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What's your job? Rozmin Watson, Santa broker

Santas

As the founder and owner of HireASanta.ca, each year Rozmin Watson crisscrosses the country, meeting with dozens of jolly, big-bellied white-bearded fellas looking to fill the Big Guy’s shoes at malls and corporate events.    

“They can tell me they’re six-foot 250 lbs. but I can’t really tell that by looking at their resume,” says Watson.

Although the entrepreneur has been working in event planning for twenty years, she got into the Santa game just over a decade ago.

“Ten years ago I didn’t even know what the difference was between a real bearded Santa and a costume bearded Santa,” says Watson with a chuckle.

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Today, she has nearly a hundred Santas across Canada. It’s a year-round gig that’s grown to include everything from Santas, elves and Mrs. Claus for hire to suit rentals and the obligatory photo booths. This year she ran her first Santa school in Vancouver, bringing in experts to teach everything from makeup to the requisite Santa-isms for speaking to the kids.

Watson took a breather from the holiday madness – or as she likes to call it “spreading the holiday cheer” – to chat a bit out the business of Santa wrangling, why background checks are critical and what it’s like when Santa meets his doppelganger.

So this is it, eh? The holiday rush…

I’m located in B.C. but I have clients in Ontario too so the phone rang this morning at 4:30 am. I was sort of up but I didn’t want to get up. It rang and rang and then she didn’t leave a voicemail, instead called again. So then I thought I better get up and see what’s going on because maybe there's an emergency.

Are Santa emergencies a regular thing?

Some weekends I have 30 plus events. When you’re doing so many events, if there’s somebody sick or if something happens or they’re stuck in traffic or can’t go, we always have to have somebody on standby.

You mentioned this was a busy week with a lot of events.

Early to mid-December is the busiest time of the year. Everybody wants to have their corporate events, their outdoor events and tree lighting ceremonies. A lot of them happened last week but there’s the parades and stuff, those happen at the beginning of the season and the corporate events they trickle around throughout the whole month.

It must weigh on you when you’re one of the few businesses that do this; I couldn’t really find anyone else renting Santas.

There are a lot of companies that offer that service as a side thing to their business if they’re, I don’t know, like, if you’re a wedding planner and your customer says I want to rent a Santa, they'll offer them that service. But they don’t do anything with the Santas other than call somebody like myself.

So what do you do then?

We do this throughout the entire year. We market, we train, we source suppliers for costumes and negotiate prices, and we put a school on once a year with great speakers that can help the Santas.

You're a Santa broker.

(Laughs) Talent agent. That’s what I call myself.

Talent agent to the North Pole...

Yep. (Laughs). And every year we develop a new service – like the Santa school – because I want to make sure that this is not just something we do for thirty days and then close the doors and that’s it.

Santa School
Santa School

You want to be sustainable.

Right. As soon as you just make it a seasonal thing, you can’t survive and then you’re not really focused on the business because now you’re looking for another job or trying to do something else until the season.

So tell me a bit about finding these Santas then. When you’re recruiting, what are you looking for? I have a curly handlebar mustache, could I get a part?

No (laughs) you have to have a white beard. Well, you don’t need to have a white beard because you can bleach it but you have to have the nice beard and the belly and you have to be soft spoken because you don’t want to scare the customer right?

Do you always meet the Santas?

In places where I can’t go I just hire somebody onsite to go and meet with them and have coffee. Sometimes I hire a recruiter or maybe someone within the industry who uses Santas so they know what I’m looking for.

What about background checks? How do you make sure you don’t have a naughty Santas up there?

We don’t hire anybody at all without a background check. When you first apply you answer four or five questions on the website. They’ll tell us their experiences like they’ve worked at this mall and done these corporate events. I don’t have them do the criminal background check until we know if we’re interested in hiring them. I've actually come across people who have been referrals and they’ve had the worst criminal background checks.

Really?

Yes. So there are a lot of companies out there that they do hire people regardless of what their criminal background check is. 

That's a little scary.

it is, isn't it?

Are the parents skeptical when they bring their kids? We all watched Santa push Little Ralphie down the slide in A Christmas Story.

I don’t find that the parents are skeptical because they’re always going into a good environment and they know if a major hotel company has booked through us for their corporate events and all the families are coming from the company, they are always rest assured that whoever has hired this Santa has done their due diligence.

Do you get any Santa meltdowns when they see the meet-and-greet lines at the mall?

No, not really because they’re all very professional and they know what they’re getting into. The thing that they are always really in awe over is when they come to the Santa school. Most are thinking: “yeah, I can do this, I have the white beard, I’ll get the suit and go to work” but they don’t know what is really involved until they go to the school. Sometimes they back out.

I'd imagine that’d be surreal sitting in a classroom with a bunch of doppelgangers.

Yeah. But it’s good though when you get all of these people together, they share their experiences. I have a Santa who’s been doing this for 40 years. He started when he was a teenager and in those days there was no such thing as a real bearded Santa so he had a costume beard. After he did that for 20 to 25 years, he decided he was going to grow it out and now when you look at him people say he's the only Santa because he really looks the part and plays the part. His wife plays Mrs. Claus and helps him get dressed. They're all very passionate. They all do a lot of charity work. Those are the type of people we look for.

How much does it cost to hire a Santa?

They vary from city to city and Santa to Santa. It goes anywhere from $50/hour to $1,000/hour. It just depends on who you want and the location and when they’re booking

Not a bad way to make a couple hundred bucks for just having a beard and a belly.

Some of the Santas we have, even the ones that work, they accumulate their vacation time and they take two or three weeks off in December to do it. And then the ones that are retired they work those thirty days in December and they make the same amount of money as they would from an entire year’s pension. But we’re always looking for more Santas – ones with talents like skating or playing instruments, they can make more.

When you were growing up did you imagine you'd one day be coordinating Santas?

No I never did, never in a lifetime.