Santa’s Village creator, operator dies at 70

Thomas Devoe kept seven sheds’ worth of Christmas decorations in his backyard. Once every November, he and a handful of neighbors would spend a week organizing an impossible tangle of sleighs, sleigh bells, tinsel and mistletoe into Santa’s Village, the monthlong holiday village spectacular opened every Thanksgiving to dozens gathered in Devoe’s front yard and hundreds more winding in zigzags around the block.

For 26 years, a bushy white-bearded Devoe would power up his glittering, ever-growing village — which featured 25 artificial trees, 10 buildings and tens of thousands of LED lights — don a red suit and hat and take a spin around the block, eventually hopping off the back of a firetruck into a throng of neighborhood kids impatiently awaiting “Santa Tom.”

Devoe died last month at age 70 after a long battle with cancer. There won’t be a Santa’s Village this year. Friends and neighbors have organized a Thanksgiving night vigil instead.

“He was like a surrogate father to me,” said Gwen Reese, who spent more than two decades watching Devoe build and devise ever-more-impressive holiday displays for the village, including last year’s animated “Finding Nemo”-themed castle exhibit. “The thing I’ll remember is how much he loved the kids, especially kids in that neighborhood, who maybe wouldn’t get to see stuff like that otherwise.

“People have said there will be a bunch of families there Thanksgiving night. I’ll be right there in front of them.”

So will Erica Eldredge, who remembers Santa’s Village being part of her Thanksgiving routine since she was 2 years old.

“I was heartbroken when I heard the news,” she said. “It felt like I lost a family member. My nephews, too, were devastated when they heard Santa died.”

Some of the thousands of lights and display ornaments Reese, Eldredge and others remember from Devoe’s lawn came from faraway thrift stores or were sought by Devoe at Ralph Jones Display, 2576 E. Charleston Blvd.

But most of the additions came via grateful friends and neighbors, a sort of hand-delivered thanks for weeks spent in a red suit and cap serving as the village’s main attraction.

Devoe’s online obituary has garnered numerous comments from two generations of locals who knew him as Santa and three generations of family in Tampa, Fla., and Owosso, Mich., who called him Papa.

Linda, Devoe’s wife of 32 years, knew Santa and Papa better than any of them but will remember him best as Tom.

Tom was a retired former landscaper she first met in Sebastian, Fla. — the drummer in a band whose name she doesn’t even remember. He was the kind of guy, she said, who moved to North Las Vegas on a whim.

He would take 200-mile-long detours on a family vacation because he saw a Christmas store “a few miles back.” She loved him for it.

“He was just an ordinary guy, but there wasn’t anybody quite like him around,” Linda Devoe, 59, said. “I don’t think anyone didn’t like him.

“I told everybody when he was alive that I wouldn’t ever do (the village) without him, and I won’t. It just wouldn’t feel the same.”

Contact Centennial and North Las Vegas View reporter James DeHaven at jdehaven@viewnews.com or 702-477-3839.