Behind the beard

If Santa took a year off work, he’d sculpt balloons.

Not the squeaky, twisted shapes your child buys at the fair. No, his balloons would be shaped into great pieces of art, such as balloon people or cars. Or maybe characters from your favourite children’s TV show.

Of course, he’s much too busy to consider other careers, he says. What little time he does take off early in the year, he spends at the beach, wearing Hawaiian shorts.

“You’ll notice me because you might see a reindeer nearby or a very small person sitting beside me deep in conversation,” he says.

Santa Claus recently took time out of his busy schedule and sat down with the St. Albert Gazette for an exclusive interview. We wanted to know if Santa had ever considered doing something other than Christmas, and what that might be.

Being Santa is a lifelong passion and career, he emphasizes right away. But once, in his younger days, he considered also being an actor.

He would have gone to school in England, like David Attenborough, a British actor who has played Santa in a movie and looks a bit like him too. Unless you live at the North Pole you need money, though, and not every actor is lucky like Attenborough and finds work, he says.

So maybe Santa would have gone to work at a children’s theatre or the circus.

He would not have been good at the trapeze (Vixen, the reindeer, always wanted to try the trapeze, he says). But he could have been the ringmaster. That’s the person who entertains the audience between the different acts, he says.

At the circus, he would have also learned “all the skills that help keep a freelance entertainer going.”

But those are all past dreams, he says. If he had to choose a second career now he would be a magician and balloon sculptor. Then he could entertain children all year.

“I only get to see the children in December and it’s very nice to see them in small doses but imagine going to their birthday parties and seeing them year-round,” he says. “And the other nice thing with balloons is you don’t need a whole work force of elves to make them.”

Of course, Santa would work in disguise in his role as magician and balloon artist.

He would shave his beard and lose some weight during the year to look younger and thinner than his normal self. Mrs. Claus may not object to that, he laughs. She already tells him to eat fewer cookies.

He worries that he may weird out the parents though.

“It’s quite a different perception if the beard is off and you are smiling and waving at children,” he says. “Obviously, I’d rather be Brad Pitt with a big white beard but I guess I started too late in life.”

Asked why he would continue working with children, he says they keep him young. They also carry the gift of imagination, the “most powerful tool anyone has been given.”

“I find that very, very important to be cherished and nurtured because there is plenty of time for them to be told they can’t do something, or to get serious,” he says.

“But now they are a kid, they can dream about being a firefighter or a knight or a vampire or whatever they want to be. And that will lead them to a brighter future than when they are told ‘oh, there is no such thing.’”

Of course, Santa will always be Santa. He loves his job too much, he says. But that doesn’t mean he can’t dream a little.

And, if you look very closely at the tall figurines guarding his photo bench at St. Albert Centre, you can see little, squeaky balloon sculptures attached to their hands.

Maybe you’ll even see Santa on TV this year.

“I am in Doctor Who this year, did you know that? On Christmas, I am going to solve a lot of problems for the doctor.”