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.
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