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There’s a ‘Secret Santa’ running around town distributing $100 gift cards to Asbury Park students.

This England born Santa has an Irish heritage and runs a little pub called Johnny Mac House of Spirits, located on Main Street in Asbury Park.

With his wife Mary in tow, John McGillion spent the week shopping for the gift cards and making a $10,000 pledge of support to the Boys and Girls Club of Monmouth County’s Asbury Park summer program.

“It’s fun,” the father of four adult children said. “We were all kids at one time so we know how a kids feels about a gift. I still remember getting a cap pistol when I was a kid. You don’t see them anymore but that was such a big thing when I was a kid.”

McGillion, whose family first settled on the eastside of Manhattan when he was 3 years old, said the family moved to the south Bronx after they tore down Third Avenue well, causing a razing of his entire block. He was 15 at the time.

Today, the successful restaurateur owns several bars and restaurants across Brooklyn and New York, run primarily by his wife Mary.

It was a call from his cousin Bernie back in 2005 that resulted in him opening up the now popular pub.

“He called me one day and said I have an empty bar in Asbury Park with a liquor license, do you want to take a look,” McGillion said. After signing the lease, he took a look down a then desolate Cookman Avenue and thought, “What am I doing here.”

Work at his New York based venues stalled the local opening, but by 2010 Johnny Mac’s opened.

“Asbury Park has grown a lot since,” he said. “But the fact that there was nothing here gave me an incentive; an esprit de corps. It was something I wanted to get involved in.”

Involved he got – revisioning and redeveloping not only the Main Street block where his small pub sits but opening up Kim Marie’s on Kingsley Avenue in the waterfront, and purchasing the former YMCA building, all of which have redevelopment plans in the works. He took over ownership of the annual Zombie Walk and works to support the annual St Patrick’s Day Parade.

And while he has homes in Westchester, NY, and Greenwich, Conn., McGillion spends most of his days in the city.

“I like the town,” he said. “I like the community. I like the diversity.”

By week’s end McGillion will have distributed a total of $52,000 to the city’s youth. Every students at Sisters Academy, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, participants in the Boys and Girls Club after-school program will receive a $100 gift card from one of seven stores the McGillions visited on Monday and Tuesday.

“This is my first time doing this,” he said. “I had a couple of dollars left over so I figured let me give the kids a couple dollars. It wasn’t meant to be what it has grown into but it’s fun.”

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