I drape my woolly scarf over the back of a low settee in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s ornate Edwardian tea rooms and take a seat. It’s a typical Thursday late afternoon in November. The cosy hum of conversation is accompanied by the regular hiss of the coffee machine. Visitors queue or gather around tables. Waiting staff clear crumb strewn plates. Nobody here knows I’m having tea with Santa.
Today, Santa is incognito. He’s sitting across from me, dressed in light green combat trousers and a black turtleneck. He’s also clean shaven and his hair isn’t snowy white. It’s strawberry blonde. But, a few weeks from now, Santa — or Brendan as he’s otherwise known — will be back in this very room, donning a scarlet suit and curly beard, spreading Christmas sparkle at BMAG’s ‘Breakfast with Santa’ event. He’s one of the legions of Santas who stroll the West Midlands undetected in our midst for eleven months of the year. Mostly, Brendan makes his living as a mime. When December rolls around, it’s time to suit up.
Following his first stint at BMAG just over a decade ago, Brendan’s done almost every season here — “which has been brilliant” — but it was 20 years ago on Christmas Day when he made his Saint Nick debut at a fancy London hotel. A friend had reached out to him with the job after hearing that said establishment couldn’t find anyone willing to work 25 December. “I said, I’ll do it — as long as the price is right.”
By contrast, West End actor Andy premiered his take on Santa in the Noughties, at a Birmingham leisure complex famous for its stabbings. A fresh-faced 20-something, he expected the gig to be easy but quickly realised his mistake. “It was freezing,” he remembers. The money was okay but the shifts were long and it was “rough as anything.” What passed for the ‘green room’ was an empty retail unit overflowing with elves and fairies, a giant teddy bear, elbowing each other out the way to do their make up, whining about ill-fitting ears or wings, bad mouthing the customers.
The set up was basic. Less grotto, more random chair shoved under an escalator. “It was quite shit,” he laughs. As for the queuing system? Non-existent. “You were literally someone in a Santa costume standing in a shopping centre where people were going to the cinema.” Immediately before or after a movie screening, Andy would be mobbed but the intervening time the place was dead except every now and then when “suddenly a child would appear, just watching you. You had to always be in character.” This year won’t be anything like that. The luxury golfing resort where Andy is exclusively appearing as Santa will look after him very nicely indeed.
Andy’s taken his Santa act all over the West Midlands: garden centres, restaurants, hospitals, care homes, designer outlets, a Christmas tree farm and even an air base. Each location has its own logistics, overseen by troops of elves. When you get good elves, grottos are run with military precision. Andy is briefed on details on an incoming family — names, ages, access needs, interpersonal dynamics — to a level a UN diplomat would be happy with. Proceedings run on a tight schedule because “no matter how good you are — you could be Robert De Niro playing Santa — if someone’s had to wait half an hour on their one day of Christmas shopping, they don’t care.”
Hiring the big man
Andy’s freelance. There are agencies that represent Santas but Andy’s found being his own boss gives him more control. Call outs from commercial venues and events companies come in September. Would-be Santas nationwide (“every male actor above 45,” according to Andy) self-tape auditions reciting ‘The Night Before Christmas’ in a booming baritone, improvising the back-and-forth they’d have with kids, hoping for plum gigs that pay the best part of a grand for a few hours.
The skill is to be unflappable, adept at maintaining the performance no matter what. “It’s not hard compared to real, proper jobs — most of my mates are nurses, social workers and cops,” says Andy, “but it has its challenges”. He draws on 14 years he spent teaching, including in Pupil Referral Units. Like a teacher, Santa needs to be authoritative, adaptable and upbeat, “celebrating the positive in each child with a range of gags and questions up your sleeve that seem spontaneous and genuine.”
There have been Santas in Brum going back generations. Brendan remembers meeting the big man when he was a boy growing up in Aston, at Henry’s, a Jewellery Quarter shop, where you could buy anything you wanted. It closed in 1969, replaced by a WH Smiths (this year bought out by a private equity firm and rebranded as TG Jones). Brendan scrolls through his phone looking for a picture as we chat. Eventually, he finds it. There he is in black-and-white, grinning. His friend’s smile is even wider. “He got a cricket bat! We weren’t happy about that,” says Brendan.
Another veteran Brummie Santa is Stan who first put on the fake beard for his sons, stepping in as Father Christmas at their primary school 50 years ago. Since then, Stan has become a regular on the popular sleigh routes around south Birmingham run by Lions Clubs International, a charity established by a US businessman and freemason in 1917. Stan boasts a colourful career. He’s been a football player, an antiques dealer, radio presenter, at the helm of a West Midlands butchers’ chain, twice served as a Solihull councillor, is a charity director and a freemason of 47 years. But Santa is the role that’s made him happiest. “It's the best thing I do,” he enthuses when we meet at the Masonic Hall on Alcester Road the day after his 83rd birthday. “I love to see the kids’ faces!”
The Lions sleigh, decked out with LEDs and a reindeer puppet, is a seasonal highlight for the crowds of local children who line the streets in anticipation. It also shows up at events, everywhere from Kings Heath village square to the NEC. In the past Stan and his helpers would hand out little gifts but kids (being kids) fussed and squabbled, wanting to swap, so now they get chocolates. That doesn’t stop them putting in their own requests, though. “I've had two or three in my time, say, ‘a baby sister’,” says Stan, who directs them to “ask your mom.”
There’s been a shift over time in what the young ‘uns of the West Midlands most desire in their stockings. “Nowadays it’s mobiles and IT,” says Brendan. “What they ask for sometimes scares you to death, because you're thinking, ‘How much is that?’” Andy remembers one mother who came in with two lads already glued to their smartphones and asking for upgrades to the latest model. His usual line — that Santa makes toys, not phones — didn't cut it. Usually parents are relieved but this time the woman insisted.
Later, she returned, solo, and asked to see him. “She broke down,” says Andy. “She’d been through a divorce and she was dreading Christmas so she was just giving them whatever they wanted. She knew they shouldn’t be on their phones, but she didn’t have the strength to stop them.” In a flash, he dropped the Santa voice and told her: “As far as I can see, you’re doing a great job”. This induced further floods of tears. “Nothing makes someone more unhappy than when you’re kind to them.”
There is something about meeting Santa that gives people license to open up, like visiting confessional or pouring out your heart to your cabbie. Maybe it’s the anonymity. Christmas is a time of heightened emotion and Father Christmas is on the frontline, getting a fleeting view into our lives and into our hearts. Children have revealed to Andy that their dad is “in the sky” and he’s recorded videos for a family members too sick to attend in person. But for all the tough stories, there are moments of absolute beauty too. Last year an older woman came into Andy’s grotto with her middle-aged son who had profound and multiple learning difficulties. The man initially held back, utterly overwhelmed. “It’s ok,” she told Andy, “he really likes you.” Gradually, the man came over, reached out and gently touched Andy’s beard, then held his hand. They sat there silently, beaming at one another.
Celeb Santas
Santa is a superstar, the closest many will get to meeting a celeb. We use ‘Santa Claus’ and ‘Father Christmas’ interchangeably but they once referred to different characters. Father Christmas was the OG English folk figure, the personification of Christmas merriment and feasting, who favoured a green cloak. In Europe, Sinterklaas was inspired by Saint Nicholas, a 4th century bishop renowned for his generosity. This evolved into the American Santa Claus who, in Victorian times, merged with Father Christmas to become the Santa we know today: a jolly, rotund, reindeer loving Laplander. The first public grotto opened in 1879 in Lewis’s flagship department store in Liverpool.
In 2025, you’ll find them the world over. Brendan has taken his Santa thousands of miles away, to an indoor ski centre in Dubai surrounded by artificially engineered snow, balmy temperatures outside. The expectations are the same though: the beard, the red suit, the ho ho ho (although Brendan says he drops his Brummie accent when he’s in Santa mode). There’s a market in high-end Santa tailors, though they tend to get booked out by the end of January. Andy’s on his third suit. Underneath it he wears “two fat suits and a muscle suit” to achieve the correct physique. Hench and tall – 6’4” – he has managed to avoid sharing his costume, for which he’s grateful, having witnessed fellow Santas getting in suits with only undies underneath. In such scenarios, he says, “your best friend is Febreze! Sweaty blokes aren’t the most hygienic”. Andy also always keeps safety pins handy for inevitable costume mishaps and gets his beard made bespoke by a theatrical wigmaker.
A pal of Brendan has a traditional green as well as a classic red Santa suit and offers clients the choice. This has raised eyebrows in the Santa community which, like any industry has its share of haters. “It sparks jealousy,” he says. “But he’s not trying to upstage them.” Having the right gear is only half of it. A good Santa needs good chat. Andy deploys cold reading techniques, using educated guesswork until he gets something he can run with. “Oh you did something wonderful the other day,” he’ll venture, “what was it?” Depressingly, some parents have not a single piece of praise for their child. With nervous preschoolers or sulky teens, he has lines to put them at ease. “What was that noise from the house last year? Rudolph was scared – who was snoring? Daddy, wasn’t it? Or was it Mommy?” They all laugh. “People want to believe, don’t they?”
Everyone’s after a photograph, manoeuvreing their bawling newborn or pet chihuahua into the frame. It can be intense, even at the slickest spots. The second time I speak with Andy he’s a few days away from his first outing as Saint Nick and he tells me he’s been preparing psychologically by sitting in Sutton Greggs, slowly inching his headphones off, re-acclimatising to the screams of sibling slanging matches. This Christmas the government predicts total household spend to be £23bn, a 16% rise on last year. I know Brummies whose tree went up a month earlier than usual. And who can blame them? Fed up of bins and bankruptcy and that general sense of impending doom, we need festive cheer more than ever.
But what is it about Santa in particular that so appeals? Stan has a theory. “It’s because it’s not the parents that's giving them something. It's Father Christmas.” The magic for little kids is partly about independence, having something that is theirs and theirs alone. “He’s a strong character, Santa,” says Brendan, who was inspired by working with American actor David Huddleston — “one of the best Santas ever” — when he played an elf in 1985’s Santa Claus the Movie. “It was the warmth that came across.”
By the time I finish up my tea with Brendan and head down the museum’s stone steps, day has turned to dark. It’s cold. I wrap my scarf tight. Crossing Victoria Square, I take in the greasy smell of churros, the old fashioned fairground music from the carousel, the Insta-worthy light displays. Winding through the Frankfurt Christmas market on New Street, shoppers surge around me. A plastic Santa catches my eye. I smile. And in the twinkling half light, it almost looks like he’s smiling back.
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