American-made Santa hats are coming to town

The Arizona-made Santa hat we are carrying in our Hershey store.

I was an ersatz Santa as a kid, creating my own costume out of whatever I could find around the house.

I glued cotton balls (as my mother eventually discovered) to the back of a cut-out coloring book cover to fashion a beard. There may have been red pajama bottoms, too. But the hand-knit hat fell far short of my standards, seeing as it was too long and mainly blue.

My love and admiration for Kris Kringle never wavered, but it took me decades to find the perfect Santa hat. And this Christmas, Stay is offering it in our Hershey store.

Pink hat

Eva Dojaquez created her version of Santa's North Pole workshop in the Southwest, at home in her native Tucson, Ariz.

She had tried sewing by hand when she was a child.

“I thought I was going to make a quilt,” she told me in a recent phone conversation. “I made these tiny little squares, stuffed them, because that’s what I thought [was] how you made a quilt. And it turns out I just ended up with a bunch of tiny, little, fat pillows.”

She didn’t pursue sewing seriously until she was an adult after trying in vain to find a pink Santa hat to wear to her job at a grocery store.

“So I just went to the [fabric] store and found some pretty pink fur and made my own,” she said. “And that’s how it started, and it just kind of evolved.”

Allowing that, “I’ve made every single mistake you can make sewing fur,” Eva said she learned through trial and error.

She also benefited from the expertise of her former mother-in-law, Lulu Tatum, a crafter of dolls and bears whose clients have included actress Demi Moore and fitness icon Richard Simmons.

Once co-workers saw her pink Santa hat, they began asking Eva to make them custom ones.

“It’s crazy how many people want a different color Santa hat,” she said, meaning other than traditional red. “They’ll say, ‘Can you make me a black one, or can you make me a brown one, or can you make me an all-white one?’ So I just started kind of selling them at work on the side.”

She had been sewing Santa hats for years before she offered her first red one.

“It never dawned on me to make a red one,” she quipped, given the ubiquity of Santa hats sold in that color by other companies. But not all red Santa hats are created equal, and certainly most aren’t the quality of Eva’s.

New York Times honor

Eva said a friend of a friend had success selling hand-painted wine glasses on Etsy, which inspired Eva to open her own store, Originals by Eva, on that platform. That’s where I bought mine a couple years ago.

Eva has registered more than 21,000 sales, mostly for Santa hats, in a dozen years on Etsy. Red (in variations) is her No. 1 seller.

The New York Times’ “Wirecutter” feature has made Originals by Eva its top pick for best traditional Santa hat three holiday seasons running, Eva said.

“These handmade Santa hats are well-crafted, luxurious, and the most customizable of those I tested,” the newspaper wrote. “They sell out quickly, but there are dozens of options available in a plethora of faux furs, fabrics, sizes, colors, and trims.”

It’s the “crazy colors” that Eva said she likes making most of all. For her higher-volume hats, she partners with a Tucson sewing factory, Sonoran Stitch.

Stay is Eva’s first wholesale customer. The cranberry fur she used on my Santa hat is no longer available, so we’ve gone with a burgundy-and-white option for the version we are selling. It’s an American-made beauty.

What I could have done with one of Eva’s hats as a kid. I neglected to ask her how she is at making Santa beards.