Christmas lasts all year for Mike and Alison Battle. The married couple start planning their festivities every January and meet Father Christmas “hundreds of times'' throughout December. Christmas shopping never ends: they buy festive props at antique fairs and antiquarian book sales year-round for their annual immersive experience, Lapland UK.
It’s not to be mistaken for the so-bad-they’re-funny winter wonderlands, with expensive tickets to view limply-strung fairy lights and plastic polar bears in a muddy field triggering complaints. The Battles’ £60-plus-per-head extravaganza has been running for 15 years, with attendees including Elton John, Paul McCartney, Tom Hardy, Idris Elba, the Beckhams, Andy Murray, and “most of the British royalty, including the Duke and Duchess of Wales - who insisted on a standard tour with other families just like them.”
The LaplandUK business hit a £17.2 million turnover this year, selling out of all 160,000 tickets for its six-week run in one day in March.
“Christmas was always a seminal moment in the calendar,” says Mike, who like Alison is 57. “When our four boys [now aged between 25 and 30] were little, they’d write to Father Christmas, and Alison would write back, telling them of his magical world.” At the time, Alison was working as a primary school teacher, whilst Mike was a hedge fund manager.
The family went Santa-hunting each year. “But we could not find an experience that reflected how important this moment was to us. All the grottos, shopping malls, garden centres and ‘Santa’ experiences we visited lacked scale, storytelling and frankly, believability. Father Christmas wouldn’t even know our boys’ names. Even a trip to Lapland in Finland itself left us wanting. As parents we started thinking that if we could create something truly special that we would have loved for our own sons here in the UK, hopefully other families would love it too.”
After years of talking about it, on New Year’s Eve in 2006, “Mike went off to Bluewater and came back with an 8ft teddy bear,” Alison recalls. “He said, ‘this is the first piece we’re going to build the toy factory at our Lapland.’ This enormous teddy costing nearly £1000 sat in our front room. I thought he’d had a breakdown.” But in the following months, Mike quit his job - Alison stayed on in the classroom for two more years - and the duo created a world of Lapland.
“We remortgaged our home, and borrowed from our parents and family for that first year: the budget went into seven figures because I felt the greatest threat to LaplandUK’s success was being ordinary,” Mike maintains. “It had to be stand-out amazing to really work. We couldn’t start small.”
The pair worked with the Forestry Commission to secure a forest location, wrote detailed scripts for their immersive theatre idea and engaged Bavarian and British artists, sourced from a visit to Nuremberg’s toy fair, to develop the characters. All the sets were handpainted, all props antiques, and a West End theatre costume designer made outfits for the 100 staff. One role was particularly important. Today the Battles hold West End auditions, but initially they hunted for Santas in village halls around the UK. “Candidates would arrive in an unremarkable anorak, then reveal a full-on homemade Elf or Mother Christmas costume, and perform bizarre, Christmas-related sketches.”
One wannabe Father Christmas spent a year growing out a beard for the role - but unfortunately it was grey and wispy. “When we explained grey wasn’t going to work, he appeared the following day resplendent with a bright white beard having painted it with Tippex!”
Even on their 2007 launch year, 37,000 tickets, costing around £40, sold out. People still find LaplandUK via word of mouth, not advertising – “that could ruin the story for a Child. Even David Beckham remarked the first year he visited - he’s now a five-time visitor - ‘how did I not know about this?’,” Mike adds.
LaplandUK has a elven currency, passports, and a newspaper, The Grapevine. Parents fill in a questionnaire about their child for Santa to swot up on, and the Battles recruit a cast of 1000 people - for which they had some 4700 applications this year - to pull off an immersive Christmas theatre in three acres of forest. The Battles now employ a pool of 80 Father Christmases, all sporting handmade, film-quality beards costing £1000.
“The build and production investment costs run into multiple millions,” Alison admits: “each of our handmade costumes cost £4000, all handmade, lined and layered, with antique buttons - we feel a great sense of responsibility for giving children that sense of belief.” The annual bill to send each child a personalised invitation and gift from Father Christmas now stands at £3 million.
The business lost “multiple millions” during the pandemic, when the event still ran throughout despite huge workloads and negotiations with Public Health England. “We felt passionately that Father Christmas would never let a child down, so nor must LaplandUK. In 2020 we were the largest event to safely operate globally, providing children with a moment of respite during an extremely difficult year,” Alison adds.
Now the Battles are planning a second site in the UK as well as looking to fulfil interest from abroad. Six Lapland-set books have already been published with Bloomsbury; more are on the way, as well as film and digital content. But the duo say they’ll never be sick of Christmas. “There have been so many magic moments - walking through the forest with Elton John serenading us with ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer’; meeting our late queen who described Lapland as ‘splendid’.
“We probably,” Mike adds, “sound slightly bonkers but the impact that the show makes every year is really humbling. It’s not a proper job really, it’s just a joy.”
Founded: 2007
HQ: head office in Borough, event in Ascot.
Turnover: £17.2 million
Staff: 25 people at HQ; 1000 staff during LaplandUK’s six-week run
