UPDATE: Alna Snowmobile Club is giving its inflatable Santa Claus to the family whose Santa was stolen from a yard display, selectmen and a club spokesman confirmed the night of Dec. 17, hours after Jean and Alton King III reported the apparent theft.

“We are so excited and grateful to the snowmobile club for the Santa,” Jean King told Wiscasset Newspaper. “As soon as he arrives we plan to set him up right away and continue to enjoy this holiday season.”

That is what the club wants for the family, so the club will be delivering the Santa Friday, Dec. 18, spokesman Joel Verney said in a phone interview. He said the  club had bought its Santa for the annual holiday parade in Damariscotta-Newcastle, but it was canceled for this year. “So we have never even used it, so this was a no brainer to do it.

“It’s not the same Santa, and it’s not the best Santa, but it’s a Santa and it blows up, and we don’t need  it, so let’s give it to someone who would appreciate it.” Verney called the incident with the Kings’ Santa Scrooge-like and said he nearly cried when he read about it.

Selectmen also expressed dismay over the incident. “Coal in their stocking, whoever did that,” Second Selectman Doug Baston reacted to First Selectman Melissa Spinney’s telling about it at the start of the board’s Zoom meeting. She said she looked at the town office’s overnight video footage and she saw a vehicle “steal it and then go off ... in the middle of the night.”

In a text reply after the meeting, Spinney said she will be transferring the footage to share it with the sheriff’s office.

Original post: Santa Claus is supposed to be gone by Christmas morning after a night traveling the globe, but one in Alna was gone too soon. Jean and Alton King III got a sad surprise Thursday morning, Dec. 17. Their family’s 12-foot, singing Santa Claus was missing from the front yard Christmas display on Route 218.

“They cut his lines and just took him,” Jean said of whoever may have made off with the inflatable decoration. “It happened while we slept which makes me pretty nervous that someone was outside my house!”

Wiscasset Newspaper introduced readers to the Santa at the early 1800s cape last Christmas, the family’s first since buying and moving into the former town office, next door to the new one. When plugged in, Santa, with an arm ever raised in a wave, lights up, sings, or both, depending on how the family sets the control box, Jean King said. She said the night Santa went missing, it was set to lights only.

“They at least left the extension cords.”

She told Wiscasset Newspaper in the Dec. 17 interview, the couple’s eight children who live there did not know yet the Santa was gone, and she predicted their little girls Allyson, 5, and Hannah, 3, especially “are going to be very disappointed.”

She said the rest of the yard display was left, with no apparent attempt to take the other items. She said she and her husband have reported the incident to Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office. Wiscasset Newspaper has a message into the department. 

“It just saddens us that someone would sneak onto our yard and steal something that brings so much joy to all of our children,” she said. “But we won't let this ruin our Christmas spirit. If the persons responsible want to return Santa, we would be very appreciative.”