In three decades in school I had lots of experiences with Jolly Saint Nick. The chance for the children to meet Santa in the last week of the autumn term was a tradition for us, and we even managed to keep it going through the restrictions of the pandemic with a 'socially distant Santa' visiting each class over zoom that year! In all my years in school though I can say that the one I experienced yesterday was definitely one of the weirdest.
My partner and I were enjoying a lovely cooked breakfast in our local garden centre at around 9:30 am when the spectacle started to unfold. We had noted that there were quite a few cars in the car park but that the garden centre itself seemed almost deserted but we thought nothing of it as we tucked into our breakfasts. It turned out that the cars belonged to families who were waiting for the arrival of a special guest.
Just a quick note on cooked breakfasts - are ‘swaps’ a thing of the past now? My tastes are pretty straightforward in that the only thing I won’t eat is the tomato. It has no place on the breakfast plate. My partner’s tastes are more specific (no sausage, beans or tomato) so I asked if we could order some extra bacon for her instead of the three things she didn’t want. This seemingly simple request was met with the curt response of “we don’t do swaps so you will have to pay extra for the extra bacon”. I don’t like causing a fuss so I agreed to do this. I paid £3 for two extra slices of bacon, which seemed a bit steep! Hilariously, I don’t think that the ‘we don’t do swaps’ message had reached the kitchen as what appeared a few minutes later was like the bacon equivalent of the breakfast plate Dr Price ordered in the brilliant episode of Fawlty Towers titled ‘The Kipper and the Corpse’. Instead of sausages we received a plate with at least 8 thick slices of crispy bacon that I had to help her with consuming! Anyway, back to Santa…
He signalled his impending arrival by starting to ring a bell. Not a ‘jingle bell’ but one of those bells that would be rung at school back in the 50s, but not with the urgency that would signal the start of the day. His ringing technique could be described as 'funerial'. To get to the room where the party was taking place Santa had to cross a cavernous restaurant, one which could easily sit 200 people. He was clearly taking his role seriously, as he slowly paced past us, but the overall effect was definitely lacking in festive spirit. It was part town crier, part ‘bring out your dead’ and also had echoes of that person you see walking in front of a funeral procession in New Orleans.
After what seemed like ten minutes of this he arrived at the door to the room where the party was taking place. I feel I should remind you that this is 9:45am at the latest, which seems awfully early for a Christmas party, and the faces of the parents we saw leading back to their cars about half an hour later suggested that many of them strongly agreed with me.
Once he reached the door, he initially greeted the children in a Santa voice - you know the sort of thing, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to keep it up so he soon transitioned into the voice of a birthday clown, which he kept up for the rest of the performance. He was good at this, sort of a west country version of Mr Tumble, but the dissonance between how he looked and how he sounded gave me the creeps. We could hear but not see the show, so I could only imagine the confusion of the children. Was this Santa pretending to be a clown, or a clown pretending to be Santa? I find clowns deeply unsettling, as I believe most people do, but there was something extra icky about this clown in a Santa suit.
The icing on the cake from this strange performance was the gift that each child received at the end of the party. My partner and I agreed that a real mini Christmas tree was a lovely idea, remember that this was all taking place in a garden centre, but I suspect that the children thought differently!
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