Children Are Asking Santa for Jobs for their Parents

Joe Jackson, a nineteen year old young man, wears a red jacket and a Santa Claus hat: “I have met children who have broken my heart.”

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA (USA)

This time Santa Clause is truly affected. As some children sit on his lap, they ask him for something other than a stuffed animal or the latest video game. They want a job for daddy or money to help mommy buy back their home. At nineteen years old, Joe Jackson wears the red jacket and the Santa Claus hat to cheer private and public events in South Carolina, South of the United States. He confesses all of his emotions: “Behind this beard one can see things that no one else can observe or feel. I have met children who litterally have broken my heart.”

The economic crisis is leading families to face one of the hardest Christmases of their lives. This means that Santa Claus, as a privileged confident, listens to what many children under the age of 11 have been requesting and it is much more than a Nintendo Wii or a Barbie doll. “Children trust Santa Claus and they open up to him, telling him things that usually they would not tell anybody else. They often ask to solve situations. They know that he can realize their dreams,” explained the Californian Timothy Connaghan who has played Santa Claus for fourty years, and in the past few, he has trained over 1,500 Santa Clauses in his “School for Santas.”

He has taught his students, for example, to remember that a good Santa Claus cannot promise money or jobs in order to realize Christmas dreams, “but he can say that things will get better.” Not only children have this form of optimism. Polls affirm that this Christmas season consumers will spend less money. Even at the Columbia Place mall, the local Santa Claus sees a decrease in people who go shopping. Mrs Manfield walks around the mall with Mahogamie, her four year old daughter who has asked Santa Claus for a Cinderella doll, Hanna Montana baloons and a famous TV series.

Her thirty year old mother has been looking for a job for the past nine months but she does not want to deceive her daughter’s expectations. She will try to buy the toys her daughter wished for. I only hope to find a bit of money. Meanwhile the little Mahogamie chats with Santa Claus about the mall and explained to him that she has been eating vegetables, she has been bathing and she has always been nice to her mother. “It is good to see her with Santa Claus- says Mrs Mansfield- my daughter has no idea of what has happened to me.” But Santa Claus materializes even in an surgery center in Louisiana. A group of volunteers have answered the 250 letters that children have been sending to Santa Claus.

Even here the signs coming from the children are other than usual: “They do not ask for Wii video games or for the Xbox- says Denise Griffiths, a volunteer- they ask for personal care products, school material and warm clothes.” As Timothy , the Santa Claus ‘trainer’, explains that we have to make sure that children leave us happier than when they came to us. “Children tend to absorb many of their parents’ worries. They do not always understand the type of worries and sometimes they embellish them. All a Santa Claus can hope for is to speak some optimistic words and to give the child the feeling that everything will be fine. Each time one of them leaves with a smile, it means I have done something good.”