By Holly Heller Enquirer Editor
    BREMEN — Brenda Miller was good this year.
    Even “Santa” thinks so.
    She consulted with him about it when he stayed at her Scottish Bed & Breakfast in Bremen Dec. 7.
    “Santa slept here!” she said with a smile. “And I fixed him breakfast. He loved it! He ate it all.”
    While her guest wasn’t the real Santa, of course, he is actually one of Santa’s  helpers. His name is David Steinborn and he keeps busy during the holidays dressing in the part of Santa at holiday parties near his home in Pekin, Ill.
    He and his wife, Lavon, came to Bremen to have their RV repaired at Precision Painting and decided to spend the night at the Scottish Bed & Breakfast, much to Miller’s delight.
    “Boy was I surprised to see Santa,” she said. “That kind of lifted my spirits.”
 

 So, what’s it like when a Santa-look-alike stays at the local B&B?
    “I made him pose for so many pictures,” she admitted. “And they were wonderful, such good sports. I called him Santa the whole time. And that’s his real hair and his real beard!”
    Santa’s visit to the Scottish Bed & Breakfast couldn’t have come at a better time, as Miller has the place decked out in holiday decor. Each of the four guest rooms has its own Christmas tree and decorated trees are also located around the indoor pool area.
    This Christmas Eve, the pool room will be the site of a holiday gathering for one local family.
    “They’re going to be swimming on Christmas Eve,” Miller said. “They’ll unwrap presents and have a party.”
    The pool room is also a popular location for winter birthday parties, scrapbooking retreats, Chamber of Commerce meetings and more.
    On Thanksgiving, 14 family members converged upon the Bremen B&B for their holiday celebration.
    “Some of them live in Pennsylvania and some came from Illinois and Iowa. This was the halfway meeting point,” Miller said.
    The list of interesting guests and their reasons for meeting at the Scottish Bed & Breakfast is a long one. Miller likes to show her treasured photo albums, filled with pictures of every guest. During the past three years, she has hosted more than 1,000 guests. As she flips carefully through the pages of her albums, the stories pour forth. Like the time Otis “Doc” Bowen held his family reunion there. Or last June, when the first wedding was held at the B&B. Recently, she hosted John C. Mather, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
    There are the “regulars” — the parents of students enrolled at Culver Academies, the Notre Dame football fans who come for game weekends and the crafters from the Amish Acres Arts & Crafts Festival.
    And then there are the more unusual ones.
    “We had a couple who flew here from Italy. They came here because she grew up in Bremen, Germany,” she said.
    Perhaps the most adventurous guests were the three college students who came this past summer in search of Little Egypt, an old cemetery in the Bremen countryside.
    “They found it on a Web site for ghost cemeteries,” Miller explained. “They just wanted to have an adventure.”
    Miller likes the surprise of not knowing who the next guest might be.
    “That’s what’s fun about it,” she said. “You never know who’s gonna call.”
    She does have one special guest in mind that she would like to host — President George W. Bush.
    “He has Scottish terrier dogs,” she said. “I am going to send him a Christmas card to invite him. He can bring his dogs with him!”
    Brenda and her husband Homer also breed Scottish terriers — the origin of the name of their bed and breakfast.
    “It’s been a wonderful adventure,” Brenda said of the past three years.
    In fact, they enjoyed owning their bed and breakfast so much that they have purchased a second one — Solomon Mier Manor, a historic Victorian in Ligonier.
    “I’ve loved every minute of the bed and breakfast,” Miller said. “The people are so wonderful. They become family members. The hardest part is saying goodbye.”