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.
Weather
Today will be sunny, with a high near 32, but the wind chill will make it feel colder. Tonight, there will be a 30 percent chance of snow, with a low around 29.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect through Dec. 25 (Christmas Day).
The latest New York news
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When the bar mitzvah boy is 90: Ron Eliran’s 13th birthday near Haifa, Israel, was canceled when the authorities called a curfew. Now, 77 years later, he has officially become a man.
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Set on fire in the subway: A woman died after being attacked inside a subway car at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn. The police said they had apprehended a man who they believe “carried out one of the most depraved crimes one person could possibly commit against another human being.”
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Experimenting with automation: Kernel, a new food chain that has two locations in New York City and another on the way, is one of many restaurants trying out robotics. But in the kitchen, human labor is hard to replace.
For the Police Department, a tumultuous few days
The last few days have been tumultuous for the New York Police Department.
First, Jeffrey Maddrey, whose title was chief of department and who was the highest-ranking uniformed officer on the force, resigned amid allegations that he had demanded sex from a subordinate in return for overtime. He was also a longtime ally of Mayor Eric Adams’s.
Then Jessica Tisch, who was sworn in as the commissioner less than a month ago, transferred at least 29 officers. My colleagues Chelsia Rose Marcius and Eliza Shapiro write that 16 of them had each earned more than $100,000 in overtime pay, according to city payroll records and police documents. Two of them, who collectively took home more than $312,000 in overtime, had worked under Maddrey.
Two other officers, who together made $289,000 in overtime, were transferred out of the operations bureau over the weekend, and Tisch wrote on X that Miguel Iglesias had been “relieved of his command” as the department’s chief of internal affairs, responsible for investigating police misconduct. Tisch did not say whether his departure was related to the accusations involving Maddrey.
Federal investigators joined a city Department of Investigation inquiry into the allotment of overtime and the allegations of misconduct against Maddrey, according to two people familiar with the matter. The F.B.I. declined to comment on Sunday.
In group text chats, the rank-and-file lauded the police commissioner and shared a photo with a golden halo around her head. Underneath the picture it said: “Saint Tisch. The patron saint of common sense.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Northern Lights
Dear Diary:
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, were visible from New York City, and I missed them. A potentially once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, and I was dead asleep in my Lower East Side apartment.
On the way to a hike in a state park outside the city the following Saturday, the 15-seat van was full. We chatted about how Kali had met his wife at a TED Talk, whether Trevor Noah was a sellout and what our dating deal-breakers were.
Genesis said she wouldn’t date someone who didn’t celebrate birthdays properly.
“How you celebrate your own birthday is how you’ll celebrate mine,” she explained.
Shante agreed but said that her ideal partner would celebrate other holidays properly, too.
We talked about our love-hate relationships with voice notes. Genesis loved them. Shante didn’t even listen to them. My father had just sent me a 17-minute one that I listened to twice.
Just before we got to the park, Kali mentioned the northern lights. I confessed how much regret I had been feeling for not seeing them.
I was hoping everyone would say they weren’t that great — barely indistinguishable from the lights of the Empire State Building or the Freedom Tower — and that I hadn’t missed much.
Don’t worry, Shante said. She had been outside looking up that night and hadn’t seen them.
I asked if there had been too much light pollution from the city’s buildings.
No, she said. She had been looking in the wrong direction.
— Benje Williams
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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