It’s Tough Work Being a Temporary Santa

Images of children visiting “Santa Claus” are widespread every year in November and December, featuring in movies and TV shows, viral social media videos, and family holiday cards. But work and organization scholar Philip Hancock offers a different angle on the familiar image of the Santa Claus-for-hire: that of a worker in a temporary seasonal service job.

Santa as a job is frequently the basis for jokes, as in the movie Elf, when Buddy the Elf challenges a department store Santa as a fake, leading to the two brawling in front of an audience of children. The threat of physical attacks, though, is a real one for some of the professional Santas interviewed by Hancock. One had to be relocated within the shopping mall where he was working after being threatened with a concealed weapon; others reported having their hats pulled or even being physically assaulted.

The Santa enactors faced other, less dramatic challenges common to service work, such as time and speed pressure.

“You had the helper, usually a female and they had an apron on and a walkie-talkie and they’d get a message through,” one told Hancock of his work in a department store. “‘Tell Father Christmas he’s not going fast enough. Make him go faster.’ So she’d come in—‘I’ve got a message. Can you go faster? Can you go faster?’”

Though that time pressure had similarities with fast food workers being pushed to assemble orders of burgers and fries more quickly, it didn’t diminish the need to stay in character and make every child feel that Santa had listened to them. While the requirement to stay in character was applied externally—in some cases by media attempts to entrap Santas with the suggestion of inappropriate behavior—the men Hancock interviewed described feeling their own commitment.

“You don’t do Santa, you have to be Santa,” said one.

Some immersed themselves to the point of buying their own costumes at significant expense rather than wearing the generic ones their employers provided; buying and wearing makeup; or growing real beards to enhance the appearance of being Santa. They also emphasized the importance of knowing the full Santa mythology to deploy in conversations with children or “mischievous parents.”

Being Santa involved staying in character through stressful moments few other service workers regularly encounter, as children would confide in them about illnesses or deaths in their families and other traumas, which “required a high degree of emotion management in order to maintain the integrity of their identity” as Santa, Hancock writes. But, difficult as those moments were, they also contributed to the Santas’ sense that their work was important and meaningful, that they were truly being Santa Claus for the children.

“By becoming Santa,” Hancock argues, “these performers experienced their work in such a way that it transcended both the attraction of financial reward and subservience to the externally adjudicated demands of [interactive service work] within an occasionally hostile environment.”

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