The first rule of Deaf Santa, of course, is you don’t ask about Deaf Santa.

Deaf Santa is Deaf Santa. You go to Pearlridge Center from 9 a.m. to noon on Thursday and there he is.

You may, however, ask about how Deaf Santa came to be. And the answer is simple enough: Jan Fried and Doreen Higa.

It was 1991, and Fried, fresh out of graduate school and recently hired by Kapiolani Community College to teach American Sign Language and interpretation, wanted to develop a community event for the holidays. At a colleague’s half-joking suggestion, she set out to find a Santa who could communicate via ASL. That led her to Higa, a speech-language pathologist with the Department of Education.

That first event at the Hawaii Center for the Deaf and Blind “was just thrown together,” Fried said. The two cobbled together donations from community groups, and KCC students served as elfin helpers.

The next year, Fried and Higa worked with then-Pearlridge Center Marketing Director Scott Creel to bring the event to the mall. Their only stipulation was that there be an actual Deaf Santa, not Conventional Mall Santa.

“We wanted a native user, someone who shares the deaf experience with the kids who are coming,” Fried said.

The event has become one of the highlights for Hawaii’s deaf and hard-of-hearing community, drawing from 150 to 200 children.

“It’s a celebration of a rich and diverse culture, and it gives the kids the opportunity to be all together, which is really important because some of the kids who come may be the only kid in their school who is deaf or hard of hearing, and that isolation can be daunting for them,” Fried said.

The event allows kids to interact with adults who are also deaf or hard of hearing, including the cadre of performers who have been with the program since its inception. It’s also brought out the best in a vast network of supporters, including longtime partners like Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, Cookie Corner, Pizza Hut, Meadow Gold, Pepsi, Sprint Relay Hawaii, HMSA and many others.

At its peak the event included students from neighbor islands. Fried and Higa hope to raise funds to be able to resume flying students over. In the meantime they’ve accommodated such students via videophone hookup at KCC.

Higa, who coordinates with schools to bring deaf and hard-of-hearing students to the event, is retiring from the DOE this year. She will likely also step down from her position as assistant elf for the event, although Fried has no intention of letting her slip away entirely.

For generations of young deaf and hard-of-hearing children, the two have left a legacy shared in love and silence.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.