Shalom, I’m Santa — how to be Father Christmas in diverse North London 

Twenty of us are gathered in the management suite of a shopping centre to learn about benchmarking grotto deliverables, exceeding customer expectations and, inevitably, Elf-and-Safety. Most are tiny teenage girls; they will be the elves. I gravitate to the only other middle-aged man. ‘Santa?’ he asks, nodding in the direction of my stomach. I nod back towards his.

It’s 1 November. It couldn’t have been any earlier, as some of the elves have been engaged as scary monsters until Hallowe’en. Not all of them — department store ghouls don’t drive sales quite like Father Christmas — although my fellow Santa had been a Cannibal Killer at a farm shop.

He’s been a Santa for 15 years. This is my first time — apart from the role-play section of the interview, when a middle-aged manager had, with some enthusiasm, pretended to be a seven-year-old girl. ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he tells me, ‘but it’s weird. The moment the beard goes on, you become Santa…’

I am a comedian, and it’s quite common in my profession to ‘do Santa’ as an antidote to the horrible office parties we have to do at Christmas. I saw an advert on a comics’ website: ‘The greatest job you’ll ever have. If you think audience applause feels good, wait till you hear a five-year-old say he loves you.’

A good beard is vital: much of the training is devoted to combing and backcombing, tying knots in the elastic to avoid slippage and placing sponges under the knots to avoid headaches. But Santa cannot live by beard alone; most of the training is logistical. The swapping of Santas, for example, at the end of each shift, is a delicate operation. One Santa hangs about unseen in a service corridor behind Paperchase until an elf leads the other Santa out; then, like a prisoner exchange in a spy movie, one Santa walks past the other, with the curtest of nods.