Christmas never ends at Ken and Beckie McGovern’s house.

No matter the time of year, visitors can find hand-carved, wooden Santa Clauses of various sizes and styles displayed on a table, a shelf, or on the floor next to the stairway.

“My wife leaves them up. I don’t” Ken McGovern said, shrugging his shoulders.

For more than 10 years, McGovern has been stealing an hour here and there to seclude himself in his basement woodworking shop next to the family room to carve Santas. He estimates he’s made as many as 12 a year some years, as few as two or three in others.

“I have no idea how many I’ve made – I’d hate to find out,” said the 43-year-old McGovern, a 20-year veteran of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, where he is now a captain and the commander of the county jail operations.

McGovern said he always liked woodworking, but he didn’t start concentrating his efforts on Santa Claus until his late father, Harold McGovern, decided to take up the hobby.

“He wanted to do it, so I thought, âÂÂ’Well, I’ll make them with him,'” McGovern recalled.

His first hand-carved Santa stood about 3 feet tall and took about six months to complete, he said. It went much faster the second time around, requiring only about two months. He found himself hooked on a new hobby.

“The more you do it, the faster you get,” McGovern said.

McGovern makes his Santas from bass wood.

“It’s lighter, and it’s easier to work with,” McGovern said. “It doesn’t splinter on you.”

He orders the wood in blocks of varying sizes, sometimes over the Internet. Most of it comes from Minnesota.

On his workbench, McGovern keeps several carving knives and gouges for making the Santas. His Santas range in size from 3 feet tall to as small as a couple of inches.

McGovern also buys thin wooden patterns of Santas he wants to make and outlines them in pencil on the wood blocks. He may cut away parts of the block with a band saw and then begin carving and scraping. A friend paints the Santas for him.

McGovern gives most of his Santas as gifts to friends and relatives, he said. He has sold only a few.

The hardest part about making the Santas is the face, McGovern said.

“You can really get pretty detailed,” he said.

When he isn’t carving Santas, McGovern works on a nearly life-sized cigar store American Indian. He’s been at it for three years and isn’t close to finishing the project.

“I have no idea what I’m going to do with it,” he said.

Carving his Santas requires a lot of patience, McGovern said. But the slow-paced hobby helps him relax.

“It’s a time when I can just sit down and get away from everything and not have to think about anything,” he said.