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Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
When people speak about their long-ago customer service jobs, a nostalgic gleam often softens their eyes. They expound on the wholesome virtues those jobs taught them. Grit. Determination. Persistence. They now possess valuable life lessons, earned at the end of a mop or by the heat of a broiler.
My time in customer service taught me about the pressure of the perfect Christmas.
At 25, I was looking to earn some extra money to go back to school. When I saw an ad searching for someone to take pictures of kids with Santa in the weeks before Christmas, I thought that sounded fairly easy. Point. Click. Cash or credit. I had no doubt that there’d be some red-faced wailing from toddlers wondering why they’d been callously abandoned onto the lap of an obese elderly man, but I could deal. I smiled during the interview, assuring the hiring manager that I was unflappable in the face of tears and spit-up.
The weeks started out slow on the Santa set. On a quiet weekday, my boss and I chatted while Santa merrily called out Christmas greetings to the occasional passerby. No kids visited, but a woman with a forced smile walked with purpose up to Santa, her gaze like a sergeant inspecting the troops.
“Hey, Santa,” she said “I just wanted to remind you that your slogan is ‘Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas.’ Not ‘Ho, ho, ho, Merry.’ It’s ‘Merry Christmas.’”
Santa assured her that he loved wishing people a Merry Christmas. The woman walked away looking suspicious.
“What was that all about?” I asked my boss.
“A lot of people are concerned about the ‘war on Christmas,’” she said. “They get upset at any sign Santa’s not on their side.”
My eyebrows rose. I had a lurid vision of a McCarthy-style committee grilling mall Santas on their views: “Have you now or have you ever been someone who says ‘Happy Holidays’?” You could still call the panic the Red Scare.
Although those who distrusted Santa could be difficult, people who loved him were the ones that really made sweat break out on my forehead.
One day, Santa had just started off for his lunch break when a mom hurried up with two young boys. She had the drained look of someone who’d had too little sleep and too much caffeine.
“I drove several hours to get here,” she said. “The boys are so excited. Can’t you fit them in?”
I looked at my boss. In preparation for the break, we’d already taken apart our camera set up and putting it all back together would be time-consuming. Plus, Santa was starving.
“Sorry,” my boss said. “Santa will be back after lunch. We hope to see you then.”
The woman asked several more times if we could make an exception. They’d driven for hours. Her boys just loved Santa. It was Christmas.
Sadly, the boys had to wait. When Santa was once again ensconced on his majestic red throne, the boys got to whisper in his ear. All seemed well, but as the woman was leaving, she approached me. Her face tensed.
“The boys wanted to know why Santa didn’t want to see them,” she said.
I understood at that moment that a Santa set is higher stakes than most retail work. Santa is a child’s fantasy, their confidante and friend. When Santa lets you down, it’s like being given the finger by the Easter Bunny.
And if the disappointment of two children is tough, what about disappointing 50? My shifts started by heading to the back of the mall to the employees only section, where I’d get Santa and bring him to the waiting children. One morning as I was walking back, I saw the line was particularly long.
“I can hear the reindeer hooves on the roof,” I said to the group. The children craned their necks up, hopeful of catching a clip-clop.
I reached the main room of the employees only section. No Santa. I checked the change room. No Santa. The bathroom. No Santa.
Panic was starting to make me sweat, speeding up my breathing a little. What if Santa didn’t show? We had a couple different Santas in rotation, but they were people with other jobs. There would be no guarantee one would be able to come in if Santa was snoozing somewhere.
I’d been told that on another Santa set, if Santa didn’t show, they had a security guard fill in. When I tried to visualize ours, I pictured a teen who hadn’t quite finished puberty. Even the most trusting five year old might turn skeptic when Santa spoke in the voice of Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls.
Thankfully, Santa showed – he’d been stuck in traffic. I was able to stall by telling the kids that Santa needed a little extra time to feed the reindeer some carrots, and everything worked out fine.
But here’s the thing: That one close call made me acutely aware of how fragile an illusion we were building. There’s one way a Santa set can go wrong that exists in no other line of business: the risk of The Reveal. A teenager could show up and tell all the kids the truth about Santa. A small child could ninja their way into ripping off Santa’s beard. A religious person could announce to all that Santa was a lie to distract from Jesus. You just never know.
And who is this illusion for? The obvious answer is the kids, but in my time on the Santa set, I learned it was for the parents. Stressed out, overworked parents, trying to capture a beautiful memory, the same way their parents had done for them.
It reminded me of the time I’d worked as a co-op student for a newspaper, and I was sent to take photos of some several months-old triplets. The mom wanted us to keep taking photos until all three babies were facing the camera and looking perfect. A 10 minute task stretched to more than half an hour.
At the time, it seemed like madness to me, but seeing all the parents at the Santa set jingling keys to get babies to look in the right direction, things became clearer. In the midst of the daily chaos of life, it’s a comfort to look back at a photo 10 years later and see what you wish you’d seen every day while you were living it. Here is my family, here is the warm glow of Christmas and here was a simpler time, when a man in a red suit could make my daughter squeal with joy.
Don’t worry about getting the perfect photo, I wanted to say the parents who tried to coax their squirming child to focus. Ten years from now, no matter the pose, this will be perfect.
Julie McClement lives in Toronto.
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