Advocacy

When venues ask the foundation what it actually costs to host a Deaf Santa Claus appearance, we don’t give them a marketing number. We give them this.

The foundation didn’t start as a grand plan. It started with a man who looked like Santa, a documentary crew, and a question: what would it take to make this last?

The Santa industry has been around for a century. Sign language has been around longer. So why is it still so rare to find a Santa who can communicate with a Deaf child?

Most hearing families try hard. They still get certain things wrong — not from indifference, but from never having been told. Here are the patterns we see most often.

You’ll notice we capitalize “Deaf” throughout this site. That’s deliberate. Here’s the convention, where it came from, and why it matters.

ASL has its own grammar, its own syntax, and a structure that has nothing to do with English. Here’s what the linguistic research actually says.