Even Santa Claus Is in Debt This Christmas

[Drosselmeyer]

Even Santa Claus Is in Debt This Christmas

DNYUZ    December 23, 2024

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll meet a Santa Claus who says his balance sheet is as red as his Santa suit. We’ll also get details on high-level departures and transfers that shook the New York Police Department over the weekend.

The price — as much as $450 for 25 minutes with Santa — was so high that it seemed to push the limit on affordability in a city where the holidays are already expensive.

But affordability and profitability are different things. At Santa’s Secret Workshop, a holiday start-up in Long Island City, the balance sheet is as red as Carl Hendrick Louis’s Santa suit.

Louis is an actor who put $100,000 into creating a North Pole stage set in Queens. He hired another veteran department-store Santa to divide the workload — the ho-ho-hoing and the chatting with children and parents. He put two other actors on the payroll as elves.

Whoever is playing Santa knows who’s been naughty and who’s been nice because Louis devised a questionnaire — the “all-knowing Santa form” — that must be submitted at least 48 hours before the children arrive. The questionnaire asks for specifics, like the age of each child and whether there are “any special pronunciation hints” for their names. It also asks for “one magical moment” about each child, such as a new skill, an achievement or a “wonderful deed” that would earn someone a spot on Santa’s nice list.

Santa and the elves, accustomed to remembering scripts, commit the answers to memory and use the information to guide the conversations.

“As a parent, I’ve done the whole going-to-the-mall thing,” Louis said. “By the time you get there, you’re exhausted, your child is exhausted. And by the time they actually get to Santa, the child is not interested and they have roughly a minute or 90 seconds to have this quote-unquote experience,” he said. “I wanted to change that.”

He has reimagined visiting Santa as more than a meet-and-greet. And the “immersive experience” at Santa’s Secret Workshop is a playlet with several scenes, beginning in a room marked “janitor’s closet,” where an elf leads the way through a secret door. It opens into a mail room where another elf is waiting with a camera, ready to snap high-resolution shots as letters to Santa are dropped off. As many as seven people can take part in each session — children, parents, grandparents or friends — which moves on from the mailroom to Santa’s room, with a sofa and a fireplace.

Out of his Santa suit, Louis does not have a little round belly that shakes when he laughs like — well, you know. He is 6-foot-1 and weighs a trim 160 pounds. His costume pads him out.

“Not the usual Santa,” he said. His ho-ho-ho voice is somewhere between a tenor’s and a baritone’s.

He is Black. The other Santa, Ricky Jones, is white. Parents can choose which Santa inhabits the workshop for their 25 minutes. On a typical day, Jones handles six sessions, “and I get three or four,” Louis said.

“I wish it was sold out,” he added, “because I could say I’d break even.” But he said that he was “maybe $50,000” in the red, and that the actors had taken a pay cut, to $30 an hour, $5 less than the $35 an hour that Louis first paid. Louis said he had had to hire a second elf to take photographs throughout each session. “I wasn’t expecting to have a payroll of three actors,” he said. “That changed the economics of the labor.”

He said he had financed the workshop operation himself, drawing on $100,000 he had inherited. “No bank or investor would give a chance on my concept of an idea,” he said. So he rented space in a former stapler factory and built the sets.

After Santa’s Secret Workshop opened in November, a parent described what had unfolded for his children as “a V.I.P. experience.” Others had latched onto that phrase, even though Louis said that “it’s not a phrase I wanted to use” and that he found it “slightly off-putting.”

“It makes it feel like it’s not for everyone,” he said, “but this is for everyone. I’ve done the best I could to make it seem affordable” by setting a seven-person limit on each session, enough for two families to make an appointment together and split the cost.

But Barbara DeLaleu of Elmont, N.Y., just brought her son, Braxton Marte, 8.

“I needed a new way to show my son about Santa and what he does,” DeLaleu said. “It’s the behind-the-scenes experience of what Santa does to make Christmas happen, which is a plus for parents like me.”

But what captivated Braxton was not Louis’s Santa or the elves. Instead, he gravitated to the eye-catching props in Santa’s room, carefully arranged on the shelves behind the sofa and in other nooks and crannies.

First, Braxton twirled the dial on an old-fashioned television set. Then, he raced across the room, to a prop phone with a cord on a table. He grabbed the receiver and, undeterred by the lack of a dial tone or a voice on the other end, dialed 911.

SOURCE:   https://dnyuz.com/2024/12/23/even-santa-claus-is-in-debt-this-christmas/

[Ole Frog]

I hope he ultimately succeeds
He has a unique vision and sounds like a credit to the profession
 

[Santa Sullivan]

I hope this becomes successful and it becomes a yearly tradition for families. 

[Rob Thompson]

Things like this need to be successful,  

[santaparker]

i know for a fact this will suceed. joe barney who some of you know has been doing experiences like this for decades. it takes time but it will happen