Elves, Santas and the true meaning of Christmas

What possessed me, you might ask? Well, it wasn't so I could dine out on the story every December for the next 20 years, or that it might provide me content for a nice seasonal column right about now.

In fact, I was newly in love and, having quit university, I was saving for a trip around the world while living with my schizophrenic father in a one-bedroom flat provided by an addiction charity – as long as he stayed clean.

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I was desperate to make as much money as I could, to get as far away as I could, for as long as I could. At the time I was an aspiring actress and so found my jobs in the classified section of The Stage newspaper where companies searched for nubile, desperate wannabes with ‘bubbly’ personalities who would do anything that might resemble acting.

That’s how I ended up in the corporate offices opposite Harrods (connected to the store by underground tunnels…) singing Jingle Bells at my job interview. It turns out that I can pipe out a pretty decent tune because I was given the job there and then.

I think the wages were £200 a week for 50 hours a week. It was exactly what I would need to earn enough to be able to fly off on my trip and so I donned my green apron and my elves hat resplendent with its bell and, via an extremely terrifying security briefing where we were told that even printing something unauthorised was, ‘THEFT, of paper and ink and electricity’.

So, I found myself in the Grotto with 20 other nubile, desperate wannabes with bubbly personalities learning the choreography for the ‘elf’ dance – which we would seamlessly perform whenever ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’, piped through the store speakers.

At the time, Santa's Grotto was still free at Harrods, I was told at the insistence of the owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed, who wanted to give a gift to all children.

Perhaps mirroring the dwindling decency and Christmas spirit of recent years, in 2019 the new owners introduced a £20 entry fee and largely restricted visits to customers who spent over £2000. But back in 2002, Christmas spirit still prevailed and kids from all parts of London, and across the full economic spectrum, flocked to see Santa.

Queues could run hours long, so one of our jobs was to go along the queue with baskets of shortbread cookies and bottled water letting people know the waiting time, making sure no one passed out and belting out an occasional ‘When Santa got Stuck Up the Chimney’ if morale was waning.

Harrods (Image: free)

Our next job was our song and dance routine before taking children in groups of 10 into a corridor where, behind picture windows, they would follow the story of the Harrods teddy bear as it went on a London Christmas adventure.

I was once given the onerous job of performing this for Nicola from Girls Aloud for a daytime TV segment and though I gave it my all, I'm still occasionally haunted by the abject look of mortification on her face as I mugged away drumming the drums and trumpeting the trumpets and miming the teddy bear’s excitement. I guess she was thinking , ‘There but for the grace of God…etc’.

After that, the easiest job was sitting cosy and warm in one of the Santa rooms. Now, don't be scandalised when I tell you there were three Santas, each with their own line in charming patter for the pretty elves because, except for one misanthrope Santa, they were really very jolly indeed.

I couldn’t abide Christmas at the time. Not just because I was 22 and believed the only things truly worth celebrating were art, hedonism and new love, but also because I was slowly coming to terms with my impoverished and traumatic childhood.

Simply, family gatherings with joy and goodwill were never that in our house. I had bad memories of Christmas, a time of too much booze and too many feelings, both spilling over. Had I not been in the North Pole chain gang, I would have preferred to pretend it wasn't happening at all.

But even the Grinch I was back then couldn't help feel touched, and perhaps a little triggered, by the kids I knew had travelled from far across London to Kensington, wearing their too thin anoraks and their worn school shoes, grinning with delight and excitement at meeting Santa in the most expensive department store in London.

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Those kids got exactly the same as the ‘Anastasias’ and the ‘Elliots’ with their big velvet ribbons, sharp pearly teeth and strangely adult clothing.

In fact, if it was on my watch, those kids with the tired-looking parents who’d travelled on several buses to get there, got a lot more time with Santa, shortbread, an extra photo, whatever I could manage.

I didn't stay for long in the end. After all, I had a one-way ticket to New York. I abandoned my elf mates a week before Christmas and flew off into the snowy night with my lesbian lover. Something which I like to think a lot of elves sick of the daily grind do.

Still, every Christmas for the last two decades I’ve remembered putting on that green apron, the paranoid Santa who told me that the walls were bugged, the brittle slightly competitive fellow elves who would kneecap you Tonya Harding-style for your spot at the front of the Elf chorus line, that buttery shortbread.

And most of all? Most of all I remember the genuine smiles of kids who, no matter how many times Santa had let them down previously, somehow still believed in him wholeheartedly.