“When Santa signs your name back to you, you know he's been listening all year.”
— People
People magazine ran a national feature on Charles Graves with the headline “Santa Uses American Sign Language to Speak to Kids,” introducing the Deaf Santa Claus story to one of the largest general-audience readerships in the United States. The piece took a classic People approach — warm, family-centered, photo-rich — and walked readers through Graves’s daily life as both an educator and a professional Santa.
The feature spent significant time with the families he visits, capturing several encounters in which Deaf children met a signing Santa for the first time. People’s reporting also tracked the broader context — the small but growing number of Deaf professional Santas in the United States, the history of Graves’s training, and the work the foundation has done to make appearances logistically possible for Deaf families across regions.
The People feature was a turning point in the foundation’s national visibility, and remains one of the most-shared pieces of coverage in its archive.
