Airport Santa Spreads Holiday Cheer In The Security Line

Every Christmas season poet Jim Behrle breaks out his Santa costume and heads to the airport. The reactions he gets are mixed. As you can imagine, people are sometimes shocked to see Santa going through metal detectors and being patted down by security agents.

But most of the kids love to see Santa, especially on Christmas Eve. Behrle usually travels from New York to Boston the day before Christmas and he gets bombarded by pleas for Xboxes and iPods. But this year he'll fly on Christmas Day. He predicts people will swarm him, demanding to know why they didn't get the loot they asked for.

WBUR's Delores Handy spoke with Behrle to find out more about this one poet's annual holiday tradition. And yes, he showed up properly attired: furry red suit, long white beard — the works. Although he wore sneakers instead of black boots (he says there are occasions when he has to flee from all of his admirers).

Oh, and he brought a present for us: a poem, below. Merry Christmas!

The Naughty and Nice List
By Jim Behrle

New England Patriots nice
Quarterback Tom Brady niiiiice
with like 20 "I's" in the middle
Sarah Palin naughty but in
kind of a nice way
President Obama nice in
kind of a one-term way
Lady Gaga naughty (but call me)
BP Oil very very naughty and getting
a giant piece of coal in the
proverbial stocking in their souls
Red Sox GM Theo Epstein gets
on the nice list for fixing the Red Sox
Yankees GM also nice for not
making the Yankees any better
Katy Perry naughty
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is Wiki-Naughty
Speaker of the House-to-be
John Boehner is on the nice list
but only because he'd cry if we
left him off (he's probably crying anyway)
Don Draper is on the naughty list
The entire cast and crew of the show
"Lost" is on the naughty list forever
and ever because I spent six years of
my life watching your show and I still
don't understand what happened
And my dear beloved orange Snooki
is on the very, very nice list
Won't you guide my sleigh to your
hot tub so we can both get on the naughty list?