Like Marines, Santas Are Made, Not Born

It’s no small business training all those St. Nicks

Santas get a turn at the reinsPhotograph by Peter Baker for Bloomberg Businessweek

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By Susan Berfield

November 2, 2012 at 3:51 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

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This article is part of the November 5, 2012 issue of businessweek.

If you think any chubby guy with a beard who looks good in red can be a mall Santa Claus, Susen Mesco will soon set you straight. “You can’t play Santa,” says Mesco, director of the Professional Santa Claus School in Denver. “You have to become Santa. … We spend the first three hours getting the men into the mind-set.”

Department stores began hiring inhouse Santas in the 1860s, and the country’s first Santa Claus school opened in 1937. Now there are at least half a dozen Santa schools as well as Santa conventions, workshops, and festivals where people can to learn to play the big guy. Mesco, who also runs an event-planning company, started her school in 1983. This year about 30 would-be St. Nicks signed up for the five-day, $850 program around Labor Day. “We used to get truck drivers and bartenders and construction workers who were off-season,” she says. “Now we’re getting stockbrokers, realtors, and accountants.”