Unseasonal greetings

Jordan has the Aqaba flagpole. Ireland has the Spire of Dublin. Westford has Omer Guillemette's Santa.

St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner, but Guillemette's 23-foot-tall Christmas decoration is still towering over his home at the intersection of routes 27 and 225.

Santa will come down before Easter, Guillemette says, but will be back up right after Thanksgiving.

"I love to see Santa up, even before the tree," he said. "It's a symbol that Christmas is coming."

Guillemette purchased the statue in July 2003 at a flea market in Milford, N.H., where he and his wife spend their summers.

A boat builder had made five statues out of marine fiberglass and sold the other four for about $2,000 apiece, said Guillemette. The builder and his wife had kept the fifth for themselves and sold it when they moved to a new location.

When Guillemette spotted it, he plunked down $500 and hauled it on a car carrier down Interstate 495 to Westford.

"I transported that Santa Claus . . . all the way home with people laughing and taking pictures," he said.

It has decorated his lawn every Christmas since -- to the delight of passing motorists and the amusement of most neighbors.

One of those neighbors, Roger Plaisted, can look through his living room window and see the Santa across the street. Last Tuesday's gusts didn't budge the statue, Plaisted said in a telephone interview. But it was an entirely different story last March, when Plaisted heard a loud bang and looked up from his yard to see Santa lying face down.

"He went down like a redwood," Plaisted said. "He went down right on his face."

This year, Guillemette, who goes by the nickname Butch, had the statue secured with two cables from the ground and another two attached to the roof.

The task of moving the hollow, 300-pound holiday icon into place requires help from two of Guillemette's brawny, football-playing sons and a couple of their high school teammates. The crew goes to the backyard and gingerly lays Santa on the back of Guillemette's pickup truck, and he drives the statue to the front yard.

In a couple of weeks, the process will be reversed, and Santa will be temporarily laid to rest in the backyard.

Guillemette has arranged to have students from Nashoba Valley Technical High School in Westford come by and do some touch-up work on the statue.

"He has surface cracks in him," he said. "They need to sand down the cracks and paint."

And, then, like a loving father, he added, "The eyes are out of kilter; they need to be adjusted."

Guillemette is a self-employed plumber who graduated from Nashoba Tech in 1976 and is now president of its booster club.

When his five children were growing up, he often worked on Saturdays. But every year, he'd dress up as Santa for his family and a slew of nieces and nephews. He says it wasn't until his oldest was 18 and the youngest 14 that the children realized Santa was their father.

"That was me," Guillemette said he told his children one summer day as they were participating in a Christmas in July event at a New Hampshire campground.

" 'No way,' they said. 'You were never home,' " he said they responded, as though they could not reconcile reality from fantasy, even then.

But in the house diagonally across from Guillemette, Jacqueline Zegowitz's three children, ages 2, 4, and 6, are no longer enchanted by the Santa. They've stopped paying attention to the jolly statue, and Zegowitz said she's ready to see it taken down.

"It's enjoyable in the month of December and January, and now it's time to come down," she said. "Christmas is over. Valentine's Day is over. St. Paddy's Day is here, and there's Santa Claus.

"Easter is coming, and there's Santa Claus."

"He's like a guest that won't leave," said Plaisted. "I'm meeting a couple of friends, and we're placing bets on who's going to paint him pink and put a couple of ears on him to turn him into the Easter Bunny."

Plaisted added that the whole thing has been entertaining and that he has no real objections.

But not everyone is such a good sport. Guillemette said some residents have complained to the town that he should have a permit to erect the structure.

At the town's building department, Nancy Lima, administrative assistant, said she's fielded a few complaints.

"A few people have come through and commented that he's left it up there a little too long," she said.

But Building Commissioner Matthew Hakala said that no one has filed a formal complaint, and that he wasn't aware of any zoning bylaws that are being violated.

None of the complaints has any lasting effect on Guillemette, who points to the joy his Santa brings to passersby.

"It brings out the best in people at Christmastime," he said.

Joyce Pellino Crane can be reached at crane@globe.com.