when their Santa signs. The piece highlighted families traveling from across Texas — and beyond — to visit Graves at appearances, and centered the experience of kids who had never before been able to communicate directly with Santa.
The segment drew on Graves’s day job at the Texas School for the Deaf and on his fourth-generation Texas-Deaf identity, framing his Santa work as a natural extension of decades spent in classrooms with Deaf students. Producers also captured several Deaf parents on camera explaining what the visit meant to them — moments that, in the foundation’s experience, are what convert a holiday photo into the founding memory of a child’s relationship with Christmas.
The TODAY appearance was an inflection point in the foundation’s reach: in the weeks that followed, requests came in from event programmers nationwide, and the visibility helped lay the groundwork that ultimately led to the documentary partnership with Ben Shelton and Anthony Mowl.
