This is one job that’s elf on Earth
‘Santa’s summer home’ requires helpers with pep
There is a little bit of Radiator Springs to this town in Ontario’s cottage country. About six decades ago, when construction was underway on Highway 11, which is as close to a freeway as you’re going to get in these parts, the local gentry worried that city folk, no longer forced to drive through Bracebridge on the way to their summer getaways, would bypass their town altogether. Students of the Pixar film
Cars will recall a similar plot: When the freeway was built, no one came to visit Radiator Springs anymore. But though Doc, Sally, Luigi and the gang could only spruce up their town with a bit of fresh asphalt, the merchants of Bracebridge, 57 years ago, had a more elaborate idea: They built Santa’s Village.
“They were worried the downtown was going to die,” says Jamie Hopkins, general manager of “Santa’s summer home” in the heart of Muskoka. “Somebody had been to North Pole, New York, in Lake Placid, and partly because Bracebridge is on the 45th parallel, they thought it would be a good idea to try that here.”
And so, they constructed a quaint amusement park — kitschy might be the more accurate word — that, for 57 years and counting, has been a summer employer for local teenagers and young cottagers. Santa’s Village has three fulltime employees. In the summer, the payroll jumps by about 150 people, most of them 14 or 15 years old, and each of them to varying degrees playing the role of one of Santa’s elves.
Elves operate the rides — the little choo-choo train that putts around the park or the roller-coaster with a sleigh at the back and Rudolph at the front. Elves manage the games. And elves sell food and work in the shops.
On a sweltering day, the kids who are out in the sun working the rides do not have to wear full elf regalia, but red polo shirts, black shorts and a red and green cap. It is, as Mr. Hopkins describes it, a “bit of an elvish-looking uniform.”
The girls in the shops are wearing elf hats and green jumpers with red leggings. The shops are shaded, so the leggings are a must even on hot days.
“It feels good to take them off at the end of the day,” says the young woman personalizing elf hats for young shoppers; we won’t use her name lest she get in trouble for slightly disparaging the elf getup.
Mr. Hopkins says managers are aware that for many of the “elves,” this is an early work experience. “Some kids aren’t interested in working a lot,” he says. They might only do a shift or two a week. Some of the ride operators, meanwhile, would start to flag a little after eight hours in the sun. “We’d see their liveliness waning,” Mr. Hopkins says. But customers expect their elves to be enthusiastic, so this season they created four-hour shifts to better ensure perky elf service.
It seems like a rather friendly way to run a business. Which makes sense, given its community roots. And on the road out, traffic headed back to Highway 11 is routed down Bracebridge’s main street.
Just the way they planned it in 1955.