Wiscasset 7-year-old Kylee Smith had a question for Mrs. Claus Saturday morning at Wiscasset Community Center’s Breakfast with Santa.

Yes, she did know all of Santa’s reindeer, Mrs. Claus, or Mattie Welch of Jefferson, told Smith. At Smith’s request, she named Comet, Cupid and the others.

Then she had a question for Smith.

“You know who the most famous reindeer of all is, don’t you?”

“Rudolph,” Smith said. Does Santa have Rudolph, she asked Welch.

Yes, and Santa depends on him to light the way on some nights, Welch said.

“So Rudolph is real?”

Yes, he isn’t just a story, Welch said.

“I’ve got to go tell my mom!”

Smith ran across the community center’s senior center to Marjorie Smith, who tries to get her daughter to the breakfast event every year.

“Because it makes her face glow right up,” Marjorie Smith said in a red Santa hat. Her daughter’s Santa hat was sparkling silver.

Minutes earlier, Welch had said she and husband of 21 years Nim Welch become Santa and Mrs. Claus every year because, “Somebody’s got to do it.”

But when Kylee Smith ran off to tell her mother that Rudolph was real, Mattie Welch said: “OK, that’s why we do it.”

At the community center event, as well as Tri-County Literacy’s Candy Cane Train and visits to nursing homes, the couple wear costumes Mattie Welch, a seamstress, made.

They didn’t pack them for a recent trip to Jamaica; they had no plans to take on the personas while there.

But then they heard about Sandals Resorts and Hasbro getting together a donation of gifts for children at a preschool there. Nim Welch agreed to be Santa, in an outfit organizers provided.

The children were very poor, Mattie Welch said. They had never had a wrapped gift before; they weren’t sure how to open them.

They didn’t ask Santa for anything, but they knew it was him.

“They were thrilled to death,” Nim Welch said. For him, he said, “It was an awakening, that’s for sure.”

It was humbling, Mattie Welch said before handing out more candy canes and smiling for photos families were taking of their children with Santa and Mrs. Claus.

Adeline Magenis, 5, of Brunswick asked Santa for a whiteboard. She really likes to draw, she explained afterward.

Kayden Reith, 6, of Dresden asked for monster trucks and big trucks. 

“Anything else,” Santa asked. But that was it.

“You’re heavy into that, aren’t you,” Santa said.

Asked for the secret to becoming Santa, Nim Welch said: “It just happens.”

The children look forward to it, he said. Some cry but they get over it, the Bath Iron Works retiree added.

“It feels like you’re giving back.”