Colleen Barry was headed to her restaurant, The Kitsch-En, one recent morning when she passed by the B Street Plaza, home for many Christmas seasons to Santa and his little house.

And there Barry’s eyes beheld an astonishing sight — Santa and his tiny domicile had vanished.

The jolly old elf, it seems, had slipped into his nifty flame-red pants, rolled up his sleeves, pulled on his shiny black boots and trotted two blocks west to the downtown plaza opposite Auburn City Hall, house in tow.

For Barry and downtown merchants, the relocation of old St. Nick’s House to West Main and South Division came as a complete surprise.

Actually, an unpleasant shock to many business folk who had always welcomed the overflow business traffic from the Santa House — and never more so than in these hard times.

“I stopped and I looked, and I felt like a knife stabbed me in the heart,” Barry said. “I did, it was really sad. Because that’s where it’s always been. And I’m sitting here going, ‘It feels like they’re taking more away from us.'”

“Us” being the business owners who’ve heard plenty of talk over the years about “reinvigorating the downtown” and “bringing business” to hard-pressed merchants.

“They say, ‘let’s keep ’em busy.’ Then, this,” said Barry.

There are concerns about the new locale of the Santa House, cheek to jowl with unfinished South Division Street, and plunked down on the rather spartan Downtown Plaza.

What merchants want to know is this: who told Santa, “go west, fat man?” And why didn’t they say a word about the move to The Auburn Downtown Association (TADA) and the businesses?

“One thing was the lack of communication,” said Kathleen Keator, director of TADA. “I’ve had to answer to some of the downtown businesses on why it was moved. Well, I didn’t know it was going to be moved. From what I understand, the Optimists asked the City, and the City approved.

“… Hindsight being 20/20, I would probably have talked to my board about having something going on in the B Street Plaza during this period, whether it be carolers or another form of entertainment,” Keator said.

Jim Fletcher, a member of the Optimists, who run the Santa House, said the prompting came from Auburn City Hall.

“The City does the moving and they suggested that we set up there, and we went along with that,” Fletcher said. “Because as the years went by, being beside a tavern was a problem.”

Mayor Pete Lewis said it was the Optimists’ idea, concerned, as Fletcher said, about the proximity of the tavern to the House and its legions of boys and girls with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.

“What really happened was the Optimists asked for the move,” Lewis said. “It wasn’t something the City did. The Optimists got tired of being situated next to the smokers and the people drinking, and they didn’t think it was a good place for it to be around kids.”

The owner of the adjacent Home Plate Pub, Henry DeHoog, holds fundraisers every year and donates money raised to the Optimists for local kids.

“I really don’t know why they moved, no one approached us,” DeHoog said.

A call to nearby Rottles Clothing and Shoes was not returned.

Has the move affected traffic at the Santa House? Fletcher said the Optimists haven’t had a meeting since the Santa House opened Dec. 3 and won’t know until next Wednesday.