Santa school in session: Beard care, sign language, and tackling tough questions

I've lost, this is my fault. Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! Ho ho ho! I don't know how I'm going to do it. Thank you. It's still quite high. Roman Geeks, Greeks, Phototubes and Starry Times at an enormous speed. Good. We've asked in the gotto 93% of people and we'll ask whether people can come in and ask for a present straight away. This is the 28th year of Santa School where we get together with a group of Father Christmas performers who work in various leisure parks, department stores, shows, shopping centres etc on those very rare occasions when the real Father Christmas can't be there himself. So what we do is get together to share knowledge, share experiences from previous years grottoes And just learn from each other. As soon as we get our pallets, your left hand is your left hand, right hand is your left hand, and vice versa. We go from the finger tip down to the palm, twice. They're all together in one. It's fine to be inquisitive and interesting, but if you're interested in what it is, we'll go through some of them. I think what it's doing is making live events and live appearances more challenging. Remind me, sir, who are you? Now, this is really important. In order to deliver an encounter that is magical you have to take it seriously and you have to really care about the encounter that you have with a child and about the content. It's a duty we have really, it's an obligation we have and it's a privilege to be able to represent Father Christmas who is someone so special to children. Father! It's a good handwriting isn't it? Father Christmas. I think the hardest thing, it's probably the awkward questions, it is the heartbreak and the heart-wrenching questions. There's a lot of uncertainty in the world and you'll be surprised. I always say kids are like sponges, they take a lot in and they talk about it in different ways and they release that pressure and that stress in different ways and I do find often it's at Christmas time and I have had conversations with children before where they've told me Tell me heartbreaking stories, and it's so normal for them. That is quite hard. I think, I wish I could just fix everything, but unfortunately that's not my role here. My role here is to hopefully bring a little bit of magic to help put a plaster on it, shall we say. Say. 80% of the chimney, that's the one thing that you might have. All right. It goes up the chimney and it actually appears. Thank Yeah, that's Miss Whiskey, Darren, or who's the other one? No, she's a biscuit. No, she's a biscuit. Thank But the idea you you. is that they very will much. tell you the trends. They will tell you what they're interested in, no matter what age it is. And if you do enough research, it's so easy to research things these days. I mean, you don't have to go to a library anymore with a library card and take out a book. Everything just happens and you can find out. So the lovely thing about it is it's almost instant. You can get an inkling as to what they're talking about very, very quickly. Ha ha ha ha. How often does anyone get in their lives to get the opportunity to be a mythical individual, a being for whom the response is always a smile? And that sounds as though it's a cliché or some kind of show business anecdote, but it's genuinely true. Everybody looks at Santa and goes, and it doesn't matter how old or how young they are, Okay. there's always the Santa inside of you. You listen to your best self. You also listen to the child that's in front of you. How do you reflect that child? Some children are boisterous, some are shy. For some, it's their first time. For others, they're old hands at this sort of thing. The vast majority, two-thirds were in grottoes and the rest at various...