A Santa’s Village Christmas Carol: Bringing an Abandoned Theme Park Back to Life

Santa's House at SkyPark as it stands today in San Bernardino.

​Santa’s Village in Scotts Valley California is the abandoned amusement park of my dreams. It closed the year I was born, but that didn’t stop my lifelong obsession with it, nor did it stop me from working for Santa’s Village today, but let’s not start with the end of the story just yet. By the time I first found out about the enchanting Bay Area Christmas theme park, it was only a memory, and someone else's memory at that.

    To put it in Dickensian terms; Santa’s Village was dead to begin with; ​as dead as an abandoned theme park could be.

It was one of three Santa’s Villages across the country; the first franchised amusement park. But the heydays of mid-century modern luxury dissolved into the gas crisis and economic despair of the 1970s. The Santa’s Village Corporation dissolved in the late 70s. The parks went their separate ways and eventually all closed. And you might assume this is where the story of Santa's Village stops, but you'd be wrong.

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