Andrew Watts has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Whenever my son’s primary school ring up, they have, very sensibly, a calming form of words: ‘It’s the school here but don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong.’ It became clear, however, that Mrs Gribben had not thought through the rest of the conversation: ‘Our Father Christmas has dropped out, and we thought of you because, well…’
‘You can’t do role play
with real children. We
use elves, generally’
A few weeks later, I join a Santa refresher course organised by Ministry of Fun, a company which supplies Father Christmases (or Fathers Christmas?) to department stores such as Selfridges and Hamleys. As I walk into the London Postal Museum, a contract – the correct collective noun for a group of Clauses, I’m told – of two dozen Santas are settling down at desks for a PowerPoint presentation by Matt Grist, who is much less annoying than the managing director of a company called Ministry of Fun has any right to be.
He starts with a brief pep talk – ‘What we do is remind people of the real meaning of Christmas, the non-religious meaning of Christmas’ – and assures everyone that there is no right way to play the role: ‘Some people are silly Santas, full of Santa banter; others are just kind and caring. We’ve got to be real and magical.’
When I talk to Matt later, he points out different Santas: ‘They use their own real personality, just heightened and Santafied. That’s Santa Tim, he’s a clown in real life, so he’s very silly.’ Matt has worked with many of the Fathers Christmas for years, but it is still remarkable that he can tell them apart, as they all look exactly the same to me. This is intentional, Santa Doug tells me: he has to shave his own beard off every year to play Father Christmas, in order to preserve ‘a certain homogeneity of beard’. Selfridges hires Santas as floor-walkers and children tend to notice if the beards change.
The Santas take this job very seriously. When I ask Santa Doug for tips on grotto-craft, he can rattle off developmental milestones like a north London mum. ‘Age one or two, the children are only interested in the beard; three – when they’re just making sense of the world and they see someone they’ve only seen in cartoons – they have to be dragged across the floor like political prisoners in a South American jail. Four – and then the fun starts…’ (I notice this myself later at my son’s school: the designated safeguarding lead takes Father Christmas round the classes in order. I am treated like a rock star in reception, a minor celebrity in year one; cross-examinations come in year four. When we open the door to year six, a child looks up and says: ‘Your dad’s here.’)
They are very protective about the old man. Four Santas told me that it was wrong to claim that the Coca-Cola Company invented the red and white livery; one of them referring me to an illustration from 1821. (It does show ‘Old Santeclaus’ in red, with presents and birch switches for ‘a Parent’s hand to use/ When virtue’s path his sons refuse’.) The more broad-minded recognise Santa was available in other colours before his synergistic brand partnership with Coca-Cola: my father lived in the same village as Sir Oswald Mosley, who would deliver presents to his tenants’ children dressed in a black Santa outfit. Another Santa starts telling me about textual variants in Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’, prepping me for questions about whether it’s Donder or Donner.
They remind me of evangelical Christians, although I don’t suppose either group would like the comparison. Father Christmas is, as Judith Flanders points out in Christmas: A Biography, almost a photographic negative of Christ: old where the Baby Jesus is young; dressed in rich furs for the North Pole rather than clothes for the Middle East; fat where He is like a root out of dry ground, having neither form nor comeliness. I’m not saying that Father Christmas is the Antichrist, although certain American Christians inevitably do. Europe went through this phase 50 years ago. Father Christmas was burnt in effigy at Dijon Cathedral, following a campaign by local clergy, to the delight of Claude Lévi-Strauss who saw in this a re-enactment of the sacrifice of the king of Saturnalia. I myself think a link between Santa and a god who ate his own children is somewhat tenuous.
Ministry of Fun is very protective about the children as well. When I ask Matt about the training programme, he is horrified by the idea of letting an untrained Santa loose to ruin Christmas for a child. ‘You can’t do role play with real children. We use elves, generally.’ Santa Ric warns me about some trickier questions I might get: ‘We want our parents back together – that’s a common one.’ As with all the Santas, interviewing him is an odd experience. I start talking to the actor, and then the character unconsciously takes over. I ask him how he explains away houses without chimneys or his logistical operations on Christmas Eve, and he grabs me by the arm and starts talking about the phials of magic dust his elves carry. ‘You’re nothing without your elves,’ he says.
I ask whether he ever drops character, and he speaks as himself for the longest stretch I’ve heard. ‘I’ve dealt with a lot of terminally ill kids, and you know it’s their last Christmas and you’ve got to make it special. That can be tough. One year, a child had died the year before, and her older brother came. He was about seven. We had a chat, and I said have a photograph before you go. And he spotted in my fireplace these little flickering candles and asked if he could hold one of those for [his sister]. That really got me, but you’ve got to keep it together.’
James Mitchell, Matt’s assistant from Ministry of Fun – an undersecretary of fun perhaps – asks whether I want to try on a Father Christmas outfit. Obviously I do. He passes me a tummy stuffer. ‘Almost all our Santas have tummy stuffers, even people who are bigger than you. Santa has to be fat!’ I tell him he sounds like the bunny mothers at the Playboy Club weighing everyone before shifts. They don’t measure the Santas at the beginning of the season, but I can tell he is going to introduce tape measures in the future. The strap of the tummy stuffer is too short to go round me.
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