Last Christmas, owners of the famed Santa’s Land in Putney dropped a lump of coal in Vermonters’ collective stocking when they announced that the holiday-themed amusement park was closing after 55 years due to financial troubles.

The owners of Santa’s Land advertised a liquidation sale to auction off what remained of the park. But the auction was inexplicably canceled last month at the 11th hour, saved (perhaps?) by some anonymous wealthy benefactor.

While the secret savior hasn’t been named, Seven Days strongly suspects Putney’s favorite son and under-the-radar real estate speculator, Gov. Peter Shumlin. Perhaps the gov plans to reopen Santa’s Land as “Shumland,” a political theme park that’s fun for the whole family!

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This article appears in Nov 7-13, 2012.

Staff Writer Ken Picard is a senior staff writer at Seven Days. A Long Island, N.Y., native who moved to Vermont from Missoula, Mont., he was hired in 2002 as Seven Days’ first staff writer, to help create a news department. Ken has since won numerous regional and national awards for his features, profiles and investigative stories and had his work picked up by international news outlets. He was the first journalist to shine a light on the thousands of undocumented workers in Vermont’s dairy...