Melissa Joan Hart is looking back at some of her favorite traditions of Christmases past.
During a recent chat with PEOPLE about her ongoing partnership with World Vision, Hart, 48, reminisced about how she used to spend the holiday season on the set of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Hart, who starred on the series from 1996 to 2003, says that because they filmed their Christmas episodes in October, the cast and crew of the show spent weeks already feeling the holiday spirit. In addition to the keepsakes she says she would sometimes bring home from the festive episode each year, her mom would also play a role in making the holiday special for everyone involved with the show.
“My favorite tradition on the set of Sabrina was that my mom — [who] was the executive producer — when Santa would come, somehow Paula, my mom wasn’t around, but Santa was there,” she recalls. “Very small Santa with a really bad beard.”
“Everyone had to sit on her lap,” she explains before remembering a member of the crew they referred to as “Big George,” who would pose for an especially silly photo while visiting with “Santa.”
“There was one of our camera operators, we had Big George and Little George, and Big George is a large man.” she says. “And the joke was every year when Big George sat on Santa’s lap, he had to pick his feet up. So we have so many pictures of Big George picking his feet up, sitting on Santa’s lap.”
These days, Hart says she’s brought some of her favorite traditions from her childhood into her own family of five. The actress says that when she was a kid, she and her siblings had to wait at the top of the stairs while Mom and Dad went downstairs to “make sure Santa came.” And years later, her three sons Mason, 18, Braydon, 16, and Tucker, 12, have mirrored the same routine.
“I love that tradition of making my kids wait at the top of the stairs and there’s so many pictures of me as a kid and then of my kids as kids sitting at the top of the stairs waiting, just waiting,” she says. “Because that anticipation right before you run downstairs to see the gifts, I think it’s like walking through the gates of Disneyland. It’s even better than tearing open the presents.”
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Through her work with World Vision, Hart has also gotten her kids involved in giving back and earlier this year, joined her son Braydon’s football team in packaging 400 hygiene kits that ultimately went to people impacted by Hurricane Milton, she shares.
“It was nice for these boys to see the immediate impact that their time spent — people that they helped — and that they were able to help,” she says.
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